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Not What It Seems: The Politics of Re-Performing Vito Acconci's Seedbed (1972)
*Theresa Smalec *
/ New York University/
tks201@nyu.edu
(c) 2006 Theresa Smalec.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Marina Abramovic's Seedbed. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New
York. 10 Nov. 2005.
1. For seven days last November, Marina Abramovic engaged in a
seemingly simple art experiment. The Solomon R. Guggenheim's
program straightforwardly outlines her weeklong endeavor: "In
Seven Easy Pieces, Abramovic reenacts seminal performance works by
her peers dating from the 1960s and 70s, interpreting them as one
would a musical score and documenting their realization" (9).
Myriad complexities unfold, however, as soon as one asks what it
means to re-enact a performance that was arguably only supposed to
happen once. Furthermore, a musical score is typically understood
as written composition, where parts for different instruments
appear on separate staves. By contrast, performance has
historically been viewed as a profoundly embodied phenomenon, with
no easy way to isolate its formal, sociopolitical, and
site-specific elements.
2. I explore the tensions outlined above by reviewing a particularly
fertile and perplexing example of Abramovic's efforts to
re-perform the score. Before turning, however, to address the
factors that make her rendition of Vito Acconci's Seedbed so oddly
provocative, I must elaborate on the basic theoretical issues at
stake in her larger project. Back in the 1960s and 70s, the rules
of performance were threefold: 1. No rehearsal. 2. No repetition.
3. No predictable end.[1 <#foot1>] Each of the earlier pieces
featured in Abramovic's 2005 program loyally followed these
maxims. Bruce Nauman's Body Pressure (1974), Vito Acconci's
Seedbed (1972), Valie Export's Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969),
Gina Pane's Self-Portrait(s) (1973), Joseph Beuys's How to Explain
Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), and her own Lips of Thomas (1975)
shared a commitment to performance's one-time insurgence. Because
there were no dry runs, no one knew how things would turn out, not
even the artists. And because these precarious acts were never
repeated, many people argue that it has since become very
difficult to pass on the knowledge they shared to new audiences.
Indeed, the question of /how/ to rebuild the genre's ephemeral
modes of transmission is integral to the museum's account of what
motivates Abramovic: "The project is premised on the fact that
little documentation exists for most performance works from this
critical period: one often has to rely upon testimonies from
witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given
piece" (9).
3. Yet as usefully urgent as Seven Easy Pieces seems to be, the
artist's proposal to research and re-do the works of her peers
threatens the cardinal rules that have long defined this art form
as singular. Peggy Phelan explains her sense of the
non-reproductive ontology of performance in Unmarked (1993):
Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot
be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in
the circulation of representations of representations: once it
does so, it becomes something other than performance . . . .
The document of a performance then is only a spur to memory,
an encouragement of memory to become present. (146)
Part of Abramovic's challenge to Phelan's ontology comes from her
never actually having witnessed most of the actions whose scores
she would reenact. Her engagement with the remnants that survive
of these works is not merely "a spur to memory," because she has
no first-hand knowledge to reactivate. Rather, her plan to use
archival remains to literally reproduce acts that were previously
"live" suggests that performance /can/ be transmitted across
timeframes. Phelan insists that performance's affective and
authoritative power thrives solely in the here and now:
"Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a
specific time and place can have an experience of value which
leaves no visible trace afterward" (149). Contrarily, Abramovic
locates its ability to endure and inspire new audiences as
residing in the /copy/: "Seven Easy Pieces examines the
possibility of redoing and preserving such performance work" (9).
4. In an unlikely way, then, Abramovic's embodied experiment appears
to support the counterintuitive theory that Philip Auslander puts
forth in "The Performativity of Performance Documentation" (2006).
Her implicit understanding of Acconci's documentation as a mode of
/composition/ (a musical score that can be replayed) corresponds
with Auslander's sense of the document as self-consciously
arranged for a future audience. In an effort to challenge the
traditional way in which the relationship between performance art
and its documentation is perceived, he initially distinguishes two
categories of artifacts, "the /documentary/ and the /theatrical/"
(1). The documentary type is based on the premise that
"documentation of the performance event provides both a record of
it through which it can be reconstructed . . . and evidence that
it actually occurred" (1). Historians and scholars tend to assume
that the /event/" is staged primarily for an immediately present
audience," whereas the /document/" is a secondary, supplementary
record of an event that has its own prior integrity" (4). By
contrast, the theatrical type refers to performances such as Cindy
Sherman's photos of herself in various guises: acts that "were
staged solely to be photographed or filmed and had no meaningful
prior existence as autonomous events presented to audiences" (5).
In these theatrical cases, "The space of the document (whether
visual or audiovisual) is the /only/ space in which the
performance occurs" (2, emphasis added). Auslander's radical goal
is to extend this internal performativity to the documentary class
of documents, as well. Drawing on J.L. Austin's theory of speech
acts, he posits that such artifacts "are not analogous to
constatives, but to performatives: in other words, /the act of
documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as
such/" (5).
Figure 1
*Figure 1: Marina Abramovic performing performing Vito Acconci's
Seedbed (1972)
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on November 10, 2005.*
Photograph by Kathryn Carr.
(c) The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
5. The documentary is, of course, the category concerning both Phelan
and Abramovic. While Phelan says that the documentation of live
actions is "only a spur to memory" (146), Auslander and Abramovic
reject this accepted view, albeit in distinct ways. On the one
hand, Auslander refuses to treat the document as an "indexical
access point to a past event" (9). He argues that many early
performers (especially Acconci) stage actions "to be documented at
least as much as to be seen by an audience" (3). In short, it is
only through self-conscious, selective, and forward-looking acts
of documentation that events such as Chris Burden's Shoot (1971)
become available /as/ performances for future audiences. The
reason we recognize them today as performance art is that they
exist /as documents/: "In that sense, it is not the initial
presence of an audience that makes an event a work of performance
art: it is its framing as performance through the performative act
of documenting it as such" (7).
6. Conversely, Abramovic embraces the documents of Acconci's Seedbed
as entry points into the past. Nevertheless, she departs from the
standard belief that such artifacts are inferior to the
inter-subjective exchanges that take place between a performer and
their initial audience. Her willingness to put herself in
Acconci's place anticipates Auslander's hypothesis: "Perhaps the
authenticity of the performance document resides in its
relationship to its beholder rather than to an ostensibly
originary event" (9). Yet even as her aim to "re-perform the
score" hinges on the copy, and not on any ontological privileging
of the live, she ultimately unsettles Auslander's conclusion about
where the affective force of performance resides. According to
him, "our sense of the presence, power, and authenticity" of these
classic works comes from "perceiving the document itself /as a
performance/ that directly reflects an artist's aesthetic project
or sensibility and for which we are the present audience" (9).
Meanwhile, Abramovic dislodges the issues of presence, power, and
authenticity from the static archive, and relocates them to the
volatile site of her female body. Her embodied perception is, in
fact, the medium and mediation through which a present audience
translates Acconci's aesthetic project and sensibility.
7. So can it be done? Apart from the philosophical tensions involved
in videotaping one's present tense repetitions of the so-called
inimitable past--thus doubly embracing the reproductive economies
that performance allegedly eschews--Seven Easy Pieces raises some
daunting methodological concerns. For one thing, how does a female
performer "pull off" a male performer's endurance piece about
masturbation? In Seedbed, a legendary fusion of performance and
sculpture, Vito Acconci lay hidden under a wooden ramp installed
at the Sonnabend Gallery. He masturbated eight hours a day, three
times a week, all the while vocalizing his fantasies about the
visitors walking above him. He spoke to those who entered the
gallery as if they were lovers, imagining his sexual relations to
them. Audiences could not actually see Acconci masturbating; nor
could he see them. Nevertheless, they could hear him becoming
aroused as he addressed them through a microphone, murmuring
things like, "You're pushing your cunt down on my mouth," or
"You're ramming your cock down into my ass" (Saltz 2004). A
loudspeaker situated on top of the ramp projected his words and
sounds. In "Learning from Seedbed," Brandon LaBelle argues that
this ramp created "a hidden space, embedded in the gallery as an
anomaly, and yet acting as an 'amplifier' for the desires of an
individual body seeking its social partner" (2006).
8. Acconci's larger goal was to involve the public in the work's
production by establishing an "intimate" connection with visitors.
He followed the footsteps of those who traversed the space,
encouraging patrons to view their audible movements as part of an
amorous exchange: "I am doing this with you now . . . I'm touching
your hair . . . I'm running my hand down your back . . . I'm
touching your ass" (Kirshner 17). Whether or not he succeeded in
creating a mood of reciprocity is highly debatable. British critic
Jonathan Jones depicts Seedbed as "an aggressive, alienated act,"
arguing that its "social and aesthetic disjuncture goes to the
heart of 1970s America" (2002). Indeed, even Acconci recalls
feeling disturbed after putting himself in the place of several
audience members who lingered outside the gallery after his
performances, wordlessly staring at him: "What can you possibly
say to a masturbator?" (Bear 94). Some people (including the
artist) found the piece unsettling and even hostile. Inviting
strangers to share one's innermost fantasies in public was,
indeed, a radical act that also marked an era of sexual freedom.
Acconci's goal of covering a conventional gallery with semen was
even more audacious from a sociopolitical perspective.
9. But why would Abramovic revive Seedbed in 2005, now that both
public intimacy and transgressions of art space decorum seem
fairly passé? Today's strangers forge connections with the click
of a mouse, becoming "intimate" in a mind-blowing spectrum of
ways. Many artists (including Ron Athey, Karen Finley, and Chris
Ofili) have since smeared bodily fluids across the cultured venues
of America. How does a female performer position herself in
relation to various forms of visceral transgression that have
"come" before her own? Indeed, the very title of Acconci's seminal
project suggests the obstacles facing a woman who seeks to
re-perform his score. Can we still call it Seedbed if a trail of
"seed" does not remain on the gallery's floor "bed?" The question
of what /else/ one might dub Abramovic's rendition remains
elusive, since women's sexual emissions are not typically
recognized as substantial. Years before she began rebuilding this
piece, the artist explained her fascination with it during an
interview with Janet A. Kaplan. "What's interesting about
masturbation is that you are producing something. There is a
product. But what does a woman produce in masturbating?" (7).
10. Though known for pushing the limits of physical potential,
Abramovic did not re-perform Seedbed "as if" she were a man. For
Acconci, the act of releasing semen was not only symbolic proof of
his imagined union with viewers, but also the literal fruit of his
labor: "I masturbate; I have to continue doing it the whole
day--to cover the floor with sperm, to seed the floor" (Diacono
168).[2 <#foot2>] By contrast, Abramovic seemed less concerned
with performing productivity; hours often passed between her
ostensibly traceless orgasms. She did, however, engage with
Acconci's focus on output in terms of gender. What types of seedy
and/or verdant results might a woman provoke by playing with
herself inside the highbrow Guggenheim? What sorts of
interpersonal exchanges could her acts of self-stimulation yield?
11. The question of historical accuracy thus became central to my
experience of Abramovic's Seedbed. Mindful of the artist's stated
intent to interpret the traces of past performances as a musical
score, I soon noted stark deviations that led me to ask if this
plan was not fraught with institutional obstacles beyond her
control. In what did the project's authenticity lie if the scene
of her reenactment looked nothing like existing photographs of
Acconci's original? Upon closer scrutiny, however, I began to
perceive Abramovic's visual departures as /tactical/, as deftly
designed to expand an audience's sense of what it means for a
female performer to inhabit faithfully an overtly masculine opus.
I now turn to analyze the multiple levels on which she
transgressed--and fruitfully transformed--the aesthetic and
sociopolitical arrangements found in surviving accounts of
Acconci's embodied composition.
12. First, there is the element of space. Even as the dimensions of
Acconci's installation were the same ones Abramovic used (22 feet
wide, 16 feet long, and 2 feet high), his Seedbed took place
within a carefully confined perimeter. The ramp that at once
concealed his body and revealed his performed desires was sharply
angled, obliging visitors to move above him on a slant. He later
acknowledged that this sculptural element placed him in a position
of psychological dominance, even as he was literally below his
spectators: "Already with Seedbed, I was part of the floor; a
viewer who entered that room stepped into my power field--they
came into my house" (Bomb 1991). Although he'd claimed he'd
intended the piece to enact mutuality, in an ironic twist Acconci
produced the opposite effect instead, assuming the role of a
patriarchal homeowner who lays down the foundational rules for his
guests to follow.
13. Meanwhile, with its domed ceiling and spiraling ramps, the
Guggenheim's towering rotunda feels strangely cathedral-like.
Russian Orthodox icons lining the walls add to its formal
solemnity, and spectators poised on several levels foster a mood
of surveillance. Many viewers take notes, pointing or staring at
others below. This panoptical structure diffuses the flow of power
more than the structure Acconci described did. His house had only
one host, but the Guggenheim's public nature allows multiple sets
of eyes to roam over and to possess one's body. In contrast to
Acconci's semi-erect slope, Abramovic's architectural intervention
is level with the floor; its gently raised surface seems
unobtrusive, even "feminine" somehow. If one didn't know that this
subtle inner ring comprises the structural heart of Seedbed, one
could easily overlook it.
14. The work is also occupied with sound. Apart from a single
loudspeaker, there were no visual distractions in the Sonnabend
Gallery during Acconci's masturbation, obliging viewers to focus
on the male artist's sonorous voice. Meanwhile, I barely reach the
third tier of ramps when I can no longer hear Abramovic. The
massive rotunda, coupled with the din caused by patrons, easily
drowns her out. Surprised by this contrast between what the
archive describes as the primacy of Acconci's audible presence and
the muted nature of Abramovic's self-assertions, I join the line
to access her interior. It is only then that I realize the extent
to which her hushed intonations fashion the give-and-take bond
that Acconci sought to achieve. There are, in effect, /two/
performances going on here. One performance absorbs Abramovic into
the museum's rubric of display, allowing us to view her
installation as one of many exhibits--no more and no less
interesting. By contrast, a second performance subtly commands our
attention, obliging us to move closer and to listen more
carefully. Without forcing herself upon us, her whispers invite us
to intuit privately what we cannot grasp within the clamorous
public caverns of the Guggenheim. In this sense, Abramovic enacts
the paradoxical both/and position that Auslander disallows. Where
he insists that the "pleasures available from the documentation .
. . do not depend on whether an audience witnessed the original
event" (9), her Seedbed effectively generates /two/ sets of
pleasures, and /two/ performances. One performance relies on
conventional documents. Through select photos, videos, and
audiotapes of this show it will attain symbolic status in the
cultural domain; this is the framed performance that future
spectators will know. The second performance is her unruly
engagement with Acconci's original, and the subversive ways in
which her use of his documentation deflects--as opposed to
"directly reflects" (Auslander 9)--his aesthetic project and
sensibility. While it might not require "being there," the
palimpsest of pleasures that emerges from her simultaneous recital
and revision of Acconci's musical score does require a different
mode of transmission than the ones Auslander privileges: the
visual and audiovisual.
Figure 2
*Figure 2: Marina Abramovic performing performing Vito Acconci's
Seedbed (1972)
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on November 10, 2005.*
Photograph by Kathryn Carr.
(c) The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
15. At six p.m., I finally reach the base of Abramovic's inner circle.
A security guard lets people in one by one, as others depart. Even
here, there is mediation. Not unlike Acconci's ramp, which became
a fellow performer in his piece, the Guggenheim takes on an
authoritarian role in Abramovic's reenactment. As a result, her
personal architecture becomes something of a sanctuary, whereas
Acconci's left no place to hide. Inside her inner circle, I'm
struck by how bright it feels under the spotlights, how warm it
seems in the presence of Marina's luxuriant voice: "I don't want
to ask your name, or who you are, or what you want. I recognize
you have the /same/ heat, the /same/ desire." Under normal
circumstances, such dialogue sounds patently false. Inside her
circle, however, it seems specific and sincere. For the first time
that evening, I sit down, allowing the forceful vibrations of
Marina's syllables to enter my body. She abruptly asks, "Where are
the steps? I need to hear steps." Several people stomp or tap
their heels. "I'm coming," she replies, "just for you."
16. Though Abramovic fantasizes about sucking cock, it's oddly
unproblematic to imagine that she's coming just for me. Later, I
will overhear two young men express disappointment in the content
of her fantasies. One says, "They're fairly feminized in a fairly
stereotypical, heteronormative way." The other agrees; "Has she
made love to a woman yet?" In the moment, however, I am
unconcerned with whether or not she obeys these perfunctory calls
for "diversity." "I'm going to come," Marina promises, "I need you
to tap on the tip of my pussy. Yes, faster, faster." The next
sound I hear is a pleasurable howl, "Ohww! Ohwwww!" Clichés about
women as animals enter my mind, yet Marina's orgasm paradoxically
disarms my self-consciousness. All around me, people smile and
seem happy for her. Next is the hollow sound of rattling. We
chuckle, astonished to realize it's a toilet flushing. She tells
us she always has to pee after coming, and resumes masturbating.
17. The circle seems a space of true reciprocity. Abramovic is not
antagonistic towards audiences, as certain viewers accuse Acconci
of having been. Although Acconci implicated spectators in his
performance, he described their contributions as passive: "I use
the viewers as an aid, I build up sexual fantasies on viewers'
footsteps" (Kirshner 17). Abramovic takes a different approach,
insisting that our footsteps are not enough; we must actively
immerse ourselves in shaping our contact with her: "Close your
eyes and keep them closed. Forget you're at the museum. Don't be
afraid. Don't be ashamed. Give to me all that you desire." I set
down my notepad, devoting myself to her carnal imaginings. In
doing so, I have no sense of being used or coerced; my efforts are
wholly voluntary, and surprisingly pleasurable. Ironically,
though, the Guggenheim's institutional arm subverts Marina's
hypnotic voice. Just as she invites us to "Let time stop," a guard
steps in and informs us that our time is up: time for the next
twenty people to have their turn. Will Abramovic (or anyone else)
notice our expulsion in the footage provided by the museum
professionals who document the event? What will she (and future
audiences) think? In the space of the document, our exile is
likely illegible; in the space of the live event, however, it
feels like a temporary betrayal of her aesthetic project and
sensibility.
18. The museum's insistence on protecting the artist censors other
facets of peoples' interaction with her. Contingency is constantly
kept at bay, even though unforeseen risks were vital to early
performance art. At one point, a man starts vigorously rubbing his
groin against the edges of the inner circle. As Marina climaxes
yet again, he drops to the ground on all fours and luridly yells,
"Does that /excite/ you?" Security immediately rushes in,
commanding him to leave. What's uplifting is how onlookers protest
this encroachment: "You don't understand the performance!" "Are
there rules against making noise?" Eventually, the guards relent:
the unruly man is permitted to stay. We've won our little victory
against the sanitized machine.
19. Throughout the performance, Abramovic ponders her role as a woman,
an artist, and an embodied translator: "Vito said he produced
semen when he did his Seedbed back in the 1970s. But what do I
produce? I produce moist [sic] and heat under you that your semen
can just drop on." Her repetition unsettles performance
scholarship's overly simple equations between vision,
reproduction, and commodity. For Phelan, the notion that a live
event can be recorded diminishes its psychic and political agency:
"Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility . . .
and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and
unconsciousness where it eludes regulation and control" (148). Yet
despite the volumes of film and audiotape preserving Abramovic's
adaptation, what I will remember is precisely what cannot be
captured: the visceral exhilaration I felt as Marina came. And
while the forces through which Seedbed fulfilled me cannot be
archived or seen, they might indeed be "copied" and passed on to
others in politically meaningful ways. We, too, can give seemingly
faceless strangers our time, forging relations of caring attention
through our erotic and intellectual curiosity.
20. Many people might stigmatize Seedbed as a self-indulgent and
colonizing act, or claim that its architecture permits a hidden
manipulator to live out fantasies at unseen others' expense.
Abramovic acknowledges this predominant vision and reworks it. Her
rendition makes it hard to imagine violating those about whom we
fantasize. If we allow ourselves to masturbate about those
"others" whom our culture instructs us to hate, can we engender
tender interest and cautious desire in place of suspicion and
rage? This may be a valuable risk to take in our violent age.
/ Performance Studies
New York University
tks201@nyu.edu /
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. Abramovic made this remark about the rules of early
performance art at "(Re)Presenting Performance" [Symposium],
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 8 April 2005.
2 <#ref2>. Diacono provides an Italian transcription of what
Acconci said and did during Seedbed. Kinga Araya, an
Italian-Canadian scholar, translated Diacono's text into English
for the purpose of this publication.
Works Cited
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Documentation." PAJ 84 (2006): 1-10.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/performing_arts_journal/toc/paj28.3.html
Bear, Liza. "Excerpts from Tapes with Liza Bear: The Avalanche
Interview 1972." Vito Acconci. Eds. Frazer Ward, Mark C. Taylor
and Jennifer Bloomer. London: Phaidon, 2002. 94-99.
Diacono, Mario. Vito Acconci: Del Testo-Azione Al Corpo Come
Testo. New York: Out of London Press: A. H. Minters, 1975. 168.
Jones, Jonathan. "See Through, Vito Acconci (1969)." The Guardian:
23 Nov. 2002.
. 27
Aug. 2006.
Kirshner, Judith Russi. Vito Acconci: A Retrospective, 1969 to
1980: An Exhibition Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Chicago, Mar 21-May 18, 1980. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art,
1980.
LaBelle, Brandon. "Learning from Seedbed."
. 12 Aug. 2006.
Phelan, Peggy. "The Ontology of Performance." Unmarked: The
Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. 146-66.
Prince, Richard. "Vito Acconci: Interview with Richard Prince."
Bomb 36 (Summer 1991).
Saltz, Jerry. "Vito de Milo." Artnet.com 2004.
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25 Aug. 2006.
"Seven Easy Pieces: November 9-15, 2005, 5 PM-12 AM." Guggenheim
Guide: Exhibitions/Programs, September 2005-January 2006. New
York: Guggenheim Museum: 9.