Review: Marina Abramovic’s Seven Deaths
by Benjamin Derksen
“What interests me is the repetition.” This statement, delivered by the artist herself in her video introduction, initiates the spectacle of Marina Abramovic’s Seven Deaths. The video installation, which is playing in the Cisterns in Frederiksberg now through the 30th of November, asks its viewers to contemplate a running theme in the art form of opera and, perhaps by extension, the culture, which has produced it. That theme is the aesthetic pleasure derived from the (performance of) slow torturous deaths of its female characters.
Seven Deaths is a series of videographic performances set up across seven screens spread throughout the cavernous Cisterns, in addition to the aforementioned introduction that sits at the entrance. Each “death” features a short poetic reflection narrated by the artist followed by an audio recording of (mostly) arias from some of the most well-known operas (as well as one or two lesser known among non-opera enthusiasts): La Traviata, Tosca, Othello, Madame Butterfly, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Norma. The videos feature Abramovic’s somewhat broad interpretation of a female character’s death from the corresponding opera, sometimes alone and sometimes together with Willem Defoe. Each death is rendered in excruciating slow motion, lingering on the actors’ faces as she/they die variously from fire, a fall from a great height, asphyxiation by boa constrictor, consumption, knife wounds, broken glass/madness, and exposure to post-nuclear fallout while the arias’ playbacks roll.
The repetition is indeed the point. But, it is not a repetition that in time produces a productive difference. One does not come away with a deeper conclusion about European aesthetics and the place of woman therein by the third (or xth) death then one had after the first. Rather, the repetition seems to stir a sneaking suspicion that something obsessive, compulsive, or perverse is operative within operatic, and by extension modern European, aesthetics. Readers of feminist theory and performance studies will find much to interest them here, though that is not to say that what Abramovic is presenting is reserved uniquely for academicians. Quite the opposite.
At times the deaths, at least in the experience of this reviewer, border on the grotesquely comic. The choice to render all of the videos in slow motion begins to give the installation the feeling of satire. The repetition of the zenith (or at least a high point) from each narrative arc strips the deaths of their dramatic and tragic content leaving behind only the form of the slow death. To quote Marx’s quip on the repetition of history in The Eighteenth Brumaire: “...first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” [1] Repetition cannot repeat perfectly. It gains a slightly different tonality following the first (second, third...) iteration(s). Put another way, it is the “high-brow art” equivalent of the The Shooting AKA Dear Sister sketch on Saturday Night Live, which is interestingly also a parody of an existing work, namely the television show The OC. The first shot has more or less the same tragic quality as the parodied subject but by the end each gun shot is “too much.”
The shift between affects and their suppression brought about by the repetition seem to draw back to an idea introduced in Abramovic’s framing at the beginning. Namely that a single life comprises many deaths. Endings, destructive plasticity [2], changes in direction. Each is a death of a kind but each can take on its own affective associations, which themselves dull through repetition. Here one can take Abramovic to be approaching the theme of death not as an existential category but rather as a feature of everyday life.
The star of this show is, in spite of its renowned cast, the Cisterns themselves. One has the impression of entering some limbo underworld as one descends into the dark, damp underground structure. The absolute high point for me is the initial bewildering moments as one’s eyes adjust to the dark and then has to find one’s way towards some distant singing where the installation’s playback is currently located. Eventually one settles down next to the other viewers as if you are all lost souls in the Bardo. You shuffle between deaths, perhaps in silence, perhaps murmuring quietly. Some of you come and go as you each experience your seventh death at different times. This haunting atmosphere lends a lot to the overall experience, such that I would recommend it even to people who have an aversion to opera.
To book tickets and read more about the installation, visit Frederiksberg’s museums website.
[1] Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Karl Marx & C.P. Dutt, New World Paperbacks: New York, 1972, 15.
[2] On this concept see the excellent and compact book by Catherine Malabou: Catherine Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread, Polity: Cambridge, 2012.