LIGHT/DARK 1977

This is a photographic still from a performance piece by Marina Abramović, called LIGHT/DARK. What’s so striking to me, right off the bat, is the intensity of light and shadow. It’s like she’s working with the same materials that painters do—light, tone, texture—but staging it in a very real space with bodies. You can almost feel the heat from those spotlights bearing down on the performers. There’s a real sense of intimacy here, even though the space is filled with onlookers. One of the performers, presumably Abramović herself, has her hand on the other performer’s face, the gesture is both gentle and somehow, violent. Light bounces off her t-shirt, and the contrast with her shadow is so sharp, it’s like a line drawn on the paper. Abramović is so amazing at taking our simplest actions and turning them into the stuff of poetry, she makes you want to slow down, pay attention, and think about the layers of meaning in what we do, and how we connect. Just like Carolee Schneemann, she’s really asking: what does it mean to be in a body, in a space, in relation to others?