For three years Marina Abramovic and Ulay lived nomadically, traveling in an old black Citroen van with their dog Alba. His home was the road. In June 1977, en route through Italy, they camped in the parking lot of the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, took off their clothes and headed for the front door. Naked and motionless, they stood facing each other staring into each other’s eyes, their backs against the frame. To enter, visitors had to slide sideways through the small space left between the two bodies and choose which nudity they faced, hers or his. The action should have lasted six hours, but the police put an end to it much earlier because they considered it obscene. At that time, more than 350 people were walking around inside the museum. Almost fifty years later, Imponderabilia, one of the couple’s most celebrated performances, is being revived these days at the Royal Academy in London, already without the presence of its protagonists (Abramovic is about to turn 77 and Ulay died in 2020) , recreated by trained young people, whose vulnerable bodies are subjected daily to the rub of a crowd of eager strangers.
Imponderabilia, which is part of the RA’s retrospective dedicated to the Serbian artist (the first woman to whom the institution opens its doors in 255 years), caused a frenzy of excited beateria in the months leading up to its inauguration , in September I was curious to see if the piece retained the power to create an uncomfortable and unsafe space between artists and audience, to check the reaction of a human being to another human being when they are encouraged to play with fire. Nothing to fear: the wick is partly wet. Tamed by the correction of the new times, the warrior of scenic art – as she already did in 2010 at MoMA – has agreed to create a side door through which those who do not want to know anything about the experience can enter.
On the day I visited the exhibition, the majority chose the alternative route, overcome by apprehension or shame. Those of us who went through it, overcoming the discomfort of feeling like an intruder, of being a violation of privacy, of not stepping on or hurting your handbag, of noticing a penis on your thigh… -before we had to making a quick decision about the motivations of which can only be thought about afterwards. Which of the two are you facing? In an old film from the seventies, you can see how the men pass by looking at the Navy, while the women do it indiscriminately in front of one or the other. The search for pleasure or the ancestral fear of man to show his intimacy in front of another man? The time I was gossiping at the Royal, history was repeating itself. On the way out, I asked my gay companion why he had chosen the woman. “Because I had never had this experience”, he answered me, still impressed by the heat, the life, accumulated between two bodies.
