Project 5: "Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful" by Marina Abramovic...REMAKE

For my re-performance, I chose Marina Abramovic's iconic video performance, "Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful" from 1975.  In Marina's original piece, she aggressively combs her hair for video for about 14 minutes while repeating "art must be beautiful" and "artist must be beautiful"

Short clip of Marina's original video performance to get an idea of what I was trying to re-create:

My re-performance:



The deeper meanings behind the piece are what inspired me to re-perform it.

This piece represents a few things:

  • Taking a feminine regarded action and making it aggressive
  • The pain that comes with being a woman
  • Beauty expectations placed upon women by society
  • Entering a trance-like state to free the mind and body from the conventions of Western society and culture
  • Art doesn't have to be beautiful and neither does the artist, but rather it can be disturbing at times
The technical aspects of this piece were also important, which I was aware of when re-performing it. 
  1. The framing: focus on the face and hands to not distract the viewer
  2. The media: choosing video rather than live performance as to follow Marina's original
  3. The timing: get as close to 14 minutes as possible
  4. The noises: don't talk too loudly and recreate the sounds of agony
  5. The materials: have both a brush and comb, like Marina
  6. The quality: since the original was shot in 1975, the quality isn't great... so to recreate this, I uploaded the video at a lower quality too
The only thing I would change would be to silent the music in the background coming from the other class. Overall, this piece went very well and I would not want to redo it because of the pain that came with it (as seen in the residue picture below where you can see I pulled out a lot of my hair).



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