Colecciones de arte

The Lips of Thomas, 1975-1997

DESCRIPTION

This piece by Marina Abramovi´c constitutes a photographic record of the Yugoslavian artist in the midst of one of the performances she carried out in the decade of the seventies, during her solitary period, 1970 thru 1975. The image portrays a frontal view of the artists' belly being tortured physically: Abramovi´c had just cut herself, etching a five-pointed star into her skin, the blood had begun to flow uncontrollably, and the artist was still holding the knife she used to injure herself.

The symbol represented on her stomach has strong biographical and allegorical connotations, for the artist was born and raised in a political context linked to communism and this fact in some way has left its mark on her existence. Abramovi´c has recognised how through this painful act, repeated on numerous occasions throughout her life, her vital tensions are diffused. Sometimes the star is shown upside-down, and other times it is in its regular position.

The performance The Lips of Thomas was produced at the Krinzinger gallery of Innsbruck, Austria in 1975. It consisted of a two-hour long performance in which Abramovi´c, nude and sitting on a table, first ate a kilo of honey with a silver spoon and afterward drank a litre of red wine from a glass cup. Once this process was over, the artist broke the glass, and then began cutting the five-pointed star onto her stomach while simultaneously hitting herself violently until she no longer felt any pain. Afterwards, the artist lay down face up on top of an enormous cross made of blocks of ice. A heater facing her belly made the blood flow from the lesions. Marina Abramovi´c stayed in that position for thirty minutes, while her body began to freeze, until the audience interrupted the action, taking away the blocks of ice from underneath the artist.

The meaning of the piece is intimately related to the artists' personal experience. Abramovi´c has built a conceptual grid in which the biographical facts, the symbols (the cross and the star) as well as her own suffering, are interwoven and interrelated, thus giving rise to a sort of liberating sacrifice in which she represents both the victim and the executioner. A. S.