Love Julia Fullerton Batten!
Marina Abramovic
Lips of Thomas, 1973/1994
Interested in the limits of mental and physical endurance, influential performance artist Marina Abramovic has used her body as the subject and medium of her work since the early 1970s. Though not her medium directly, photography has also played an important part in her career, documenting performances and so providing the only extant time-based traces of those temporal acts. The series Performance Edition 1970-75 uses one photograph and one text panel each to represent performances for which there no longer is (or never was) film or video documentation. The text of Lips of Thomas explains that 1973 performance:
LIPS OF THOMAS
Performance
I slowly eat 1 kilo of honey with a silver spoon.
I slowly drink 1 liter of red wine out of a crystal glass.
I break the glass with my right hand.
I cut a five pointed star on my stomach with a razor blade.
I violently whip myself until I no longer feel any pain.
I lay down on a cross made of ice blocks.
The heat of a suspended space heater pointed at my stomach
Causes the cut star to bleed.
The rest of my body begins to freeze
I remain on the ice cross for 30 minutes until the audience interrupts the piece by removing the ice blocks from underneath.
Duration: 2 hours 1975
Krinzinger Gallery
Innsbruck
Balkan Erotic Epic: Women in Rain 3
Virgin Warrior Hearts