To enter a new Royal Academy exhibition, visitors must squeeze between two naked models.
A career retrospective of Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovi includes the unusual installation.
For those who feel uncomfortable squeezing through the nude performers, there is a separate entrance.
Critics have generally given the exhibition mixed ratings; while the Times called it “remorseless,” the Guardian called it “vital.”
Entering between the two naked performers forces those with tickets into a “confrontation between nakedness, and the gender, the sexuality, the desire”, the Royal Academy’s head of exhibitions Andrea Tarsia has said.
Naked models exhibition
Abramovi and her German partner at the time, Ulay, presented the unusual piece for the first time in 1977. Visitors had to squeeze between the two Naked models at the exhibition as they stood closely together in a doorway.
Alastair Sooke, a critic for The Telegraph, claimed that during the new installation in London, he was “too preoccupied with not stamping on their toes” to be able to feel any tremors.
“You don’t have to go through the naked gates. There’s a bypass, but it’s cheating,” added the Times’ Laura Freeman. “I squeezed through, sucking in my stomach, trying not to tread on anyone’s toes or brush against anything.”
The retrospective spans Abramovi’s career of fifty years. In the 255-year history of the Royal Academy, she is the first female artist to have a solo exhibition there.
Ben Luke of The Evening Standard gave it four stars and stated, “For once, this is not hype. I can’t think of a better display, especially considering that much of it serves as performance documentation.
“The staging of this material on film and in photographs is exemplary, and it’s aided by four live pieces from different moments in Abramović’s career, reperformed by Marina-approved artists.”
He added: “I struggled to picture how the vast galleries of the RA could be filled by an artist whose practice has inevitably been largely ephemeral when they have swallowed and diminished more conventional artists. But there is no sense of padding. The pacing is great: it’s spare where it needs to be, busy and noisy at the right moments.”
“Those performances from the 1970s and 80s – many of them collaborations with her then-partner, the German artist Ulay – still seem radical and courageous, with something urgent to say about, for instance, the complex relations between men and women, or the gendered roles that society forces us to play.”
Sooke added: “Over time, though, as Abramović became less concerned with corporeal endurance, and more interested in trialing her mind, she started to believe the hype.
“The result? Narcissistic art, devoid of risk, with none of the rigorous, visceral, blood-spattered toughness of old. Ritualized cleansing, in the form of scrubbing bones, is one of her motifs – but, ultimately, Abramović has ended up sanitising herself.”
Freeman of the Times was similarly lukewarm, awarding two stars and saying there were “two principal problems with this stylishly presented but unsatisfactory retrospective”.
“First: you thought performance art was bad? Old videos of past performance art are worse. Second: Abramović, who has made her career and artistic reputation teasing, testing and breaching the limits of her own endurance, may be hard as nails, but she is 76 and an honorary Royal Academician, so her part is played by acolytes.
“We see her knitting, smoking, holding a candle and walking with infinite slowness, carrying a bowl of milk,” he said. “Here she is lying naked under a skeleton in a kind of video sarcophagus, on top of which a naked live performer repeats the pose.
“Other performers re-enact early works as we go from room to room. There are so many Marinas here, but only one Abramović, in all her multiple guises.
Abramović is “redoubtable, indefatigable, brave and extreme”, he wrote.
“I speak as one who has been moved by her endurance and spirit and laughed at her mordant wit, and also as one who has enjoyed a couple of her workshops and run away from another,” he added. “But who cares about the mumbo-jumbo when the best of her art is so strong?”
