David Parry/Royal Academy of Arts
The first time the world was treated to Marina Abramović’s Imponderabilia, in an Italian art gallery in 1977, the police arrived and shut the performance down on the grounds of obscenity. The former Yugoslavia-born artist and her partner, Ulay, stood opposite each other naked at the gallery’s entrance, close enough that visitors were required to squeeze between their nude bodies to enter. The planned six-hour performance was forced to end after just three. But don’t worry if you missed it—or its 2010 redux—it’s now back as part of an exhibition of Abramović’s work at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London.
Born in Belgrade in 1946, Abramović studied as an academic painter before surging to international fame for her pioneering and often disturbing performance artworks beginning in the 1970s. Her work, which has notoriously involved putting herself in harm’s way—even mortal danger—has cemented her reputation over the last half-century as an iconoclast and the acclaimed “grandmother of conceptual art.”
The Abramović exhibition is, astonishingly, the first solo show by a female artist in the RA’s Main Galleries (the RA’s history dates to the eighteenth century), arriving even later than organizers had originally planned. Initially scheduled to open in 2020, COVID gave curators no choice but to postpone a show whose centerpiece is predicated on the most radical departure conceivable from the idea of social distancing. After two reschedulings, the doors opened—and the clothes came off—at the exhibition last month. Better late than never.