I. (beauty)
“I really think that beauty can come from ugliness,” Marina Abramović told me as she gestured to several pictures of her boobs. We were seated across from each other at a long wooden table in her Greenwich Village apartment, casually sparring about the place of silence, violence, and beauty in art. The performance artist bustled around the airy, well-lit space, her long dark hair swinging behind her. She yanked a few books from the shelves and showed me pictures from her 1975 performance art piece “Art must be Beautiful, Artist must be Beautiful.” In the performance, a topless Abramović frantically brushes her hair while repeating the title of the piece over and over. This repetition evolves from a self-admonishment to a numbing chant to a frightening meditation on the expectations, whether conscious or unconscious, that spectators and audiences bring to their artistic experiences.
