Visitors Entering the Royal Academy Next Fall Will Have to Squeeze Past Naked Performers as Part of Its Marina Abramović Retrospective

Marina Abramović and her former collaborator Ulay’s
groundbreaking 1977 performance Imponderabilia will be
recreated in London next fall as part of Abramović’s
retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts.

The museum is now seeking performers to restage the work, which
involves standing naked face to face in a doorway while visitors
squeeze through the narrow space between them. It forces “a
confrontation between nakedness, and the gender, the sexuality, the
desire,” Andrea Tarsia, the Royal Academy’s head of exhibitions,
told the Times of
London.

Imponderabilia was originally carried out by
Abramović and Ulay, her partner from 1975 until 1988, at a
performance art festival at the Museum of the Galleria d’Arte
Moderna Bologna. The idea was “if there were no artists, there
would be no museums. So we are living doors,” Abramović told
the Financial
Times.

“We decide to rebuild the main entrance of the museum, smaller,
and stood there completely naked, so the public who have come to
the museum to see the performances have to make a choice to face
one or another of us, because the entrance is so narrow they could
not go frontally,” Abramović told Glenn Lowry, director of New York’s
Museum of Modern Art, on the occasion of the restaging of the work
in “The Artist Is Present,”
her hit 2010 retrospective at the museum.

Some 300 to 400 people walked through the bodies in the original
show, some quickly, others returning for a second passage. Still
others opted to walk around the doorway, eschewing such close
contact with the nude artists. But within three hours, the police
had been called and the performance was shut down (neither
Abramović nor Ulay had their passports handy to present to the
authorities).

Decades later, the work remained controversial during its run in
New York. Much of the press coverage of
the exhibition focused on the nude performers reenacting
Imponderabilia. Art critic Jerry Saltz wrote of having “a
close encounter with a penis that grazed my thigh,” while
the New York Post published an article titled
“Squeezy Does It at
MoMA,” in which museum visitors spoke of their discomfort with
passing between the naked performers. The Associated
Press reported that some guests had been kicked out of the
museum for inappropriately touching the performers.

“We have a way to let security know if we’re having an
emergency, but we’re all prepared for discomfort,” one performer
told the Post at the time.
“You just have to suck it up!”

As she did for MoMA, Abramović will hold intensive workshops
training the performers to recreate the work in London. The new
show will feature more than 50 photographs, videos, installations,
and re-staged performances, but will not see Abramović as a
constant fixture in the galleries, as she was for “The Artist Is
Present.”

“Never say never with Marina, but one thing she won’t be doing,
because we won’t let her… she won’t be in the galleries for 80
days,” Royal Academy artistic director Tim Marlow told the
Guardian. “Will
she be in the galleries doing something? Almost certainly.”

Previous reports offer a hint of what that something could be:
In April 2018, it was reported that Abramović was working with
art-tech company Factum Arte on a performance for the show that
would see the artist charged with one million
volts of electricity.

“Marina Abramović: 50 years
of pioneering performance art” will be on view at the Royal
Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, September
26-December 8, 2020.

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Have to Squeeze Past Naked Performers as Part of Its Marina
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