October 2019
In this essay I talk about “relationality, celebrity, and labor" in the 2012 Matthew Akers film. There's the tension between conviviality and antagonism in relation to the audience, the deliberate use of celebrity by Abramovic, and the fraught space of exploitative labor in the restagings of her work. I arrive at the void space beyond pain that Abramovic invites her audience to experience with her.
Written for Johanna Gosse's Contemporary Art.
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