mosphere.
The peculiarity of The Cleaner is that it reveals the earliest period of Abramo- vić’s creative work - the drawings, paint- ings and specific texts that she worked on immediately after completing her studies at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts in the '60s, which have never been shown before. She was slightly embarrassed by them, because she soon became a“serious conceptual artist”, admits Marina in a doc- umentary about The Cleaner in Stockholm. When collecting these drawings, sketches and studies for the exhibition, which were scattered around the cit- ies where she’d lived, the artist was also somewhat surprised. She concluded that these works served precisely as the trig- ger for her to enter the world of perfor- mance. Experts share her views, so they link her drawing depicting scenes of clouds with Marina’s spiritual aspirations.“The re- constructions of traffic accidents that she sketched continuously hinted at the per- formance series Rhythms, which she per- formed in the '70s,”says Lena Essling, cura- tor of The Cleaner exhibition, speaking in the aforementioned documentary. “It is important that The Cleaner retro- spective at the MSUB, and all other places where it will be presented, shows the ex- tent to which Marina Abramović’s Belgrade period is an integral part of her entire artis- tic opus,”stressesVesna Latinović, editor of
the monograph‘Marina Abramović, early works - Belgrade period’, published by No- vi Sad’s BelArt Gallery. In this monograph, the only one by a Serbian publisher, Oli- vera Janković, an independent art histori- an from Belgrade, deals with many works and the most important part of Abramo- vić’s opus. According to many, the 1970s was also a crucial decade in the history of art as a whole. During those years, the focal point of new artistic practises in Belgrade was the Students’ Culture Centre (SKC). “Belgrade was on a par with New York in terms of its importance on the map of artistic hap- penings,” says art historian Biljana Tomić. “It was difficult to separate professional life from personal; we lived what we were doing,” says Dunja Blažević, editor of the Fine Arts Programme at SKC during that bygone time, summing up its specific at-
Performans koji je trajao 12 dana Marina Abramović: In Residence 12-day performance entitled Marina Abramović: In Residence
Marina’s works of that time entered the annals of performance art as an exam- ple of the drastic re-examining of physical boundaries. In the work Rhythm 5, she al- most suffered a fatal injury. She laid at the centre of a five-pointed star drawn on the floor, which was then set alight.“The idea was for her to stay lying there until the flames went out, but the fire burned all the oxygen, causing the artist to faint. In the audience there happened to be a doc- tor who noticed that Marina did not react when a flame touched part of her body, and so – together with another man – he carried her out of the star,” explains Be- lArt’s Vesna Latinović. And so, this perfor- mance culminated in an unforeseen man- ner and with the crucial participation of the audience. The Rhythm 0 performance was even more dramatic. Marina presented 72 items to an audience and invited them to use these tools on her body. The auditorium was quickly divided between attackers and defenders.“The first descended to aggres- sive strokes, stripping Abramović’s clothes, placing a loaded pistol to her forehead, while others protected her,”says Latinović. “Everyone showed their own attitude to- wards woman, and especially towards a woman who poses a challenge to the au- dience in a public space,”she emphasises.
PLACE OF FREEDOM Although the Belgrade of the 1970s was said to be on a par with New York in terms of cultural content, it proved to be too small for Marina. She was born into a marriage between former Partisan fighters and, after the war, Communist officials, so dis- cipline was imposed on this young artist. When we add to this the influence of her very devout grandmother, who was the wife of the brother of Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Varnava, it is easy to understand how art was a refuge for Marina; her only place of freedom.
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