Seven Easy Pieces

This new monograph documents seven consecutive, groundbreaking nights of monumental, solo, body-art performances by the internationally renowned artist, Marina Abramovic, during the Fall of 2005 in the famous rotunda of New York City's Guggenheim Museum. It includes a new piece created by Abramovic specifically for the project, as well as Abramovic's renditions of six other seminal works (by five other artists and herself) from the formative decade, 1965-1975. The works include reenactments of Vito Acconci's Seedbed (1972), in which the artist occupied the space under a false floor, masturbating and speaking through a microphone to visitors above; Valie Export's Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) in which Export walked through a movie theater in crotchless pants, challenging the audience to turn from the images of women on the screen to a real female body; and Abramovic's own Lips of Thomas (1975), in which she ate a kilogram of honey and drank a liter of red wine before breaking her glass with her hand, incising a star in her stomach with a razor blade, whipping herself until she "no longer felt pain," then lying down on an ice cross while a space heater suspended above her caused her to bleed even more profusely. Also included, Bruce Nauman's Body Pressure, Gina Pane's The Conditioning, and Joseph Beuys's critical exploration, How To Explain Pictures of a Dead Hare. In this important series, Abramovic gives us the opportunity to recall, revive and preserve major historical performance pieces, all of which are inherently ephemeral, in a completely original way. With an interview by the esteemed Guggenheim curator, Nancy Spector.