Marina Abramovic / Ulay
Relation / Works 3 Performances
Innsbruck, Austria: Galerie Krinzinger, 1978
[46 pp.], 16.5 x 24.5 cm., softcover
Edition of 1200
An early bookwork by Ulay & Abramovic featuring photo documentation of three performance works from the Relation series: Relation in Space, Relation in Movement, and Relation in Time. The title also includes an index of performances, films, video tapes, bibliography, biography and excerpts from a dialogue between the artists and Heide Grundmann.
"As the Relation Works went on, the theme of immobility became increasingly pervasive. In Relation in Time, 1977, the two sat motionless back to back for 16 hours, tied together by their hair. (“Hair is a kind of antenna, like air roots of trees,” Ulay says.) The audience was admitted to watch the 17th and final hour of motionlessness. What was being exhibited in the immobility pieces was not a waxworks; these were mute and unmoving monuments, yet seething with inner life and sentience, will and activity. It was that inner life transpiring invisibly within the immobile body that was the object exhibited—“something that comes into being but remains invisible,” as Marina and Ulay have described the intended subject of their work. This inner life was not a matter of day dreams or trances; like Buddhist vipassana meditators, Ulay and Marina strove, in their immobility performances, to keep their attention continually alert upon the present moment as it unfolded around and within them."
- Thomas McEvilley, Artforum
