Bone washing and Marina in SAN

MARINA Abramović is a world-renowned conceptual artist and performance artist.

In a civilization where being “who” is more important than “what” this simple truth says a lot or nothing. She is a Serbian artist, more precisely she was born in Serbia, which is just a circumstance, and she said: “When people ask me where I’m from, I never say from Serbia, but from a country that no longer exists.”

Just as the place of birth does not bind her, neither does the nation define her, so she adds: “I feel neither Serbian nor Montenegrin (her parents are from Montenegro, decorated partisans, whom she described as ‘red bourgeois’, and the relationship with them, especially with the mother, as difficult and traumatic) but as an ex-Yugoslav woman”. When she freed herself from the constraints of the country, nation and parents, she also freed herself from potential offspring and announced that she had “three abortions” because “giving birth to children for my art would be a disaster disaster”.

Thus freed in the series Rhythm (1973, 1974), she sat in front of 72 objects with which the audience could caress or hurt her, cut her hands with knives, roasted with an open flame, took schizophrenic drugs until the doctors took her off the stage. With her longtime partner Ulaj, in the Imponderabilia performance (1977, re-performed in 2010), she invited visitors to slip between their naked bodies and choose for themselves whose face they would turn to and whose lower back. The performance “Seven easy pieces” (2005) brought performers under the theater boards who masturbated while the audience moved around the stage, and in 2006 she directed (along with other similar creators) the film Destricted in which she talks about eroticism in the Balkans, showing naked men who (without a little room for imagination) fill holes in the ground making it more fertile, or (again) masturbate in the rain, curing scaly oxen (not the interpretation of the author of this text) while women smear the faces of children with their vaginal juices against spells.

The pinnacle of her work (or art) is, however, the installation Balkan Baroque (1997) in which, as a response to the war in BiH, she spends hours washing piles of bloody, wormy beef bones. For such an inspired display, she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. She received the 13th of July award from Montenegro with great gratitude (this is the most important recognition in my life), and in the same year, in 2012, the Karić Foundation also made her its laureate. In 2021, Serbia honored her long-lost daughter with a “gold medal for merit”, which Marina accepted without words or public emotions.

She can rightly hope for another award, membership in SAN. The reason I dared to write this text is not to evaluate the work (or art) of Abramović, I am neither so expert nor so conceited that I think that my understanding of beautiful or good is decisive, or even important. I have no intention of judging either the work or the author, so I will refrain from pointing out the indefensible similarities between what happens at her performances and notorious TV formats such as reality shows like “Big Brother” or “Zadruga”, porno-cinema and satanic gatherings.

I will fail to make an easy point by recalling that Microsoft (2020) pulled an ad featuring her authorship due to public outcry over the occult and satanic messages her work was sending to audiences. I don’t even think I’m getting into the controversy of whether performance art is art (and I don’t think that Mita Tabachki should have become an academic as a stage designer, so how can I understand that performance is a recommendation for a place among the immortals). I won’t even play with Monty Python images in which Marina Abramović gives an introductory speech followed by men and women stabbing themselves with knives, showing their genitals and washing bones, while SANU president Zoran Knežević listens to the artist in reverent silence with selected academics.

No, the reason I’m writing is that I can’t read anywhere what SANU members think about her candidacy and that the national intelligentsia is more afraid of serving as an example to one of the ambassadors that Serbia is moving towards “patriarchal and nationalist values” (Swedish ambassador, 8. March 2024, Novi Sad) than to present his position. In the public life of Serbia, and especially in politics, the absence of intellectuals with an attitude is devastating. Who is today’s counterpart to Brana Crnčević, Gojko Đog, Miroslav Toholje or Mihajlo Marković, but that is another, no less important topic, but let me return to Marina’s membership.

SANU is not or should not be an institution that is visited based on the number of Google searches or likes, the scientific and artistic contribution of the creator is certainly an implied condition, but apart from it, the attitude towards the Academy itself, towards its essence, must also be evaluated. SANU was not created as a mere treasury, vault and custodian of knowledge, but an institution that fights for the survival of the Serbs, for the glory of Serbia, with its means, no less deadly, and especially no less important, than the army or politics. The Academy is scientific, but the Academy is first and foremost a Serbian institution. This does not mean that the members of the Academy must necessarily, or even predominantly, be Serbs, but it must mean that its members and candidates have proven their loyalty to the values ​​of the Serbian people and not any other people, not underestimating anyone.

Ivo Andrić, academician of SANU, won the Nobel Prize not for reflecting on the absoluteness of human suffering, but “for the epic strength” with which he “shaped the motives and destinies of the history of his country”. Josif Pančić is a Croat by birth, a Catholic by faith and law, but also the first president of SANU, not because he verified or abandoned the fact of his birth, but because he made Serbia famous with his work. SANU is not a simple set of scientific works, but a set of people whose work serves the pride of the nation from which they emerged and who, through their work in culture and science, confirmed the correctness of the values ​​that make it a nation. No matter how hard the fathers/mothers of the tyranny of gender equality tried to make the world a sexless place – the world is not that, and no matter how hard other Serbs, liberals, ambassadors, and often the very top of SANU, tried to make it a non-Serbian academy, SANU is not that.

The world was created and continues as an alliance and conflict of two genders, and SANU was created and continues as an example and set of values ​​of the Serbian people. That is why there is no coherent answer to the question of what qualified Marina Abramović to enroll alongside Dobrica Ćosić, Ivo Andrić, Jovan Cvijić, Aleksandar Belić, Dejan Medaković, Lavoslav Ružička, Slavenko Terzić, Milorad Ekmečić, Čedomir Popov, Vasa Čubrilović and all those whose work we it keeps us upright on earth and gives us the right to aspire to heaven.

With what installation and what attitude did Marina Abramović make us more valuable and what specific value of our people and SANA did she accept as her own, making Serbia both her own and glorious. The time in which she lives is a time with countless opportunities to show her attitude when it comes to Serbia and the Serbs, but, apart from the washing of bones, which reads as if the bones are an indictment of Serbian evil, there is not a single word of consolation or at least a demand for justice for the people who Marina belongs, even reluctantly. If through Balkan Baroque she expressed her attitude towards (we always forget, the civil war) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, why didn’t she express her attitude towards the bombing of Serbia in Balkan Baroque 2.0.

Or Serbia on fire and its slaughtered children did not give her a single moment of inspiration for a setting in which there might not be naked men, but there might be the naked truth about NATO aggression. She is not a public activist without an attitude, in 2021 she participated in the erection of the Crystal wall of crying monument that reminds of the terrible massacre in Baba Yar (today’s Ukraine) by the Einsatzgruppen (ss units created only for the extermination of Jews) and in 2022 quickly and without hesitation she condemned what she called “Russian aggression against Ukraine”. Marina is not an intellectual who is unaware of the world around her, if she were she wouldn’t hang out with Hillary Clinton, Marina unmistakably chooses a side of the world where there is hardly any justice for the people to whom she belongs unwillingly and despite everything.

And to exclude and forget all that, to act according to the ancient wisdom of not judging a man until we see his end, the question remains whether Marina Abramović, a world-renowned conceptual artist and performance artist, a candidate for membership in SANA, will put all her authority in the service of Serbia until it is kidnapped so that it is not declared a genocidal state of a genocidal people. Tesla and Pupin were no less world-famous, and they owed more to humanity, so they again shamelessly and with full conviction worked for the glory of Serbia, and accepted the values ​​of the Serbian people as their own.

So what prevents Marina from following their example? Will Marina give a performance in front of the UN building in which she washes the white scarves of the mothers of Srebrenica, and through the washed water and water they become black like the scarves of the Serbian mothers of Bratunac. Will Marina A have to apologize and justify her membership in an institution that is first and foremost Serbian, then scientific and cultural, and what will that apology look like? Why should Marina Abramović become a Serbian academic, why?