Week 12 – Artist – Abramovic-Althamer

     Marina Abramovic has used her body as subject and medium of her performances to test her physical, mental, and emotional limit. Her works, characterized by endurance and pain, and by repetitive behaviors, actions of long duration, and intense public interactions and energy dialogues, has engaged and repelled live audiences. 
    Pawel Althamer is an artist best know for groundbreaking projects involving community engagement, collaboration, and social transformation. His works often involve family, friends, neighbors, visitors to his exhibitions, and strangers encountered on his travels. He makes art that creatively reimagines reality in an attempt to subtly, though powerfully, shift conventional perceptions- social, political, psychological. 
    Abramovic arts were mostly using her own body to express the ideas or meaning that she want the world to know about. The performance art was sometime dangerous, exhausted, and in pain. However, her unique way of art performance has appealed many audiences in the world and received many honor awards in her artist career.
    While Althamer was also considering his art as performance art just like Abramovic, however, he did not use his body to demonstrate meaning, he used engagement with community to create a film, an art, a project to emphasize his ideas and goal of life.
    For example, "Common Task " is a series of documented actions and activities in which Althamer's neighbors from a communist-era housing project in Warsaw.  One of the famous performance art of Abramovic was the project called " Seven Easy Pieces", which expressed her anger at seeing so many of the ideas developed in her and other's performances being appropriated without credit, she committed herself to archiving seven iconic works by recreating or reinterpreting them.