For three years, Marina Abramovic and Ulay lived nomadically, traveling in an old black Citroën van with their dog Alba. His home was the road. In June 1977, on a route through Italy, they camped in front of the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna in Bologna, took off their clothes and headed towards the entrance door. Naked and motionless, they stood facing each other, staring into each other's eyes, with their backs pressed against the frame. To enter, visitors had to slide sideways through the tiny space between the two bodies and choose which nudity they faced, hers or his. The action should have lasted six hours, but the police put an end to it much earlier because they considered it obscene. By then, more than 350 people were already walking inside the museum.
Almost fifty years later, Imponderabilia, one of the couple's most celebrated performances, revives these days at the Royal Academy in London, now without the presence of its protagonists (Abramovic is about to turn 77 and Ulay died in 2020) , recreated by trained young people whose vulnerable bodies are subjected daily to the touch of a crowd of anxious strangers.
Imponderabilia, which is part of the RA's retrospective of the Serbian artist (the first woman to whom the institution has opened its doors in 255 years), caused a stir of excited sanctimony in the months leading up to its opening last September. . I was curious to see if the piece retained its power to create an uncomfortable and insecure space between artists and the public, to see the reaction of a human being in front of another human being when encouraged to play with fire. Nothing to fear: the wick is partly wet. Tamed by the correction of the new times, the warrior of performing arts – as she already did in 2010 at the MoMA – has agreed to create a side door through which those who do not want to know anything about the experience can sneak in.
The day I visited the exhibition, the majority chose the alternative route, overcome by apprehension or shame. Those of us who went through it, overcoming the discomfort of feeling like an intruder, of violating privacy, of not stepping on or hurting your bag, of noticing a penis on your thigh... – before we had to make a quick decision about whose motivations You can only think after the fact. Which of the two are you facing? In an old film from the seventies, you can see how the men pass by looking at Marina, while the women do so indifferently in front of one or the other. The search for pleasure or man's ancestral fear of showing his intimacy to another man? The time I was browsing in the Royal, history repeated itself. On the way out, I asked my gay companion why he had confronted the woman. “Because she had never had that experience,” he replied, still impressed by the heat, the life, accumulated between two bodies.
