“I am the artwork. I can’t send a painting, so I send myself.” Since the 1970s, Marina Abramović (b. 1946) has been using her body as her artistic medium, and the surrender of control and passive acceptance of what may come as her modus operandi. Through her body, she traces and exposes her relationship with pain, the potential of the human mind, and the body’s limitations. In 2016, Abramović staged a performance at New York’s Guggenheim Museum for her seventieth birthday celebrations. Guests were given chocolate molds of the artist’s lips covered with delicate gold leaf, which they were instructed to press against their own lips. The ephemeral, edible artwork presented a dilemma for participants: to eat or not to eat? Abramović chose to echo the memory of the event and experience, immortalizing it with photography – an amalgamation of consumption with art that will be left as a testament. The photograph also captures echoes of the artist’s experience during a retreat in a Tibetan monastery, where she participated in an ancient ceremony, and after a long period of fasting and seclusion, monks consume chocolate and gold leaf, which, according to 

local belief, balances the soul and stimulates the mind. 

 

Silence is Golden 

Marina Abramović’s lips are covered with gold leaf. Of all the face’s parts, the lips are chosen to be covered. To keep the leaf from falling or dissolving, the lips must stay sealed and silent. For silence is golden, a virtue, and “silence is a fence for wisdom,” as we are told. Talking is perilous, defiant, and breaks the silence, demanding repair and divulging secrets we were asked to keep to avoid rocking the boat, revealing uncomfortable truths, and remaining beautifully silent. Breaking this silence requires courage; you must open your lips and speak, needing an audience to listen and a culture that encourages discussing difficult issues, seeing speaking as healing and wanting to right wrongs. Abramović grew up under a regime that tried to suppress testimonies and impose silence, knowing the price sealed lips pay. Perhaps that’s why she returns our gaze, showing that even sealed lips, the eyes can speak volumes. In other countries, regimes, and even here, great mental strength and the right social and political conditions are needed to break the silence and stop injustices. 

 

Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi 

Prof. Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi is a sociologist at the Hebrew University and a faculty fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. She if the former dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences (the first woman to hold this position). Her major academic interest revolves around issues of collective memory and commemoration.