Marina Abramovic: Objectifying The Female Body In Art

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To objectify the female body in artwork means to strip the subject of some aspects of humanity, reducing her down to fundamentals in order to construct an image based on the desire of the artist and not the personality of the sitter. The Western tradition of art heavily relied on objectification: idealizing, primitivizing, or eroticizing the body to convey messages and explore the psyche of the artist. The advent of Performance art as it is known today reinvented what it means to objectify the body, and through this it fundamentally changed set artistic doctrines. The female body moved outside of the canvas and became real flesh. Performance artwork, particularly that of Marina Abramovic, fractured preconceived ideas of art and notions of the female body through its visceral exploration of the body in art, its physical limitations, and how it is objectified through the performance. Performance Art is defined as "a nontraditional art form often with political or topical themes that typically features a live presentation to an audience or …show more content…

In this piece she used the Russian knife game to explore the physical limitations of the body: each time she cut herself she would switch knives until she harmed herself twenty times with twenty different knives. This would be recorded, and then she would play back the recording while recreating what she just did, merging past and present. This was also the first time a performance artist considered his or her state of consciousness as a performer and the impact that could

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