RITUAL DYNAMIC PERFORMANCE: In Works of Marina Abramović, Andrea Fraser, Gilad Ratman

Master's thesis by Lisa Stuckey in History and Theory of Art.
Passed with distinction in 2015.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Elisabeth von Samsonow

ABSTRACT
In the mid-20th century, breakthroughs within performance studies and liturgical reforms occurred synchronously with a revision of clerical rituals. On the basis of an analysis of works, Stuckey’s study conceptualizes the interdependencies between performance theory, performance art, rituals, and ritual theory.

By the example of the performance Official Welcome (2001/2003) by the artist Andrea Fraser, who is associated with institutional critique, the site-specific intervention in the Israeli pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale The Workshop (2013) by Gilad Ratman, and the retrospective by Marina Abramović The Artist Is Present (2010) at MoMA the analysis follows the hypothesis that ritual and performative works of contemporary art have a common ground in their action, aesthetics, and habitus. The investigation is carried out through Arnold van Gennep's theory of ‘rites of passage’, Victor W. Turner's ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’, such as key concepts of ritual dynamics. It examines where a transfer of ritual processes and ritual knowledge into the exhibition space takes place. Furthermore, the role of gesture and body, the use of different media and rhetorical methods, such as how agency is distributed between ritual specialists and other actors is discussed. European and American artists such as anthropologists have continuously exoticized certain practices as ‘shamanic’, violently subjecting them to their own interpretation.

Even though nowadays the term ‘ritual’ has decoupled itself from a strictly religious connotation, from an art-theoretical standpoint oftentimes emerges when artistic performances reveal sacral or spiritual dimensions. This study critically reflects this fact by examining how the emergence of post-colonialism and the erosion of essentialist ways of thinking are echoed in art production on the one hand, and how ritual-performative set pieces are transferred into artistic contexts on the other—in order to experience a dynamization in form, content, and meaning.

Central argument published in the paper:
Lisa Stuckey: Ritual & Performancekunst: Ein dialektisches Verhältnis, in: Neue Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen (Nkf), Nr. 2 (2016), Wiener Schule, S. 70–77.