7 Easy Pieces

This new monograph documents seven consecutive, groundbreaking nights of monumental, solo, body-art performances by the internationally renowned artist, Marina Abramovic, during the Fall of 2005 in the famous rotunda of New York City's Guggenheim Museum. It includes a new piece created by Abramovic specifically for the project, as well as Abramovic's renditions of six other seminal works (by five other artists and herself) from the formative decade, 1965-1975. The works include reenactments of Vito Acconci's "Seedbed" (1972), in which the artist occupied the space under a false floor, masturbating and speaking through a microphone to visitors above; Valie Export's "Action Pants: Genital Panic" (1969) in which Export walked through a movie theater in crotchless pants, challenging the audience to turn from the images of women on the screen to a real female body; and Abramovic's own "Lips of Thomas" (1975), in which she ate a kilogram of honey and drank a liter of red wine before breaking her glass with her hand, incising a star in her stomach with a razor blade, whipping herself until she "no longer felt pain," then lying down on an ice cross while a space heater suspended above her caused her to bleed even more profusely. Also included, Bruce Nauman's "Body Pressure, " Gina Pane's "The Conditioning, " and Joseph Beuys's critical exploration, "How To Explain Pictures of a Dead Hare." In this important series, Abramovic gives us the opportunity to recall, revive and preserve major historical performance pieces, all of which are inherently ephemeral, in a completely original way. With an interview by the esteemed Guggenheim curator, Nancy Spector.