Fame, Celebrity, and Performance: Marina Abramovíc Contemporary Art Star

This dissertation analyzes Marina Abramovic's rise to mainstream attention and her subsequent status as a celebrity through the prism of her major New York City performances -House with the Ocean View (2002), Seven Easy Pieces (2005) and The Artist is Present (2010) -as well as the most recent iteration of her Biography (The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, 2011/13), and her plan to build the Marina Abramovic Institute in Hudson, New York. While the popular success of Abramovic's Manhattan performances is widely acknowledged, especially, for example, the fanfare that surrounded The Artist is Present, serious consideration of how these performances have sustained such a devoted fan base and why she has become an intense presence in the media remains lacking. Comparison with a diverse roster of past and present artists, including Andy Warhol, Hannah Wilke, Shirin Neshat, Chris Burden, and Tehching Hsieh, helps to formulate my investigation. I present strong links between the recurring, interactive use of the telescope and/or camera lens in Abramovic's three New York performances in relationship to the film studies concept of "intimate strangers," the "It-effect," and 1990s relational aesthetics. Although Abramovic is avowedly not a feminist, I argue that concepts of gender performativity inform not only the reception of her work, but also her Internet and mainstream media presence. She is seen to fit the paradigm of the "executive female artist," a designation used in this instance to reconfigure collaborative performance art practices. Abramovic's status as an art star is paradoxically rooted in a multiplicity of presences and absences that exhibit both a corporeal and corporate structure.