You no longer need to pray to connect with the divine. It's the divine that makes itself present to us, sending notifications.
We are surrounded by oracles: artificial intelligences, beings that live in the ether and always answer, on demand. With everyday life so thoroughly computerised and automated, the human being is losing the spiritual component that has always accompanied it. The words spirituality and mysticism no longer belong to our daily vocabulary, and the figures once glorified and revered for their direct, profound contact with the elsewhere seem to have disappeared.
They seem to. Because in fact they are still here: it's just that today we don't call them mystics. We call them artists.
I came across Marina Abramović in an art course at university. The work that made me discover her was The Artist Is Present: MoMA, 2010, more than seven hundred hours sitting motionless on a chair, while outside the museum people queued for the chance to sit opposite her and communicate without saying a word. Then came all the others.
I felt an immediate connection, because I sensed that the real meaning of her work lay in something invisible and unfathomable. The confirmation came when I read Walk Through Walls, the autobiography she wrote with James Kaplan. I understood that she was searching for something divine through the use of her own body: performance art as an instrument for connecting with what stays hidden.
The price to pay, as I read it, is enormous: taking the body past the limit of endurance and pain, to the point of brushing against death. And she went further still — she combed death. It happened at the Venice Biennale in 1997, with Balkan Baroque. For four days, in the basement of the pavilion, she sat on a mountain of cattle bones scrubbing them one by one, singing the songs of her Yugoslav childhood, while outside the war in the Balkans was not yet over. Blood does not wash away: the work proves it precisely by failing to. It won her the Golden Lion.
Her parents had been two partisans, war heroes under Tito: our grandparents' generation. She was washing the bones of the one that followed. It's the same stone in the pond I've written about elsewhere — a wave set off by others that someone, decades later, is still trying to put back in order. With their hands, one bone at a time.
It's striking how art and death are intertwined: art as an epiphany of life, the opposite of its annihilation. And how far Marina Abramović has gone in turning the annihilation of her own body into life — that is, into art.
In The Artist Is Present she used the body differently, creating direct, first-person contact with the viewer, who had to sit opposite her, a few centimetres away, for an indefinite length of time. No dialogue, no exchange of any kind beyond the direct contact of the gaze. A connection that is today the hardest thing we are asked for, when it concerns human contact — and at the same time the easiest, when it passes through an electronic device.
Many of the people who sat in front of her at MoMA burst into tears, completely disarmed, as though they had laid bare their own secrets and weaknesses. A confession without spoken dialogue: energetic, mental.
For us the elsewhere arrives on a screen, free, at any hour of the day. She needed a body, and she needed to put it entirely at stake.
Perhaps the mystics haven't disappeared. It's we who have stopped paying the price of going to find them.
