Where artist, writer and art critic Dick Tuinder noted upon his visit to the exhibition of Marina Abramovic in Montevideo - the Dutch Institute for Media Art - that "the majority of the visitors of the current exhibition constisted of late middle-aged women. Peers of the artist in sex and generation," did I mainly see many young, hip women, maybe even girls, of which I suspected they are part of a new generation of performance or video artists.
Much is to learn for that new generation from Abramovic: total surrender, extreme consequences and self sacrefice - almost all which makes an artist a good artist. While compiling the recent overview of 30 years of video art in the Netherlands the Montevideo and Abramovic thus discovered "that she, the Yugoslavian woman who ended up in the Netherlands by coincidence and love, was the only constant in that part of history." Montevideo shows an overview of this constant, among which a dozen video's by Abramovic and Ulay, but also more recent performances:
"Performances where Abramovic is dancing the mambo on magnetic shoes. The visitor can join in, with a light feeling in the head and feet glued to the floor. But there are also 120 singing monks, who will cover you in singing, and frantic dancing men in the installation The Hunt. And there is the installation Spirit House, where you walk past an Abramovic who's dancing the tango, using a whip on her back until it bleeds and breathing in a bath of ice. Abramovic is still extreme. She's still creating performances you cannot imagine." (De Volkskrant, 1 May 2003)