In August 2015, Marina Abramovic and the Swiss psychoanalist Jeannette Fischer met at the artist’s Hudson house for four days, wired up with microphones. Those recordings form the basis of the book Psychoanalyst meets Marina Abramović: Artist meets Jeannette Fischer (Scheidegger & Spiess, hardback, 2018, 176 pages with 7 color and 24 b/w illustrations, 11.5 x 16.5 cm; order the English edition of the book from Amazon.com, Amazon.uk, Amazon.fr and Amazon.de; the German edition, Psychoanalytikerin trifft Marina Abramović, from Amazon.de).
Marina Abramovic and Jeannette Fischer first met in 1998, when the psychoanalyst visited the artist’s exhibition Artist Body—Public Body at the Kunsthalle in Switzerland’s capital Berne. The scientist came to the conclusion that the artist’s performance revealed all the fine and subtle relationship structures between people, the hierarchical distinctions, the mecanisms of the violence that inevitably exist below the surface and that generally go unnamed. It occured to Jeanette Fischer that Marina Abramovic performed the same things that she explored through psychoanalysis. That was the start of their friendship.
This great book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in the work of Marina Abramovic. The discussions between the two women are profound. The psychoanalyst sums up key findings in key sentences.
One chapter focuses on fear as a constant feature of Marina Abramovic’s work. The analyst concludes: If one inflicts pain on oneself to free onself from fear, than pain is acceptable.
In another chapter, the artist says that she gives absolutely everything in her performances, that it isn’t dying that scares her, but the unstoppable passing of time, and that she always ends up alone. She explores the conflictual relationship with her father who abandoned her when he split up with her mother. He disinherited Marina, as her mother later did too. Her brother won’t talk to Marina. Her first and second loves of her life left her. The psychonalyst concludes that Marina’s performances are an exercise in survival, that she gets support from re-enacting helplessness.
Later in the book, Jeanette Fischer states that Marina Abramovic’s performance is about the unconscious hope that there might be a boat in which she would be welcome. These are just some of the key findings of the four-day-meeting of the artist with the psychoanalyst. Without this book, you cannot fully understand the work of Marina Abramovic, one of the great contemporary artists.
This article is based on the book Psychoanalyst meets Marina Abramović: Artist meets Jeannette Fischer (Scheidegger & Spiess, hardback, 2018, 176 pages with 7 color and 24 b/w illustrations, 11.5 x 16.5 cm; order the English edition from Amazon.com,Amazon.uk, Amazon.fr and Amazon.de; the German edition, Psychoanalytikerin trifft Marina Abramović, from Amazon.de). For an easier reading, quotations and partial quotations have not been put between quotation marks.
