For Seven Easy Pieces Marina Abramovic reen­acted five sem­i­nal per­for­mance works by her peers, dat­ing from the 1960’s and 70’s, and two of her own, inter­pret­ing them as one would a musi­cal score. The project con­fronted the fact that lit­tle doc­u­men­ta­tion exists from this crit­i­cal early period and one often has to rely upon tes­ti­mony from wit­nesses or pho­tographs that show only por­tions of any given performance.

The seven works were per­formed for seven hours each, over the course of seven con­sec­u­tive days, Novem­ber 9 –15, 2005 at the Guggen­heim Museum, in New York City. Seven Easy Pieces exam­ines the pos­si­bil­i­ties of rep­re­sent­ing and pre­serv­ing an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral.

“About the pub­lic … I do not want the pub­lic to feel that they are spend­ing time with the per­for­mances, I sim­ply want them to for­get about time.” Marina Abramovic, 2005

Filmmaker’s Orig­i­nal State­ment writ­ten in Feb­ru­ary 2006:

The film of Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic is about the per­form­ing body and how it affects vis­cer­ally the peo­ple who con­fronts it, looks at it and par­tic­i­pates in the tran­scen­den­tal expe­ri­ence that is its pri­mary affect. From an art event to a social phe­nom­e­non, the seven per­for­mances became the talk of the town because it cre­ated among the vis­i­tors a sense of sub­li­ma­tion like prayer. The film attempts to reveal the mech­a­nisms of this tran­scen­den­tal expe­ri­ence by just show­ing the performer’s body liv­ing the events inscribed in each pieces with details that out­line the body fragility, ver­sa­til­ity, tenac­ity and unlim­ited endurance.

The fas­ci­na­tion comes from the rev­e­la­tion of the phys­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion of Marina Abramovic”s exposed body due to the rig­or­ous dis­ci­pline of being there on dis­play each day for seven hours with­out any restric­tive bound­aries. The relent­less progress of time is revealed each day by the acoustic of the build­ing with its waves of crowd that roll like an ocean and mar­vel at the performer’s stead­fast­ness with respect­ful silence. That the performer’s required dis­ci­pline had to be so dif­fer­ent from one piece to the next is one of the mys­ter­ies. How the atten­tive audi­ence feed into the art and Marina’s aes­thet­ics is what is explored. It is as if a monas­tic urge attracted the mys­tic among us view­ers that were there to par­tic­i­pate. And the film, by focus­ing on Marina’s minute changes and strains along the long seven hours of each piece, explores in a sys­tem­atic way a body with­out limit and increases the aware­ness of how par­tic­i­pa­tory body art is.

The film will be 90 min­utes long and fol­lows the lin­ear­ity inscribed in the week event, from body pres­sure, audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion and con­fronta­tion in the first three pieces to the cer­e­mo­nial in the last four pieces as mapped out by Marina Abramovic’. It is only after the fact that the film viewer will real­ize how much the project con­cept enlight­ens us on aes­thet­ics that priv­i­leged phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence over rea­son, process over iconog­ra­phy and tes­ti­fies to the power of audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion over pas­sive spectatorship.