The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović

A transgression of traditional theatrical frameworks characterizes Robert Wilson's productions: the creation of illusion through spectacle, duration-based plays, and the disorientation of the spectator's gaze. Wilson is a persistent fighter against logocentric theatre, his tool being not so much the word as the image. One is that it reminds us of Jacques Derrida, and his writings on Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation.^[1] The prominent philosopher argues that Western theatre seeks representation and is only organized by the repetition of the voice of authority and is always deprived of presence and identity. But Wilson's theatre is closer to Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty.” An unreliance on presence and self-identity characterizes it. Wilson (echoing Artaud's earlier concept) incessantly bombards the spectator with voices and questioning of master discourses. It is also common for the production to mix recorded texts or noises with live words performed by the actor. This forces the viewer not only to take in the play but also to linger over its details. The productions are designed to make the audience understand the visuals rather than the story itself. Wilson seeks to separate the theatrical sign systems (music-singing, dance-movement). His aim is not to make the sign systems blend but to draw attention to themselves individually. But Wilson is much more sophisticated in his approach to this sign separation than Meyerhold or Brecht had been in the past. He creates a completely unique theatre.

In Wilson's directing process (the creative process of the production), the word is subordinate, the dramatic text is practically one of the last elements to be created, and everything else is planned much earlier (from movement to scenery). In Wilson's productions, the visual world is always created first.  “While the scene sketches emerge, Wilson ‘finds’ either music or a text from the time period of the production; if a text, he fragments it as a minimalist musician would, breaking the text into units which he varies freely . . .  Wilson treats words as object, not as meaning units.”[2] Holm Keller also points out that Wilson's staging is not determined by speech acts.[3] This implies that Wilson plays with words: sometimes deliberately breaking them up and then reassembling them in a new order. This is culminated in actors on stage not talking to each other, but turning to the audience, talking to the audience. Ivan Nagel aptly observes that while other directors staged dramas, Wilson invented a new kind of theatre far away from the standard theatre practice.[4] As Katherine Arens observes:

Wilson is identified as a graphic artist, who ‘finds’ some visual material – often a picture, or his own image of how someone sees (usually encompassing some distortion or an extreme way of seeing.) Wilson then ‘sketches’ the visual material to fill space and time, turning an image into a theatre performance. The first step in this conversion is production of series of scene sketches, which look not unlike tanagrams or minimalist art. Wilson usually sketches each scene as one in a series of black-white pattern variations, which are then blown up into stage backdrops.[5]

Wilson is interested in several fields of fine art, including painting. The visual world of his productions has admittedly been inspired by Paul Cezanne and René Magritte. As with the painters in painting, light plays a prominent role in his work. But Wilson's vision of light is also akin to that of Adolphe Appia, who argued that light has a spatial role, in itself capable of structuring space.  Stefan Brecht compared Wilson's stagings to the surrealist painters' visual world.[6] This connection is not coincidental, of course, not least because the dreamlike is constantly present in Wilson's work, the actors on stage appear mostly dreamlike in the structured space. However, Wilson's staging focuses not on the actor but on light, space, and movement. The world of the stage follows Wilson's own internal laws. "Abstract images often motivate each other. Sometimes creating interspersed tables of multiple details throughout the performances"[7] thus creating continuity between performances, building a specific referential system of references (like a labyrinth) in Wilson's oeuvre. It is no coincidence that Katherine Arens calls him a "visual-jigsaw-puzzle genius."[8]

Very early on, various theatre scholars have made it clear that Wilson's theatre is different from that of other directors. Stefan Brecht in 1978 described it as a “Theatre of Visions.” Hans-Thies Lehmann in his book Postdramatic Theatre lists artists whose work can be described as postdramatic: one of the first names to stand out in this list is Robert Wilson. As early as 1991, Katherine Arens, drawing on Hans-Thies Lehmann's earlier argument, poses in the title of her book the question: "Is postmodern performance possible?" However, I believe that Wilson's theatre is not to be described in simple terminology and represents a whole new way of thinking about theatre, visuality, objects, movement, and space.

This paper seeks to take a new angle on Wilson's rather under-analysed production of The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, from the perspective of the influential philosopher Jacques Derrida, who, like Wilson, is constantly in dispute with logocentrism, and his “autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic” concept. The aim is not to put Wilson's staging behind a definition, or to align it with the terminology of others (such as “Visual Theatre” or “Postmodern Performance,” or perhaps “Postdramatic Theatre”) but to point out the possibility of autobiographical discourse, which Wilson himself may have wanted to point out, not only in The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, but also in Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973), or Einstein on the Beach (1976). And although Wilson's productions create a continuity between one performance and another, my paper aims to analyse The Life and Death of Marina Abramović specifically from the perspective of Jacques Derrida, thus providing a fresh and fruitful approach to Wilson and the stageable (or unstageable) biography, which critics have already written "Biography is not a genre that typically ends up getting played out of the stage."[9]

This paper focuses on how logocentric meaning-intensity, referentiality is disintegrated, and how the “autobiographical theatre" constructs the death narrative, or in a Derridean term, develops it into an “autobio-hetero-tanato-graphic “narrative.

Discourses of Life, Death, and Survival

Robert Wilson presented the The Life and Death of Marina Abramović in Manchester in 2011. In the play, not only her life, but also her death was staged—a death that did not (and

has not yet) happened in a bio-logical sense. Even more, the performance artist herself played roles—herself and her mother too—she was present on stage in the bio-graphic piece. If we didn't know that Wilson's theatre is a “Visual Theatre” (and not primarily a theatre of texts nor a regular staging of dramas) and that in his productions the actor does not play as important a role as other elements of scenography, we might wonder why Wilson puts on stage the famous performance artist Marina Abramović, who makes a sharp distinction between theatre and performing art.  Or we could also legitimately ask—of the performance artist herself—what she is doing in a theatre play as a known “resistor.” We understand that Marina Abramović has been a vocal critic of dramatic theatre and has highlighted the following: 

Performance is the moment when the performer enters the audience constructed by his own mental and physical ideas. It cannot be considered theatre in the traditional sense, because theatre has an element of repetition, of substitutability (you play someone else), so theatre is a black box. Performance is always the real. In theatre, the blood and the knife are never real.  In performance, the knife and the blood coming out of the body are real.[10]

Two years later, Marina Abramović makes an even more forceful statement. “The theatre is fake: you sit in a black box, you pay for your ticket, you sit in the dark and watch someone play someone else's life."[11] But Robert Wilson is also a strong critic of this kind of theatre, which is perhaps why he prefers to call his productions "opera". In an interview with him, he explains: “I don’t like the theatre much. But I love the abstract, fluttering visual patterns of ballet, and I think that is basically what I’ve done in theatre: architectural landscapes that are structured” (Wilson quoted in Walsh 1984:85).

The common point between Wilson and Abramović seems to be the questioning of the means used by dramatic theatre, the rejection of text-based theatre. Naturally, it is clear that Wilson was ambivalent about the performance art and happenings of the 1960s and 1970s: there were aspects of these artistic projects that he explicitly rejected, but he himself preferred the process of collective creation (and the desire for total “presence”). From this point of view, it is not surprising that after several years of work, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, a specific biography and thanatography reflecting on the life of a well-known figure—what the theatre critic Lui calls a “hagiographic”[12]—was created in 2011, which significantly rewrites the question of the representability of presence-based performance art. Wilson's attempt to dissolve the performance art versus theatre opposition is striking,. Jorn Weisbrodt Montauk reflects on this issue in his book on The Life and Death of Marina Abramović: “I don't know if the piece dissolves the dichotomy between performance art and theatre . . .  but it shows that differences and definitions don't matter at all.”[13] And perhaps a more intriguing question when analysing the production is how life and death are presented in the light of biography and authorship (and staging).

According to Jacques Derrida, there is an almost invisible line between the inside of philosophemes, for example, and the life of a nameable author.[14] The biography inevitably extends to the death of the person; that autobiography in principle cannot do. But life as bio-logy and bio-graphy is not simply an opposition to death as thanato-graphy and thanato-logic. What prevents this direct opposition is precisely the objectification and its impossibility.[15] An autobiography, if it is exchanged into biography may include death. Perhaps this Derridean idea and the problematic nature of the objectification of performing art can be understood in Wilson’s play in which Abramović’s earlier performance pieces are incorporated into the theatre play as a fort/da game.^[16] Abramović throws them away (the same way Ernst did with his wooden spool) and then sends them into battle. In Wilson’s play, repetition compulsion drives these performance piece references. Most of Abramović's performances are already clearly linked to the death drive.^[17]

Bio-graphi(es) as Iterability

The screenplay of the The Life and Death of Marina Abramović based on the first manuscript of Abramović's autobiographical book Walk through Walls: A Memoir (2017) and Abramović's handwritten notes. Wilson only starts using these materials at one point in the production design. According to Krisztina Rosner, the staged story also shares some affinities with Biography (1989), directed by Charles Atlas. (Abramović and Atlas use autobiography as a diachronic structuring principle in an investigation of identity as defined by personal history.) It also resonates with The Biography Remix (1997), created by Belgian director Michael Laub. Marina Abramović has appeared in both of these, not only in a bio-graphical sense, but also in a bio-logical sense, physically.  However, Wilson's approach differs in two very important respects from the earlier elements of the “biography series.” Whereas Atlas and Laub focus primarily on Abramović's creative work, Wilson focuses mainly on Marina's childhood memories.[18] Wilson mobilizes distinctly subjective, personal (more autobiographical) stories rather than the story of the professional performer. The other, truly radical innovation is already in the production's title, "the thematisation of Marina's death and the staging of life events as seen through the lens of her own death."[19] The gesture of how the production came into being was also unusual: it was Abramović who approached the director with the idea of a staged biography:

Every time I make a biography, I start with the same principle of I give up the control completely. When I hand the material over to a director, he gets the opportunity to remix my life in a certain sense. It can follow chronological order or not. It doesn't matter. I am material, nothing more. My life is a novelty for me every time.

Wilson doesn't detail Abramović's entire career at all, nor (as expected) does he follow the chronology.  Wilson's performance deliberately goes against logocentricity.  The structure of the script, which divides the planned performance into a total of four large sections, is a good indication of this very important reworking (drawing, redrawing). It also divides the life to be presented into four major units (childhood, maturity, adulthood, and death). Within these four, however, there is always a triad of life stages:

I.

A Death (0 minutes)

B Childhood (8 minutes)

C Adulthood (9 minutes)

II.

B Childhood (6 minutes)

C Adulthood (8 minutes)

D Maturity (9 min)

III

 C Adulthood (6 min)

D Maturity (8 min)

A Death (4 min)

IV.

D Maturity (7 min)

A Death (3'2 min)

B Childhood (8 min)

Wilson uses the rules of mathematical permutation to arrange the performance into almost random triple-time units.

The Performativity of the Autobiographical  Layer: Mask as De-facement

Wilson's staging, due to Abramović's multiple presences, is autobiographical in one of its defining layers. It seems, however, that in Wilson's performance, "the (autobiography), understood as a performative material”[20] The contradictions become the deepest essence of the production. Autobiography is never innocent, descriptive discourse, but behind its apparent referentiality and objectivity destructive-deconstructive subjective rearrangements lie.

Autobiography is . . .  not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts. The autobiographical moment happens as an alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual reflexive substitution. The structure implies  differentiation as well as similarity, since both depend on a substitutive exchange that constitutes the subject.[21]

 A very similar observation is made by Jacques Derrida in his Life Death seminar (1976). In this structure, a Derridean sense of différance is at work, in which the author makes himself the object of understanding, and a constant movement, a kind of constructive-destructive alignment and separation takes place between the reader of the life and the author of the biography, which must be one and the same person. In the theatrical performance, a duplication of this process (which is also active in normal autobiography) takes place. At least two mirrored structures are in motion, side by side. Abramović writing and delivering of her own autobiography inevitably involved in confronting the subjective meaning of her life with its referential facts. We know that she also collected and added correspondence and other referential documents which she gave to Wilson at the first workshop. A further deconstructive mirror-situation in the production arises from the fact that The Life and Death of Marina Abramović is not her own work; she is not the author of her own autobiography; she is not the director of the production. Robert Wilson is editing a life narrative from fragments of Abramović's life story. But he was creating one that also speaks to the audience in Abramović's “language.” Wilson “gives us the fragments of a life with its daily trials, doubts, insecurities, its familiar struggles, phases of youthful rebellion and tireless search for selfhood amidst the domestic din of a life really lived like any other.”[22] The autobiography, although it remains covertly in the depths, in fact liquidates itself and becomes a biography.

One of the storyteller (or MC for the evening) of the play is Willem Dafoe, who, as the surreal narrator of Abramović's story, speaks in a rather cynical manner, wearing a white joker mask (porcelain face, a typical Wilsonian element) and military clothes (an allegorical evocation Abramović father's position).  His dominant acting style is mime. The mirror structure is deconstructed: there is no metaphorical (prosopoeic) reflection, but someone else speaks, and the autobiographical discourse becomes metonymic. Dafoe's speech is often incomprehensible. Speech that is supposed to be intelligible ends up in a cacophony, which throws the viewer off, as does the repetition. Dafoe's endless repetition of words empties out the linguistic units. In Wilson's work, this is also an extension of the Artaudian tradition.

Particularly controversial is the autobiographical technique with which Abramović's death is represented on the stage. She imagines and plans her own funeral, which Wilson incorporates into the work, pretending that Abramović is dead. Abramović herself takes part in this theatre play: she and two other actresses lie in the coffin, wearing funeral masks.  The idea of the “three Marinas” is Abramović's idea of her own funeral, which Wilson exploits in the opening scene. On stage, we can observe three coffins, one of which actually contains Abramović, and the other two contain actors playing “Marina,” masked on her face.  Around the coffins, dogs run—they are looking for food—among plastic bones blood red, and disappear from the stage as the performance begins. The scene is a reference to Abramović's idea of “three Marinas,” whereby Marina Abramović's own funeral will be held in three separate cities and with three separate coffins at some point in the future.  One body in Amsterdam, one body in Belgrade, and one body in New York. These are important places in Abramović's life and artistic activity. Of the three coffins, only one will contain the “real body” in bio-logical terms, but no one will know which.

With this opening scene, Wilson transforms the autobiography into an epitaph. The epitaph is the personification of a dead person, the inscription of his/her subjective essence on the material surface of the tombstone. The epitaph includes no references or deconstructive events; it only refers to the subjective essence. The opening stage scene functions just like an epitaph, only with images rather than text. Paul de Man argues that in the autobiography, the real person is always and disturbingly present, but in the case of the epitaph, we never think of the real dead body but rather of an idea. The epitaph poem, or Abramović's gestures, create a prosopopeia in Wilson's work. Prosopoeia means “to give a mask or face,” and it is with such funeral masks (and triple coffins) shown that the play itself begins. At one point, Abramović removed this mask from her face on the stage. Abramović's attempt to narrate her biography in a Wilsonian “(visual)language” implies a transition in which the referentiality of the biography and its subjective relevance are called into question.

The staging of the life of the performing artist is thus a destructed, deconstructed prosopopeia in the Paul de Man sense, both facement and de-facement. Wilson's staging implies a de Manian prosopopeia, a transition in which the referentiality of the biography is called into question, and its subjective relevance is questioned.

For this biographical (or rather, phonautographically) opening scene, Wilson himself indicates three different realisations, three separate versions, in his 2008 plans for the script of the performance.  The first version would have three funerals taking place simultaneously on stage, with three or three piles of mourners (male and female) of exactly equal numbers around the coffins, weeping. Each of the three “stage spaces” is a different color (white, black, gray), the only noise on stage is the sound of people sobbing. In Wilson's second plan, the stage is lined with open coffins facing the audience, the actors wearing death masks and everyone in black. The mourning crowd is made up entirely of women, weeping and tearing their hair. Wilson's third opening scene consists of three closed coffins, with as many people on stage as can fit, all in colorful ceremonial dress, all talking and laughing, all surrounded by food and drink. Goran Bregovic's band plays. To the fast and dynamic music, everyone dances hysterically; then suddenly the coffins open, and Marina (with a live snake coiled around her body) is hoisted onto the shoulders of the crowd, and at the same time Frank Sinatra's “My Way” is played. Finally, in 2011, for the first performance of the three versions, Wilson uses none of the three plans. In the first scene, we see Abramović wearing a funeral mask lying in three black coffins and dogs prowling among the illuminated red bones.

Bio-graphic and Thanato-graphic

Wilson stated in 2008, “If I do this work, I’m not interested in your art. I only want to work with your life.”[23] The question is also posed by Derrida in a lecture at the Life Death seminar on the autobiography of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, through Freud’s famous fort/da analysis. Can Freud’s mourning (after the loss of his daughter, Sophie) be separated from the writing of his famous Beyond the Pleasure Principle? Is the work written separate from its author? And can Wilson not talk about Abramović’s art when he creates this thanato-graphic play? Is Abramović the performance artist really present when she plays the roles as an actor?

Abramović's self-reflection is constantly called into question in Wilson's theatrical performance as he stages the life and death of the performance artist according to his own ideas. What is presented is no longer an autobiography but a biography. Firstly, Wilson sophistically eliminates the artistic expression, the performing art, which was Abramović's original mode of self-creation and self-expression. At the same time, the boundary between performing art and theatrical performance is blurred, or more precisely, performing art becomes visual theatre. Thus, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović is an autobio-hetero-tanato-graphic narrative constructed by Wilson that essentially both reveals and conceals the Abramovićian itself, and deprives the viewer of reading the theatrical performance as an opposition to performing art.

Derrida indicates that the discourse on life/death—which is also the true depth of Wilson's play—“must occupy a certain space between logos and gramme, analogy and program, as well as between the differing senses of program and reproduction. And since life is on the line, the trait that relates the logical to the graphical must also be working between the biological and biographical, the thanatological and thanatographical"[24] In the case of the Wilson production, in the discourse that follows up and links Abramović's life and death, there is not a clear opposition between the pairs, but rather a dynamic reversal. “This borderline—I call it dynamis because of its force, its power, as well as its virtual and mobile potency- is neither active or passive, neither outside nor inside.”[25] According to Derrida, an invisible line is drawn between the inner content of the works and the life of the author who can be named. We cannot speak of simple pairs of opposites. “Life as bio-logy and bio-graphy is not simply the opposition to death as a thanato-graphic and thanato-logical.”[26] What prevents this direct opposition is precisely the objectification and its impossibility. A biography (of life) is always also a biography of death. Derrida's Otobiography is an interpretation of Nietzsche's Ecce homo. Derrida's fundamental thesis is that autobiography is always a function of the objectivity of a name, of a signature, open to a primary identity formed in the absolute proximity of life and death. In this primary identity, in this regression, the specific self-constitutive role of mother and father operates. Nietzsche writes that he himself exists as a reflection of the father and mother, as a trace of their gaze. The father is long dead when he writes his autobiographical Ecce homo; the mother is alive and will outlive her son. In him, in the wake of these two gazes, the autobiographical and the biographical are summed up in his name, in his signature, in his presence. Abramović's self-construction is surprisingly similar.

Soundscape

Wilson collaborated with Anthony Hegarty (and Balkan folk singer Svetlana Spajic) to create the soundscape, which consists of an intermingling of pop music, the rock ballad, Balkan folk music and simulated orchestral music, and other dadaist noise experiments. From the autobiographical layer it is certainly worth analysing Hegarty's theme song, “Your Story, My Way”:

I will tell you a story

Through my man’s eye

Your story

My way

Your black and blue story

Through the white of my eye

My loneliness

My pain

I will tell you a story

Grind it through my eye

Crush it through my white’s eye

I’m gonna cry

I’m gonna use our eyes

I’m gonna cry

I’m gonna cry through your eyes”

The lyrics are an interesting field of analysis in many ways. In an interview with El Pais, Abramović points out that “Everything is seen through masculine eyes. My work has developed in a world of men. I am not a feminist: art does not have a gender.”[27]

Hegarty's curious monologue is superimposed on Abramović's life, on the writing of his life. The man-eye, the white of the eye (which is not seeing but only some mirror) is a reflection of the (perverted) gaze that deconstructively forms the self. The gaze, however, is anamorphic: it weeps, it cuts, it destroys and builds, it shapes bodies, it creates tears. At the same time, a deconstructive referentiality is at work in Hegarty's song, which also makes the storytelling perspective unstable. He tells a story from his own point of view by telling the story not of himself but of “you,” in the singular second person (your story), in his own way, in the first-person singular (in my way), and in doing so he assumes the narrative. This eye through which the life story is told is also a man's eye through which a woman's story is told. From the very beginning of the performance, the viewer is placed in this self-constructive, almost anamorphic position.

 Lacan states that “we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. That which makes us consciousness institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi.”[28] The gaze is paradoxical, that is anamorphic in nature, because “You never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see.”[29] The subject's autobiography is always organized by an essentially paranoid gaze that looks at it from the material world, “in this matter of the visible, everything is a trap”[30] and  “in our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it—that is what we call the gaze.”[31] Wilson's entire visual representation mobilizes this anamorphic gaze. The female-male perspective is also challenged in Hegarty's Cut the World:

“For so long I've obeyedThat feminine decree

I've always containedYour desire to hurt me

But when will I turnAnd cut the world?”

Hegarty is preparing twelve songs for the performance. These include: “Marina,” “Cut the World,” “Saint Ascend,” “Empathy,” “Snake Piece,” “Salt in my Wounds,” “Volcano of Snow,” “Why Do You Cut Yourself?,” “The White of Eyes,” “Floods My Body,” “You Will Show Me that You Love Me,” “Elements of Suffering,” “There Is No Piece.” Each song draws on her personal and fairly recent friendship and experience with Marina. The friendship was formed back in 2010 when Hegarty sat across from Abramović at The Artist Is Present, and the two met in a restaurant in London and started talking. This meeting in 2010 is reflected in the very first draft of the script of the production from 2008 in which no song inserts are marked at all in Wilson's plans.^[32]  Hegarty will deliver the first audio material of the songs to Wilson on 11 May 2011. Hegarty is therefore the second narrator of the biography (alongside Willem Dafoe). The songs written always convey a sense of intimacy that comes from an identification with Marina. While Willem Dafoe as narrator usually addresses the audience from a more distanced position. The 'distanced' narrator role is only dissolved in one of the last scenes of the performance, when Dafoe switches positions with Hegarty and sings Why must you cut yourself, almost replacing him.

Conclusion

Wilson's talent also manifests itself in his ability to take on a subject that is not in itself a simple task to bring to life. To stage the biography and death of a living artist is just such a challenge. The production also raises philosophical questions about what we understand by 'presence', but it is also an important question: can this play be a 'biography' of a performance artist born in 1946 (still alive!) if Abrmović herself (as an actress) is present on stage?  Can we discuss, then, whether the fragments of Abramović's life story can be assembled from a postmodern-ironic montage into a Derridean, tanatographic narrative?  Derrida's ideas may bring us closer to understanding Wilson's production, but Wilson's entire production cannot be understood solely from this perspective.