What might it mean to think about artistic collaboration in relation to time? There are two usual responses: either to think about artists working together within a given space at the same time, or to think about the months or even years that some artists have spent collaborating together as a significant part of their practice. The first response identifies collaboration as an event of a finite duration: of the joint creation of specific works, such as Carolee Schneeman and Robert Morris’ collaborative performance Site (1964), or the shared direction by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno of the extraordinary Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006). The second signifies a sustained history of collaboration and can be found in artistic collaborations as family units (such as Boyle Family from the 1960s onwards) or as couples in art and life (Anne and Patrick Poirier; Marina Abramovic and Ulay; Gilbert & George). This trajectory of collaboration was described at length in one of the present coauthors’ books, Charles Green’s The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, and we will review its argument for these pages.1
But there is another coupling of collaboration and time that we want to consider here. It is a more philosophical conception of collaboration across space and time, of collaborating with: history and not just _as history, and which may even encompass collaboration with deceased artists. That collaboration occurs between images in the re-enactment of works of art: as collaborations between artists past and present through images from the past—archival, documentary, singular, myth-making—and as the reactivation or re-experiencing of those imaged events, years later in a different body of work, within very different social and historical contexts, and often by a very different artist. These collaborations breathe the body into life rather than simply breathing life back into the body of the archival image—transferring and transforming it into another medium. This transformation through collaboration, and from the archive into performance, provides what we will refer to as an Atlas Effect, one whose implications for contemporary art are as practical as they are philosophical.
This reactivation of the image archive, this Atlas Effect, has not gone unnoticed by a number of leading art critics and curators, and certainly not by an even larger number of contemporary artists. Re-enactment and re-staging have again become buzzwords in recent art discourse, in part encouraged by Western pop culture’s evergrowing fondness for simulated experiences of a long-dead past—cinematic remakes, period films, history-themed amusement parks—that often reduce history to spectacle. Sven Lütticken has fiercely, and rightly, criticised our spectacular period of period spectacle for its strong undertones of conservatism, and its restorative rather than transformative intents.2 A number of contemporary artists, however, have reenacted or rewired past events for purposes different than mere spectacle. Jeremy Deller’s well-known re-staging of an anti-Thatcher protest from early 1980s Britain for his video The Battle of Orgreave (2001) immediately springs to mind here, as do Pierre Huyghe’s numerous re-engagements with cinema history (his lo-fi retake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) for Remake (1995), for example, or his dilation of a temporal ellipse in Wim Wenders’ movie The American Friend (1977) that involved filming Bruno Ganz crossing the Seine in L’Ellipse (1998).3 Works like these have also informed two of the most commanding and pervasive concerns in contemporary art: the so-called archival turn and the equally capacious social turn.4 Both concerns habitually appear in association with artist collaboration, linking archives, politics and cooperative production together to promote an art of great currency, with works that may look like exhibitions or street demonstrations, or that are indistinguishable from social research. The compelling connection between all these forms is, as Hal Foster and David Joselit recognise, an aesthetic of avatars, teamwork and ghost-writing—an aesthetic that articulates a shift in art practice away from postmodernism, and that emerges amid the fading of 1990s methods of art criticism best exemplified by the (once-)powerful American journal October (with which both Foster and Joselit are identified).
Foster’s short but widely cited October article on the ‘archival turn’, much like Lütticken’s contemporaneous critique of re-enactment, sets out a workable paradigm of contemporary artistic representations of archives and the re-activation of earlier artists’ archival projects. Joselit similarly describes contemporary experiences of culture as ‘navigational’: his analysis maps the emergence of a ‘navigational art’ in which the virtual avatar and the physical self, as well as narrative fact and narrative fiction, begin to blur. The arguments of both Foster and Joselit are heavily inflected by new media theories of the database, and especially by that of Lev Manovich.5 In formulating a critical position toward these theories, our underlying premise has been that art has fundamentally changed in a way ignored by Joselit and Foster: a new legal landscape accompanies and, indeed, constitutes the shift from the postmodern to the contemporary during the early 1990s. It is partly characterized by collaborative forms of re-enactment, and partly by the navigation of new sources and spaces, but also by the (re)discovery of old places and old legal regimes. Furthermore, the conditions of the contemporary—figured in the work of artists like Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, Tracey Moffatt, the list goes on—do not engage with the problems of ‘appropriation’ as this was articulated within postmodern discourse, but they do involve having to grapple with appropriation art’s legal hangovers of unauthorised image use and the all-pervasive laws of copyright and moral rights.6 This is the double bind of the Atlas Effect we want to elaborate here, which permeates contemporary art and is registered at the levels of discourse about collaboration, archives and memory. The question we need to ask first, though, is: What is the background for the current prevalence of blurred, collaborative authorships and collaborative re-enactments?

1. The Third Hand

From the late 1960s onwards, artists moved away from stable media definitions of art and artistic work. At the same time, artistic collaborations moved towards identities that could be constructed, fictional, disguised or absent. This was the foundational argument of Green’s analysis in The Third Hand, which traced the narrative of disclosure and withholding of the self in conceptualist art. The book mapped the types of collaboration in conceptual or conceptually-inflected art, understanding that even these fashioned and carefully crafted selves were presented as if they were natural.7 This was a taxonomy and, at the same time, a chronological history of conceptual art, beginning in the 1960s and moving into the 1970s, through the lens of artistic collaboration. It showed that collaboration is not so much a mode of production as it is both a key trajectory and a conceptual thematic that has defined artistic production
since the later 1960s to the present.
Three broad types of collaborative authorship may be distinguished, which share an aim to convince the audience of new understandings of art and identity; all are opposed to collaborations or collectives in which a conventional idea of art made in the studio is preserved. In early conceptual practices, collaboration was inscribed in the art. An interrogation of the inscribed multiple figure of the artist alters our sense of conceptual art’s significance. By the mid-1970s, another type of artistic collaboration had become clear: collaborations based on families or couples who worked like anthropological or archaeological research teams, with an emphatically articulated, even rhetorical sense of historical perspective and memory, but behind a cloak of stylistic semi-anonymity. In a later phase of conceptual art, the figure of the artist was deconstructed via an interwoven set of exaggerated, highly stressed, binary relationships between the visual and anti-visual, and between imagination and memory.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude evolved a transitional artistic identity, in which a corporate “name” or trademark subsumed their own individual selves in an almost parodic exaggeration of artistic freedom. Gilbert & George linked their living sculpture’s believability to their total self-absorption, creating a meta-identity that encompassed both artists, relegating each to the status of automaton or puppet. Marina Abramovic and Ulay referred to “body memory” and the “third force” that they created in their interaction with each other. Self-revelation was implicit in such “third hand” collaborations; yet it proved unsustainable in practice.
No crisis created by an ideal of universal genius was behind any origin of collaboration in art as a widespread phenomenon during the 1960s or 1970s. The Third Hand attempted to be both more specific and more generalised than this, and above all, the narrative was developed in relation to contemporary art practice. On the one hand, the book re-explained in a very focused way the distinct period roughly between 1968 and 1978. This period is absolutely foundational to art today, but its significance was lost during the subsequent period of classic postmodernism in the early to mid-1980s and then was again subsumed in the developments of late 1980s marked by identity politics. The very identities and working methods that The Third Hand located in the 1970s in artistic collaborations re-emerged, but in a more normative and widespread way, after the early 1990s amongst younger artists. Consequently, the movement outside discursive boundaries and beyond stable artist/artwork divisions, into new forms of polemical and enigmatic group action, registers as immediately familiar. The drive to rethink artistic authorship was not the property of any one period—even one as productively unstable as the late 1960s and 1970s—or of the present. It constitutes a historical trajectory, wherein artistic collaboration in the former period was part of an important sea-change then as it is in contemporary art. The productivist aesthetic implicit in specifically modernist formations of collaboration was rejected by all these artists, at least for the most part initially, though another model of the collaborating artist, which has ended up embracing a more conventional idea of collaboration—that of the collective—returned in a substantial way after the late 1980s. Collaborations were not so much a way of connecting with a social project—as it was for Art & Language, after its start, whose history has been left to the many people who worked within it—as a way of working out if it was even possible to engage in such activity. As time went on, the desire to see concrete political action in art through collective work increasingly replaced the desire to see if collaborative action could facilitate, through the removal of the artist, a new zone between art, writing and history.
This in-between zone is more than just fascinating. It is implicit in a lot of the activity that has grown to define intermedia practices in contemporary art, only some of which involves new media. The collaborative typologies that appeared in The Third Hand (collective, short-term cooperation; corporate, bureaucratic groups or partnerships; married couples and families; and finally intensely and publicly bonded couples who created “third artists”) also formed an evolving narrative, wherein certain types of collaboration were then answered by others, as each in turn proved to be inadequate in the solution of the artistic problems of convincing the beholder of the rhetoric of the artist. Take the example of several Sydney-based conceptualist artists in the light of the more general, agoraphobic reaction to the contracting horizons of mainstream conceptual art in the crucial years around 1970. The artists included Peter Kennedy, Aleks Danko, Tim Johnson and Mike Parr, all of whom worked in teams, collectives or with invented identities, and who continue to work in this fashion today. This loose grouping was associated with Sydney’s alternative gallery Inhibodress and the University of Sydney workshop, called Tin Sheds, and they had created cooperative links with Mail Art networks in Europe and the United States. In works that rehearsed a series of systems models, they enacted a violent disavowal of self, which crucially functioned as a replacement for expressivity, all the while transmuting the idea of “dialogue” within conceptual art into aggressive new forms of autobiography. These indexical ‘self-portraits’ deliberately mimicked and
mocked classic conceptual art through impure, inappropriately psychologised dematerialisations of the art object.8 Eliminating the material object turned out not to be a heroic step forward towards enlightenment but yet another erosion to which art was subjected in the gradual separation of production from its philosophical base.9 The sense of artistic freedom catalyzed by the transformation and dematerialization of artistic language of the early 1970s was a short-lived moment before its aesthetic and economic recuperation. Artists sought, of course, to avoid this recuperation, and did so frequently through the manipulation of artistic identity and, therefore, often through collaborations, as they did in the Sydney activist groups. Collaborations were sometimes a deconstruction of the metropolitan master-narrative—that of the “death of art”—and sometimes a reconstitution of the avant-garde narrative within experimental, deliberately “marginal” adaptations to the changing ecology of art. But unless they moved outside the ecosystem of the art world completely (and many collaborations successfully did; though they are necessarily now-invisible figures), activist artists still clung to a self-definition that reified the apparently outmoded cultural category of art.
A link exists between the notion of sustainability—which is again gaining currency—and particular types of collaborative contract. The problem lies, again, in confusing collaboration with friendship. It should be noted that collectives are not the same as collaborations. All of the artists in The Third Hand worked together for long periods of time. It is highly unlikely that Christo and Jeanne-Claude, or Anne and Patrick Poirier, or Helen and Newton Harrison, or Gilbert & George, or a host of others, would choose to work outside their collaboration. Too much investment and too much mutual pleasure is the obvious reason. But other collaborations, like that of Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden and Ian Burn of Art & Language, were not based on sexual partnership at all. Indeed, in their case, the contractual relationship seemed to have been articulated fairly early and fairly clearly, so as to preempt litigation in the event of a breakdown in communication between the collaborators.
What may be seen to emerge after this highly wrought, carefully constructed and self-conscious period of collaboration in art? One direction, on the discursive front, has been a relatively formalist engagement with collaboration articulated in the many all-too-literal readings and critiques of relational and participatory aesthetics in recent years—a formalism largely based on a dual hope of reclaiming collaborative and collective formations after the collapse of European communism, and of reproducing in offline worlds the digital networkings hyped through the dot.com boom of the late 1990s.10 But there is another direction we can consider here, and one which a key figure from The Third Hand has also begun to navigate. That figure is Marina Abramovic, whose ambitious re-enactments of imaged events over recent years trigger a series of important questions about and toward contemporary collaborative formations.

2. The Second Self

In Seven Easy Pieces (2005), a seven-night series beginning on 9 November 2005, Abramovic re-performed six canonical performance works—Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure (1974), Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972), VALIE EXPORT’s Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), Gina Pane’s The Conditioning, first action of Self-Portrait(s) (1973), Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) and Abramovic’s own Lips of Thomas (1975) before staging a new work in the atrium of that most canonising of institutions, New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The series—and especially the works we want to focus on here, the six re-performances enacted before the presentation of her more restful new work on the seventh night—provides an intriguing rethinking of contemporary models of collaboration. It is also, perhaps, an unexpected catalyst for that rethinking—and one we intend to work through in the following paragraphs—because Abramovic’s re-performances by no means look like the collaborative acts discussed above. Instead, the tropes of isolation and separation consistently recurred throughout Seven Easy Pieces. For seven successive nights, seven hours a night, Abramovic performed alone on stage, or in the case of her version of Seedbed, presumably under the stage on which audience members sat or stood and listened to her moans and her detailed monologue about masturbation relayed via speakers through the Guggenheim atrium. Tape running across the floor marked out a no-go zone between work and viewer, performer and audience. Museum guards (as is the case with most other works of art in a museum) stringently policed that symbolic barrier, in some cases pre-emptively pulling away any viewers who looked as though they may try to intervene in Abramovic’s actions.
In a sense, the tape was superfluous, a tautology, because each of the works that Abramovic performed already hinged on aesthetic forms of distancing the viewer from the performer. For Body Pressure, Abramovic pressed herself against a pane of glass that, despite its transparency, literalised the barrier between herself and her audience, refusing to yield to the artist’s constant attempts to push against it or through it to her audience. In Seedbed, only Abramovic’s voice rang out through the Guggenheim; her body was hidden from view, prompting uncertainty or cynicism about whether she was even present under the stage upon which listeners were located, and whether they were just listening to a pre-recorded monologue. The machine gun that Abramovic held in her re-staging of VALIE EXPORT’s performance was arguably more panic-inducing—especially in post-9/11 New York—than the sight of the artist’s genitals laid bare by her crotchless “action pants”. The three other reperformances were similarly distancing. Abramovic’s remake of The Conditioning involved her lying on a bench of metallic bars above fifteen burning candles; spotlights transformed the stage into an altar and Abramovic into an object of reverence rather than a subject for engagement, her face directed up toward the atrium’s glass ceiling rather than trained toward her viewers. The honey and gold leaf mask she wore in the fifth reperformance, in mimicry of Beuys or as a form of method-acting Beuys’s persona, served as further shields between the artist and her audience. Finally, the often harrowing violence in Lips of Thomas —whether cutting a fivepointed star across the skin of her stomach, whipping her naked back until it was raw or lying on blocks of ice so that the cold shocks caused her body to shake uncontrollably—may have induced affective and sympathetic shudders in her viewers, but the actual wounds were indelibly and masochistically Abramovic’s own. Sympathy for someone else’s pain is only a very weak form of engagement, still less of collaboration. With Abramovic, it did not and could not bridge the large and recurrent gap separating the viewers from the artist and her reperformances.
Most importantly, though, a degree of isolation was already enforced by Abramovic’s use of the stage for Seven Easy Pieces. In the past, Abramovic (and her contemporaries) had largely rejected making theatrical performance art because theatre was understood to falsify performance, devolving it into pastiche and eviscerating what she calls performance’s “straight dialogue of energy.”11 This was not to say that she rejected theatricality outright: if the stage was segregationist and self-containing, even self-indulgent in its apotheosis of the performer, then that conjunction of distance and indulgence could be harnessed for potentially productive purposes. This was the reasoning underlying Abramovic’s performances on stage from 1992 onwards in Biography, a “greatest hits” collection in which Abramovic re-performed excerpts from her life and work beginning with her birth in Belgrade in 1946, through her collaborations with Ulay between 1975 and 1988, up to her most recent performances. Throughout Abramovic claimed that the staginess of Biography was a therapeutic salve after the demise of her professional and personal relationships with Ulay, one which allowed her “to stage my own life in order to create a distance from it.”12 In other words, Abramovic’s turn to the stage after years of rejecting it was highly strategic. In Biography, it conjoined distance and self-indulgence so as to give the impression that she had pastiched her past and transformed herself into an image of her own history; in Abramovic’s words, however, that staged turn had the other and perhaps equally important purpose of publicly releasing her grief for that past.
In Seven Easy Pieces, a similar and parallel process to Biography’s strategically staged distancing took place, but it was not for the purposes of grieving. Instead, Abramovic’s stated claims for the work fit snugly into the resurgent discourse of artistic re-enactments outlined earlier, for she says that her stated aim was to experience particular works from performance art’s history that had influenced her own practice but which she had not had the opportunity to see when they initially occurred. Three methodological steps underpinned this ostensibly self-indulgent intention, each of which was spelled out in her introductory essay—titled ‘Reenactment’—for the book accompanying Seven Easy Pieces. First, she aimed to see whether and “how a performance can be preserved” by “treat[ing] the instructions of the performance like a musical score—something that anyone who is properly trained can re-play”.13 Second, she set out to acquire the original artist’s permission to ‘re-play’ the performance, and to pay copyright fees to the artist or their estate for that purpose. And third, following the re-performance, Abramovic sought to “Exhibit the original material: photographs, video, relics” alongside similar documentation of her reperformance.14
What initially seemed like a decadent exercise instead serves—or so it appears—to work against performance art’s presumed ontology of uncontainable ephemerality, by preserving and properly documenting performance art for future audiences, artists and historians. Abramovic’s overt purpose was thus both constructive and conservative. It seemed to assimilate performance art into a capitalist economy evergreedy for auratic objects and visual records (the very economy that Abramovic’s long-standing champion, the art historian Peggy Phelan, had famously argued was always resisted by performance art’s ontological slipperiness).15 But in so doing, it also sought to affirm performance art’s relevance to, or centrality within, the contemporary art canon and curatorial practice, ensuring that a performance still had an afterlife provided it was re-performed under specific conditions of copyright and authorisation. And it was arguably for this reason that Abramovic’s distance from her audience, or from any form of audience involvement and interference in her work, was crucial: such involvement would have disrupted the didactic demonstration of what an effective and arguably ethical preservation of performance art should look like. Distance and decadence, in other words, combine in Seven Easy Pieces just as they do in Biography, but for very different reasons: for pedagogical rather than personal reasons, neither of which Abramovic believed should be interrupted by audience intervention.
The importance of this last point about ethics and pedagogy cannot be over-emphasised, and we will return to this. For present purposes, however, we need to unpack a significant problem in this line of thinking derived from Abramovic’s overt claims to re-enactment and preservation. For while Seven Easy Pieces may have seemed easily assimilable into established discourses of re-enactment, that easy assimilation is, we think, deceptive. Seven Easy Pieces was not a strict re-enactment of past performances, despite the title Abramovic gave her essay. There are a number of reasons for saying this. Each of the Guggenheim re-performances was seven hours long, a timeframe that often far exceeded the original works’ durations and which consequently resulted in Abramovic re-performing her re-performances like a live action version of the video loop. Nor was she able to copy the original works precisely. Repetition, as we know full well, always results in variation, in transformation, in originality and the unexpected becoming released through mimicry and recurrence. Gender distinction also played a crucial role, especially in Seedbed where Abramovic’s ad-libbing on clitoral and vaginal stimulation was markedly different from the all-too-seminal account of masturbation provided by Acconci. Most importantly, though, the original performances could not be precisely copied, were not strictly re-enactments, because for the most part only very basic facts (rather than myth or hearsay anecdotes) exist about what the initial works entailed. What little documentation has survived the decades since the works were first performed is limited to schematic instructions for performance (as with Body Pressure, a work that Nauman did not perform himself), short pirate films ( Seedbed ), blurry television footage ( How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare ) or grainy black and white photographs whose snapshot fuzziness distorts the performances’ durational content. Even Abramovic’s own works had not been exempt from this deterioration.
Despite Abramovic’s extensive research into the initial performances—speaking with the artists or their next of kin, trawling through museum and personal archives as well as secondary literature—it is these more widely available images and rudimentary instructions that ultimately framed the re-performances for artist and audience alike. We can even argue that what Abramovic re-performed was not so much the initial works themselves but their limited documentation. If this was implicit in Abramovic’s desire to treat the initial performances as ‘musical scores’, as notational and schematic sources of information to be replayed, it was frequently explicit in Abramovic’s reiteration of poses and gestures derived solely from the image archives with which students of many undergraduate art survey courses have become familiar in recent decades. And in mimicry of the photographs’ immutable longevity, these were poses that Abramovic often held for extended, exaggerated durations: Beuys in the Galerie Schmela, his left arm cradling the hare and his right hand raised in instruction, a pose that Abramovic maintained for minutes at a time throughout the fifth night of the series; Pane lit from above, gripping the side of the (no doubt extremely hot) metal bench on which she lay, her hair spilling out over the bar behind her head and dangerously close to the first row of candles; and most notably, VALIE EXPORT sitting with her right foot set firmly on the ground, her left pressed against another chair, her arms bearing a shotgun, her action pants baring her vagina. It was this gesture, photographed after EXPORT’s ten minute performance in a Munich cinema, that Abramovic re-performed and not EXPORT’s movement through the audience, breaching the cinematic screen’s mediation of the everyday with the display of what she called the ‘reality’ of her exposed vagina.16 And it was this re-performance that provided the key to understanding Seven Easy Pieces’ actual premise. Namely, it was possible to preserve not the initial performances themselves, but the documentation and images that had already sought to preserve them. Not a re -enactment, then, but an enactment of the limitations faced in preserving performances; and not a capitulation to those limitations either, but a testing or questioning of whether those limitations of performance, and particularly the supersession of the performance art event by rudimentary imagery, could be traced out and potentially exceeded by embodying those limitations.
Which is to say that Seven Easy Pieces revealed the need to present more nuanced reflections on the restaging of past events or art works than existing discourses of reenactment allow. Rather than perceive “re-enactments” as inherently able to bypass an event’s spatio-temporal and perhaps ontological limitations, Abramovic’s enactments of those very limits returned them to centre-stage. The reason for this, we believe, was not only to re-evaluate discourses of “re-enactment”— of what it might mean to re-enact the past, and to enact the means by which we have registered that past—but to do this through a parallel re-evaluation of notions of collaboration. And yet, if collaboration is central to this re-evaluation of contemporary “re-enactments”, we still need to ask ourselves a question we posed earlier: how was Seven Easy Pieces an example of collaboration? For if Abramovic performed alone on stage, and in fact resolutely withdrew herself from engagement with her audience, then how exactly was collaboration relevant to her performance series at the Guggenheim?
The answer is complex, because what Abramovic asserted was an expansive field of collaboration, a collaboration with history and across time rather than just in real time, and which took the form of a collaboration with the artists who had created the works comprising Seven Easy Pieces . This might sound odd, and in part it was: both Joseph Beuys and Gina Pane had died more than a decade earlier, while Abramovic’s staging of Lips of Thomas entailed collaborating with herself, thirty years later. But it was no more odd than Abramovic’s long-held interest in the silent exchange of energies with those around her—Ulay in their meditative collaborations of the late-1970s and early-1980s, her audiences in House ith the Ocean View (2002)—for what Abramovic sought from Seven Easy Pieces , she claimed, was “to find out what I could get from sharing their [the initial artists’] energies”.17 Sharing the artists’ energies was an attempt to collaborate virtually with those artists, and this is crucial virtuality constitutes a ‘cinema’ that we are calling an Atlas Effect. She worked through and beyond the physical limits and conventional delimitation of collaboration toward something else. And this “something else” was not a New Age quasi-séance, despite what we might initially think about collaborating with the past and with the dead. Abramovic’s purpose was more pragmatic. On the one hand, it had to do with research and libidinal investment in research, for Abramovic’s collaborative sharing of energies provides her with a more profound and experiential understanding of the performance art canon of which she was a part. It was, in other words, an attempt at self-location within the canon and a self-directed, pedagogical research into its histories. The audience here is clearly irrelevant to Abramovic’s own—again, necessarily indulgent—self-education.
On the other hand, though, Abramovic’s purpose was not only to extend philosophical conceptions of collaboration. It was also experimental and practical: to work and collaborate through images, to test and expose the limitations of images so as to potentially exceed the archive through virtual forms of collaboration. This is, to reiterate, more than just a spectacular example of “re-enactment”. Collaboration through imagery, and more precisely through the embodiment of archival imagery, was a means to reanimate past artists as much as past art within a hermetic energy exchange between Abramovic and Nauman, Abramovic and Beuys and so on. This is perhaps the central reason why distance and withdrawal from audience engagement were crucial to Seven Easy Pieces ; for what Abramovic sought almost entirely was a
dialogue with the past, a closed-circuit loop or even a collapse between past and present, Abramovic and her artistic predecessor or doppelganger. This process of staged withdrawal and self-absorption—of even potentially vampiric spectralization—was a familiar trope from her collaborations with Ulay and their construction of another “self”, a “Third Hand” between the artists and their fusion into a singular artist-figure. It also emerged in Abramovic and Ulay’s cross-cultural collaborations with the Tibetan Lama Ngawang Soepa Lueyar and an Aboriginal elder from Australia’s Central Desert, the famous Papunya Tula painter, Charlie Tararu Tjungurrayi, in a 1983 performance called Conjunction, part of their series Nightsea Crossing which Green has previously analysed.18 Collaborations based on fusion and withdrawal point to an alternative model of artistic collaboration, where the parts of the relationship merge to form ‘something else’ which is more than the sum of its parts and in which the parts are not removable or replaceable because they do not combine as much as transform. The result is a distinct and distinctive entity—a Second Self as much as a Third Hand—in which the obliteration of personal, ethnic identity is firstly a way of enacting an ethical connection or bond between souls and, secondly, a means of invoking the possible promise of a human community based on virtues such as a compassionate, panoramic vision. There is no reason why such a synthesis might not be critiqued or interpreted through the lenses of Eeleuzian, psychoanalytic or neo-Marxist activisms, but to map collaboration through these systems is perhaps not as productive as taking up Mieke Bal’s contention that “the subject’s agency… consists not of inventing but of intervening, of a “supplementation” that does not replace the image but adds to it.”19 For it was precisely this process of supplementing that underpinned Abramovic’s collaborations with Ulay and others in the decades before Seven Easy Pieces and which also played out in the Guggenheim: not a combination by collaboration so much as a supplanting or obliteration of the artist by the Second Self that emerged in her collaboration with other artists through archival images and indeed with images of herself.
The closed-circuit collaborations between past and present artists in Seven Easy Pieces may have necessitated Abramovic’s withdrawal from the Guggenheim audiences, but that does not mean that withdrawal is the same as illegibility. Her virtual and self-obliterating collaborations, if we can call them that, were still clearly recognisable for viewers, as when critic Sandra Umathum sensed “the impression that while [Abramovic] is here with us, she is also simultaneously in a different place and time.”20 She had, as Johanna Burton also perceptively noted, transformed herself into an image.21 Or, more precisely, into a replication of the images through which audiences were familiar with the historical performances, and which was accentuated by Abramovic’s appearances on the Guggenheim stage—as separate from the viewer, and as an entity strictly to be observed as an image (or, in the case of Seedbed, through the withdrawal of the performer’s body that left her actions to the viewer’s imagination). Self-representation as image did not quite give presence or presentness to Abramovic or the artists whose past energies she claimed to share, but instead indexed a lack of presence, a spectralisation, a supplanting of the artists through the
image of the collaboration being staged. Abramovic’s new Second Self took on a distinct form: a virtual formation that both was and was not physical at the same time, that appeared to be in two places and times at once, and in which gestures from the historical archive migrated between one artist and another, one medium and another, and one time to another: a virtual Atlas.
We must now consider to what ends Abramovic sought this virtual self-obliteration in Seven Easy Pieces. What did she hope to achieve by means of collaboration through time, rather than just re-enactments per se ? There are two paths that we wish to trace briefly: the first relates to archives and history; the second is a more pressingly contemporary concern of how to engage with archives and with other people’s imagery. Both are crucial to Seven Easy Pieces and locate the series within a broader field of contemporary inquiry.

3. Primary Responsibility

To understand Abramovic’s peculiar absence as an identity that might be mapped, like a psychoanalytic subject, we must turn to iconologist Aby Warburg’s unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas (1927–1929). This was a photographic atlas of visual art, in which Warburg effectively saw the artist as the hostage of cultural memory and a supplementary presence in the work of art. The_ Mnemosyne Atlas_ was a quasi-artistic display of art historical imagery, organising motifs of frozen human gestures into sixty or more panels consisting of photographs of Old Master etchings, sculptures and paintings but also of contemporary images from newspapers and the press. It was not, as many iconographers mistakenly assume, a history of the transmission of artistic and stylistic influence. Warburg was attempting to show something specific but ineffable about the survival, sublimation and desublimation of images in European art history, and how images migrate from one context and history to another, from one medium to another. This was not ncessarily a conscious artistic migration in the sense of asserting influence, but a migration and recurrence that often occurs despite artistic intent, that is embedded in cultural memory and obliquely erupts out of conscious constructs by means of appearances and unintentional gestures that are watermarked by their historical predecessors.
The Atlas is a key to understanding contemporary art as a trans-disciplinary field. Its effects can be seen in many contemporary video works, and especially in Doug Aitken’s protagonists, such as Giggy Johnson in electric earth (1999) whose staccato movements across the screen and through the metropolitan decay of Los Angeles are gestures animated by cinematic and art historical spectres: Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), French actress Emmanuelle Riva’s amnesic wanderer in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), the entropic spirals of Robert Smithson’s Land Art of the 1960s.22 The Atlas risks depoliticization and dehistoricization, though failure is not guaranteed, despite the pitfalls of Documenta 12’s foray into the Warburgian ‘migration of form’ and Warburg’s own obliviousness to legal and ethical contexts outside European scholarship’s own, late nineteenth century research protocols.23 The Atlas has also inflected a particular trajectory of Eastern European art since at least the collapse of Communism: of artists returning to nonconformist art histories that amnesic neoliberal capitalism has disowned and neglected, but which artists have reanimated since 1989 as a way to engage critically with art’s normative internationalisation after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This is not, despite many claims from critics outside post-communist Europe, a form of nostalgia for communism, but rather an aesthetic testing: of what can be translated from nonconformist pasts into very different contemporary contexts, of how to resist or at least dissent from the social hierarchies and cultural amnesias of contemporaneity, of how to remember
through enactments of and restagings from the image archive.
The Slovenian art group Neue Slowenische Kunst (or NSK) gave a proper name to this ghost-writing or spectral collaboration between the present and the past. That proper name was “retro principle”, a reanimation of the nonconformist past—such as collectivity under communism, or the semi-private exhibitions and discussions conducted as Apartment Art in the 1970s and 1980s—within the highly conformist 1990s.24 For it was precisely a collaboration between histories that NSK expressly figured through its very own collaborative structure: between numerous artists arrayed across multiple disciplines (academia, rock music, art, design). NSK perceived the resonance of cultural memory across time and space by supplanting individual identity through various forms of collaboration—between different people, as well as between different cultural contexts. This kind of “retro principle” similarly fuelled the work of Romanian art group subREAL—a collaboration between artists Calin Dan and Iosif Kiraly—and particularly their re-use of the photographic archive of a long-standing Romanian art journal called Arta. In a series of installations in the late 1990s, subREAL transposed images taken from Arta’s archive—taken by sub-REAL after the journal’s demise in 1994, and amid government threats to destroy that archive of trans-European art history and Romanian political events such as the December 1989 revolutions—and attached them loosely to the wall. With time, heat and humidity, the photographs scattered to the ground; the installation eroded immanently, entropically, much like people’s memories of pre-1989 history. Past and present, memory and enactment, merged together and effaced each other in much the same way that the collaborative form of subREAL had entailed a kind of effacement of and between the individual identities of Dan and Kiraly.
We can also think of the Centre for Art Analysis staged by another Romanian-based artist, Lia Perjovschi, in which Perjovschi’s extensive archive of exhibition ephemera, catalogues, slides and JPEGs—material dating back to the nonconformist 1980s in Romanian cities like Oradea and Cluj—are re-used and redistributed through seminars held outside the institutional bounds of Romania’s contemporary art museums and institutions, and in her Bucharest apartment. The archive serves as the basis for the seminars’ discussions of differences and correspondences between localised art histories across the world; the seminars themselves are pedagogical exercises transposing and reanimating those very similar discussions that took place in Romanian Apartment Art throughout the communist era. It is this legacy—of nonconformism, of Apartment Art, of neglected art histories located in image archives, and their transference to new mediums such as contemporary discussions forums and professional networks—that highlights the Atlas Effect in Perjovschi’s work. An effect in which once frozen gestures from art’s history become thawed and remobilised in new contexts and new histories through shared sessions of dialogue between the Centre’s par participants. All this within a context where these foundational gestures of Ceausescuera Romania are increasingly forgotten with the passage of time.
And it is an Atlas Effect that equally awaits in Abramovic’s turn to the image archive, her own enactment and staging of images from that archive and her replication of frozen human gestures across art’s mediums and histories. Her reanimation of those gestures was, to repeat, not a form of preservation as many of her critics claimed.25 Rather, processes of attempted duplication are transformative and entropic, not replicatory.26 Abramovic herself was aware of this, despite her claims that Seven Easy Pieces sought to preserve past performance art through re-enactment. Something more important than just preservation was at stake, because what “I also am trying to say,” Abramovic asserted in an important interview with critic Thomas McEvilley, was “something about history.”27 For if collaborating with past artists and their art historical gestures results in the emergence of a Second Self between Abramovic and other artists (and her own past self), that collaboration also seeks to remobilise the cultural interventions stored within those gestures. Indeed, the obliteration of specific artistic identity through that collaboration was the means by which past cultural interventions could be recharged, reconsidered and released in the present. This, too, was noted by Abramovic. She could argue of the gestures and energies shared through her collaborative Atlas Effect, that they may be put to “a different purpose [but] it puts a new meaning (which is actually the old meaning) back into this gesture.”28 Her virtual collaboration with VALIE EXPORT, for example, traced a form of panic inducement between 1969 and 2005—not necessarily through the sight of genitalia, but through the presence of a potentially loaded gun at the height of “War on Terror” rhetoric. The same can be argued of her restaging of Lips of Thomas. Its original critiques of the introjection of Communist state symbolism as a political theism—scarring the skin with the five-pointed star of Communism, ingesting Yugoslav wine, self-flagellation followed by lying in a cruciform shape across blocks of ice—were, by 2005, no longer directed to the long-defunct politics of Yugoslavia, but to a more contemporary political hysteria, a similarly libidinal and injurious politics with its own brazen religiosity.
That this transference of cultural memory could occur despite the significant alterations Abramovic made to the original performance scores (from adding and removing parts, to playing and replaying the performances long beyond their initial duration) suggests that the works’ forms, their signifiers, were secondary to Abramovic’s greater concern for reanimating the works’ meanings despite those changes. Indeed, transferring the performances’ signifieds from one context to another—an example of the retro principle at work through an Atlas Effect—was Abramovic’s point; the works’ signifiers—much like artistic identity in her ghost-written collaborations—were largely supplementary. Abramovic, like Warburg, like subREAL or Lia Perjovschi and a host of other artists grappling with images, history and performance today, shows through this process that the history of artistic styles is the result of sedimentary pressures of cultural memory rather than of innovations achieved through self-expression or invention. The real importance of artistic collaboration lies not in a singular significance, but in the intersection of redefinitions of the artist with redefinitions of art prompted both by productivist changes in form from studio to post-studio work and by redefinitions of art. For the task of understanding these shifts along the lines of familiar definitions of textuality, intention, period and chronological movement, and their supplanting or erosion will not suffice. As time has gone on, the desire to see political action in art through collective work has increasingly replaced the desire to see if collaborative action could facilitate, through the supplanting of the artist, a new zone between art, writing and history, though we would argue that this zone is more fascinating than simplistic and formalistic connections between art and politics.
But this is not to say that artistic and formal signifiers, including those in Abramovic’s reworkings, are entirely irrelevant or disposable. Abramovic, we must remember, still sought permission from the works’ creators for their re-performance, even though those re-performances were not strict re-enactments of the works on a formal level, but a reanimation of their conceptual and cultural memories. If the signified frequently overrules the signifier in significant contemporary art practice, and particularly recent spectral collaborations, that is not the case for the art markets that have emerged after the new rules of the game introduced by appropriation art. The increasing protection of images afforded by restrictive revisions to the idea of “fair use”—a fair use that artists have assumed for centuries—now has weighty financial and even criminological ramifications. Restaging the archive and collaborating through the atlas is both an emergent aesthetic trend and a potential train wreck, a collision between the freedoms assumed by normative artistic practice and the legal constraints regarding image gathering and re-use. This is the double-bind of the Atlas Effect. A double-bind that must be considered as central to a more nuanced reflection on contemporary forms of collaboration which are currently all too easily understood under the umbrella term ‘relational aesthetics’ and its related critiques. Artistic and cinematic methods of image recollection through reproduction and revivification that have been the norm for generations are now imperilled as a result of increasingly protective legal regimes that regulate both public and artistic spaces with the increasing protection of images afforded by revisions to the idea of ‘fair use’. Much of the greatest art produced from the 1950s onwards proceeded from the presumption that cultural appropriation was ethical and imperative, from Andy Warhol’s deadpan, silk-screened Campbell’s Soup Cans through Robert Rauschenberg’s scruffy, elegiac collections of debris, stuffed eagles, discarded car tires and newspaper clippings in his great Combine series (1953–1964), to the postmodern reproduction of commercial culture, shorn of any sign of self-expression, that was so prolific in the US and Europe in the 1980s. These famous works hanging in major art museums around the world could not be easily defended under current copyright and moral rights laws. (Nor could Warburg’s collection of Hopi artefacts and rituals.) So contemporary artists who use the atlas form, creating collections and samples of gathered images, whether a dizzying barrage of music played in different film clips in the case of Christian Marclay’s sampled Video Quartet (2002) or the similar appropriation of cinematic imagery in Candice Breitz’s video installations, do so at considerable potential risk given the legal and moral constraints on image circulation and personal privacy.29
Supplanting the self by embodying the archive may be one possible means of countering the increased regulation of image use today. This is the proposition put forth by Abramovic. Her authorised re-enactments, as Atlas Effect, recognise the legal restrictions of using others’ images and engage directly with those restrictions so as to exceed their limitations. Abramovic is not alone in trying to breach this “death by copyright”, as Calin Dan presciently described the contemporary cultural scenario. Experiencing first-hand the image-scapes that multinational mass media present and delimit for us on a daily basis—and exceeding those images’ limitations of myth-making and hyper-regulation—is pivotal to art right now, which is why artists deploy themselves to Antarctica, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, or reanimate a past delimited by its documentation. These two forms of re-enacting the image archive, of creating experiential Atlas Effects, cannot be separated from each other. A question remains open: did Abramovic go too far, embracing the legally conservative appeal to image regulation and the diminution of fair use so as to authorise her spectral collaborations? Her solution may be restricted. But the question it raises is crucial to the rethinking of how and in what direction contemporary art practice, both after appropriation and invested in collaboration, may now travel. For it highlights the many primary responsibilities—historical, political, financial—inherent in Atlas Effects. Artists are consistently hostages of cultural memory which resonates from the past and is increasingly regulated today.

NOTES
1. Green, C. 2001. The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2. Lütticken, S. 2005. ‘An Arena in Which to Reenact’ in Sven Lütticken (ed.), Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art. Rotterdam: Witte de With Publishers, pp. 17–60.
3. We can also think here of Jens Hoffman’s invitation of eleven artists to re-stage particular events from performance art’s history in his 2001 Berlin exhibition A Little Bit of History Repeated. Many of the ideas raised by that exhibition will themselves be repeated in the second section of this article, but by an artist not selected by Hoffmann for his important exhibition.
4. See Foster, H. 2004. ‘An Archival Impulse’ in October 110 (Fall), pp. 3–22; Joselit, D. 2005. ‘Navigating the New Territory: Art, Avatars, and the Contemporary Mediascape’ in A_rtforum_ Vol. 43, No. 10 (Summer), pp. 276–279; see also Bishop, C. 2006. ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’ in Artforum 46:6 (February), pp. 178–183.
5. Manovich, L. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
6. For an extension of the terms “contemporary” and “contemporaneity” as period style, see Smith, T. 2006.
‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity’ in Critical Inquiry 32, pp. 681–707. Recent research has linked laws restricting images—both in industrialised countries and in the Islamic world—with a renewal of the iconoclastic tradition. Smith’s recent book about 9/11 and high-rise buildings explores the boosterism and destruction of built environments on the basis that they are images. See Smith, T. 2006. The Architecture of Aftermath. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
7. As Charles Harrison wrote, “The author is the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.” Harrison, C. 1991. ‘The Conditions of Problems’ in Essays on Art & Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 82–128, quotation from p. 92. The Third Hand shows that precise tropes of collaborative identity were in each case self-consciously, deliberately and gradually chosen from a range of available and widely known options by artist collaborations during the 1970s.
8. On the 1970s debate about ‘dialogue’ in conceptual art, see Green 2001, pp. 49–56.
9. Germano Celant wrote: “The creative events of 1967–68 thus marked a historical watershed: the dogma of neutrality was rooted out, since there is no way of separating the object from the creative act, from the awareness of and participation in its reasons and technical input. Art is no longer a virginal nature.” See Celant, G. 1985. ‘The European Concert and the Festival of the Arts’ in The European Iceberg: Creativity in Germany and Italy Today. Exhibition catalogue. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, pp. 13–22, quotation from p. 19. For discussions of this erosion also see Harrison, C. 1991. ‘Conceptual Art and the Suppression of the Beholder’ in Essays on Art & Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 29–62, 19;
Stojanovic, J. 1993. ‘Conceptual Art Then and Since’ (interview with Terry Smith), Agenda (Melbourne), nos. 26/27 (January–February), pp. 19–34.
10. Net activist Geert Lovink has described this intersection (and decline) of collaborative art and digitally-networked forms in a thoroughly convincing way. See Lovink, G. 2003. My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
11. Abramovic as cited in Moulton, A. 2005. ‘Marina Abramovic – Re:Performance’, Flash Art (October), p. 87.
12. Ibid.
13. Abramovic, M. 2007. ‘Reenactment’ in Seven Easy Pieces. Milan: Charta, p. 10.
14. Ibid, p. 11.
15. Phelan, P. 1993. ‘The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction’ in _Unmarked: The
Politics of Performance._ London and New York: Routledge, pp. 146–166. We should remember here, though,
Sven Lütticken’s problematising of this presumed ontology in relation to Tino Sehgal’s performances in
Lütticken, S. 2005. ‘Progressive Striptease: Performance Ideology Past and Present’ in Secret Publicity. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, pp. 161–180.
16. VALIE EXPORT in conversation with Nancy Spector, October 2005, cited in Abramovic 2007, p. 118.
17. Abramovic as cited in Op. cit. Moulton, 2005, p. 89.
18. Green, C. 2004. ‘Group Soul: Who Owns the ArtistFusion?’ in Third Text 18:6 (November), pp. 595–608.
19. Bal, M. 1999. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 13.
20. Umathum, S. 2007. ‘Beyond Documentation, or the Adventure of Shared Time and Place. Experiences of a
Viewer’ in Abramovic, 2007 p. 54.
21. Burton, J. 2006. ‘Repeat Performance’ in Artforum, 46:5 (January), p. 56.
22. See Green, C. 2007. ‘Broken Screen’ in Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Arts + Culture 36:1 (March), pp. 52–55.
23. Farago, C. 2006. ‘Re(f)using Art: Aby Warburg and the Ethics of Scholarship’ in Claire Farago and Donna Pierce (eds.) Transforming Images: New Mexican Santos In Between Worlds. University Park, Pennsylvania: PennState University Press, pp. 259–273, 308–313.
24. Arns, I (ed), 2003. Irwin: Retroprincip: 1983–2003. Frankfurt: Revolver.
25. See, for example, Princenthal, N. 2006. ‘Back for One Night Only!’ in Art in America 94:2 (February), p. 90.
26. Silverman, K. 1996. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, p. 189.
27. Abramovic cited in McEvilley, T. 1998. ‘Stages of Energy: Performance Art Ground Zero?’ in Abramovic, M. et al. Marina Abramovic; Artist Body. Milan: Charta, p. 22.
28. Abramovic as cited in Moulton, A. 2005. ‘Marina Abramovic – Re:Performance’ in Flash Art (October),
p. 89.
29. For a sample of artists’ experiences of privacy laws see McConagle, J. 2005. ‘Candid Camera? Photographing the Other in Luc Delahaye’s L’Autre’ in Modern & Contemporary France 13:2 (May), pp. 161–175.
30. See Dan Calin’s ‘subREAL – Death by Copyright’, a posting to nettime.org on 26 May 2000. See
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0005/msg00224.html. Last accessed 9 December 2007.