Jay-Z and Marina Abramovic

A few hours after our class last Wednesday covering Marina Abramovic, I started seeing news of a piece of performance art done by Jay-Z in a similar vein.  At the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, Jay performed his song "Picasso Baby" to a line of people, one person at a time, for 6 hours straight . Below is a link to a review by Jerry Saltz, senior art critic for New York magazine, and 3 time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. At this point I'm assuming I don't need to list Jay-Z's superhuman accomplishments, but I will say for all of them, I am most taken with him as a storyteller. Not a skill-set that would necessarily translate well in a performance art scenario; while he is a seasoned performer, most of what we have seen in class of performance art does little to bring the audience in- the goal of storytelling. I find myself outside performance art, confounded and searching for it's intent, whereas I am magnetically drawn in by Jay-Z,  this being his focused intention. I was braced for a gruesome takedown, Saltz notes some recent underwhelming celebrity marathon piece's by Tilda Swinton and Milla Jovovich at the beginning, and describes the set-up as being "exactly like" Abramovic's, an unfair description I think. But, Saltz says "…there was no doubt in my mind that he was controlling me, taking my energy and giving it back, manipulating the space around us. I felt like my internal ship was on fire and useless. I loved it.".  Hours into the performance, Marina Abramovic showed up ( I have linked to a Vine snippet of that ), and at this point Saltz interprets their encounter "...as if she was saying 'I give you permission to steal my act; now I am taking it back.'". I thought a lot about this, there a couple aspects here I am still circling. First, we covered Abramovic's "Seven Easy Piece's", a few of which were re-performance's. My recollection is that she did invite the originator of one of them to participate in some way, an invitation which was declined. While many of these concept's rest on very basic premise's, I have to wonder if the "marathon" aspect isn't too basic to claim ownership of. The main thrust of Jay-Z's performance is entirely different to me. Second, the result- nearly everything I saw about the Jay-Z event framed it as Jay AND Abramovic. Her presence did seem to alter the performance considerably, almost to the same degree as her ex's appearance at "The Artist is Present" did. Are we to take each these appearance's as being happenstance? In both instance's they strengthen the narrative and benefit the artist, in ways a consummate performer would engineer. Either way, I salute Jay-Z and Abramovic, they are both beyond my understanding. 

The review.

The Vine.