London Diary: Art in all its forms

For the first time in 255 years, London’s Royal Academy is featuring a solo exhibition by a female artist in its main galleries. The Marina Abramović retrospective has generated much speculation and chatter. After all, the famed performance artist once laid out seventy-two objects, including a gun and a scalpel, and invited members of an audience in Naples to use them on her ‘as desired.’

Such a thing can hardly be restaged today. The Royal Academy instead features footage of the original performance, as well as the objects that Abramović selected.

And yet, it remains bewildering to behold. Mustachioed men adorning a young Marina with roses, before pricking and slashing her bare skin. Around me, people snapped photos on their smart phones. What would happen today? Would we go so far? Probably not. Not when we expect everything to be recorded and live forever. But would we want to? Does Abramović’s piece still evoke an elemental instinct for violence and degradation?

In some ways, we’re more attuned than ever to the language of performance art. Mindfulness apps and wellness retreats often play with the idea of endurance turning the body into a portal. Abramović simply pushes this to the extreme. In Balkan Baroque, she repeatedly scrubs at a pile of bones. In Luminosity, she sits still and suspended on a wall-mounted bicycle saddle.

Her work involving viewer participation has, I believe, a special appeal. Even as social media may make us wary of behaving as the Naples audience did, it also has us thinking of ourselves as art. We’re both spectator and spectacle now. In Imponderabilia, the London retrospective’s most talked about work, a naked couple stands in a doorway while the audience passes between them. I watched a man get told off for photographing his wife squeezing through. While he promised to delete the photo, I suspected he’d still post it on Instagram later. That moment his wife made the couple’s naked flesh quiver. That moment she changed the composition and became art herself.

Although our digital age makes it cynically tempting to view such things as narcissism, I wonder if Abramović’s original ideas about interconnection also hold true. After all, we do impact and change one another. Most of us were raised to believe that art hangs on walls. We’d peer at Renaissance paintings, setting alarms off if we got too close. And while the pictures may have changed us, we never changed the pictures. Gloomy men would still stare gloomily down, even if we’d drawn strength and stoicism from their demeanour. There’s nothing very democratic or empowering about that. Indeed, it’s almost dishonest.

I suspect that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Perhaps I’d find it if, like Abramović in The Current, I lay on a metal bed as a storm rumbled above me. Or perhaps I’d just have a picture of myself doing it.

• Opinion