A Dutch court has ordered Marina Abramović to pay her former partner Ulay over â‚¬250,000 arising from the sales of collaborative works and a re-enactment of one of their works for Adidas.  “I won the case on the most crucial points,” Ulay says. “The relief was like shedding my skin, physical and mental.  My cancer ordeal was aggressively threatening my life and the massive legal battle with Abramović was threatening my existence. To my opinion, the court verdict was fair and just to the truth.” (more…)

An article in The Guardian explores the recent lawsuit filed against Marina Abramovic by her former partner and collaborator Ulay, who claims she has not paid him for the proceeds of their collaborative work over the past several decades, nor has she credited him in writing for their shared pieces.  “The points I’m asking of her are: every six months, a statement on sales and my royalties. And I’m asking for absolute proper mentioning of my name,” he says. “She has deliberately misinterpreted things, or left my name out.” (more…)

Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present, MoMA. Installation view with Portrait with Flowers, 2009. All photos by Ipek Irgit for Art Observed unless otherwise noted.

Marina Abramović is notorious for the centrality of her own body within her artwork. True, Abramović’s career can be read as a sort of bewildering physical endurance test, yet this would seemingly belie, a more important relationship than the artist to her own body, but the relationship between the artist, artwork and audience. In the case of her newest performance, The Artist is Present, part of the retrospective of the same name at MoMA, the artist is very much present, but most significantly the audience is present also.  In an interview on the MoMA website Abramović discusses her belief in the essential role the audience plays in performance art, if not all art work, “The work is done for the audience, without the audience the work doesn’t exist, it doesn’t make any meaning.”

Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present, 2010

More text and images after the jump…

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