1,200 Frames in Red and Blue

Harry Laventure

Courtesy of the artist and Saatchi Yates

Marina Abramović Reimagines Video Portrait Gallery in New Saatchi Yates Exhibition

‘If you put me in one box I will jump into another’. The press conference responds with a chorus of chortles, but the quote is more artistically apposite than its jocular tone’s suggestion. Abramović leans back into the contours of her pinstripe suit, hands resting in a well-manicured scholar’s cradle, and continues to jest and jive a path of supreme honesty as the questions skim in for her new exhibition. Our occasion’s key centre is one of warmth, gratitude, but above all tentative excitement. A presence like Marina’s is that of softly spoken gravitas, but the art itself dances to jazz.

Repackaging the films Red Period and Blue Period from Video Portrait Gallery (1975-2002), Abramović now presents 1,200 individual, unique slides taken therefrom, to be sold individually. The original videos portray Abramović in uncompromising close-up. In Red, shades of crimson monochrome engineer a suggestive dynamic, conjuring the visual vocabulary of prostitution and carnality whilst paying homage to Matisse’s own period of the same name. Abramović’s action moves to complement this, teasing with the beckoning finger before massaging her face, tugging her hair, and biting her little finger. If this waltzes with the line between seduction and uncomfortable vulnerability, Blue closes the jig in disconcerting one-sidedness. Under her titular colour filter, Abramović is accompanied by a pop song repeated to the point of mockery. Finger biting turns to nail biting, and the saliva cloaks her hands like cobwebs. As Saatchi Yates puts it, ‘her gaze flickers between apathetic detachment and raw suffering’. These meditations on transcendence, sexual power dynamics, and helplessness to the voyeur have now been emulsified into two groups of slides, as harmonious as they are polar.

Arriving with uncharacteristic earliness, vaccinated against fatigue by a double espresso, I had the privilege of spending fifteen minutes alone with the works in their totality. The strip of Red frames align to run directly above the Blue below, meandering as if a diptych film reel along the walls. In Saatchi Yates’ otherwise vacant space, the work forms a sort of binary horizon. Magnified as they have been, each frame delivers a frozen cross-section of emotion and places every nuanced glint of the eye and turn of the lip as services to the larger dissection. The photography spills out of each frame into the dynamism of the next, whilst confronting you with stills that exist as momentary monuments in their own right. After all, the more macro considerations are curious when noting that the slides themselves are to be sold individually. Even at 9.15am on a Wednesday morning, the reactions thereto are forcefully visceral.

Having been shuffled into the conference room, we were graced with remarks from the master herself. Again, for someone steeped in the popular mystery of profound performance art, I must emphasise her sense of humour. To Abramović, this work is ‘the new world on the walls – it’s 2025, people, come on’. Of marked labour was the point that this new sense of direction came from ‘the youth’ of Saatchi Yates, in all their ‘tremendous energy’. Her musings on pretences for the original films yielded anecdotes of her breakup with Ulay, now Instagram famous from their shared melancholic stare some 22 years later during The Artist is Present. The pair had been a sublime double act from their meeting in 1976, performing collaboratively until their separation in the late eighties. Culminating in a walk across the Great Wall of China, Abramović and Ulay met in the middle to say their last goodbye. Understandably for a relationship of this emotional intensity, both were beyond devastation. The dichotomy of red and blue bisected a vast spectrum of emotions that Abramović continually felt in the aftermath. ‘Fat, ugly, and disgusting – but also desperately wanting to be seductive as a part of that’ is precisely how she described it. The honesty of this is spot-lit in every single one of the frames on display at present. The emotions are hers to express and ours to react to as we please.

Given the retrospective theme of both the exhibition and conversation, it is perhaps little wonder that Abramović was asked whether she feels any bitterness, looking back on her personal history, critical reception, and popularity since the seventies. With immense comedic timing, the reply was succinct: ‘I don’t care’. She later described such manifestations of reflective artistic acrimony as ‘overrated creative emotions’. Moreover, it has everything to do with her present state of joy. In May 2023 she underwent minor knee surgery, triggering a pulmonary embolism which put her in intensive care for six weeks, including time in a coma. Since then, ‘every day has been a blessing’.

Indeed, Abramović is in her self-declared ‘Pink Period’ now, and the joy translates to the mode of sales. Each and every one of the 1,200 frames from the collection is on sale for £1,500, in the hope that as many people as possible – especially the younger buyers – can ‘have a piece of her’. That third-person pervades Abramović’s approach to this art, whether by temporal or personal distance. ‘She looks beautiful in a way that is not expected’, to coin the artist’s own words. This layer of abstraction is a symptom of her delight in health, in many ways. The trauma that fuelled the art’s conception, whether vermillion or Persian blue, is perhaps more part of the work’s own time capsule than Abramović’s biography now. From one box to another.

After the conference, I was privileged enough (after some severely intentional loitering) to ‘sit and drink English tea’ with her. As she overflowed with pride about her new project, Balkan Erotic Epic – A Triptych, I was rapt with the force in Marina’s orbit, aged 78. Taking my leave under the aegis of that delicate gravity, I did my final perambulations of the gallery, and trundled out onto Bury Street. Somewhat fortuitously, a police car rattled by, lights flashing.

Marina Abramović is at Saatchi Yates until the 31st of October. https://saatchiyates.com/exhibitions