Week 12 - Artist - Abramovic-Althamer

Marina Abramovic is a conceptual and performance artist from Serbia and a philanthropist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work examines body art, endurance art, and feminist art, as well as the performer-audience interaction, the body's boundaries, and the mind's possibilities. Abramovi claims to herself as the "grandmother of performance art" because she has been working for over four decades. By including onlookers and focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical boundaries of the body," she pioneered a new concept of identity. 

Abramovi used aspects of ritual and gesture in her first performance in Edinburgh in 1973. The artist played a Russian game in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of one's hand, using twenty knives and two tape recorders. She would pick up a new knife from the row of twenty she had lined up each time she cut herself, and she would keep track of the procedure. This piece was called the Rythm 10, she has a few more pieces with a similar name each one more bond than the past. 

Her overall work is scary to me because of the stunts she pulls every time. 

Pawel Althmaer -  is a modern Polish sculptor, performer, collaborative artist, and installation and video art producer. The artist is most renowned for his revolutionary community participation, collaboration, and social reform projects. They frequently include sculpture and, in the end, strive to reorient how art is created and shown. Althamer has worked with and depicted family, friends, neighbors, visitors to his exhibitions, and strangers he meets on his travels because he is fascinated by the people who share the environments he lives in. Althamer creates art that artistically reimagines reality in an attempt to modify traditional perceptions—social, political, and psychological—in a subtle but powerful way. 

Decontextualization is a recurring issue for Althamer, who questions not only his identity as an author-artist, but also the ecology of the art industry as a whole. Althamer's 2011 commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Almech, is one of the best examples. He moved a branch of his father's plastic factory from suburban Poland to the Berlin museum's interior, where he created a sculpture workshop.

Both artists incorporate what/who is around them in beautiful ways. But the way they represent theirs work is completely different, Abramovic is more daring and showings her work to an extent that most artists would not go with their audiences. Such as the one where she is just staring at her people person, which is a little too invasion for some. But, Althamer is a little calmer when it comes it showing his work, most of the sculptures have this white theme that tones the scary image down a whole lot.