Artist became Red Light District worker and had to deal with three men
Marina Abramovic is an artist well known for her dramatic live performances but one of her most shocking saw her swap places with a sex worker in Amsterdam for the day.
Abramovic, the Serbian conceptual artist and performer, shocked the world in Naples with her Rhythm 0 stunt which saw her stand for six hours, letting watchers on do anything they wanted to her during that time.
Although she admitted that she was ready to die that day, and she was stripped naked, that wasn't all that out of the ordinary for an artist who also had nine orgasms in public for another performance.
However, her time as a sex worker was something of an anti-climax in both senses of the word, as she was forced to deal with three men after swapping with a prostitute who she had befriended in Amsterdam's infamous red light district.
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Abramovic said: “I was living in Yugoslavia and was invited to do a performance for a project called Body Art. That was the first time that I had been to Amsterdam and the first time that I had seen the red-light district. I found it to be quite shocking. Especially, coming from a communist/socialist country and having the background that I had. My mother was a major in the army. My father left when I was seventeen. My mother had to raise the children [Marina and her brother] completely alone. She was very strict, always talking about morals, what was right and what was wrong.”
While the sex worker she swapped with was busy at an exhibition opening at the De Appel gallery, Abramovic offered herself in the famous windows, and had three visitors in total.
However, the first visitor was kicked out for being too drunk, the second refused to pay the going rate and the third only visited in the hope of finding the usual woman who resided there, meaning it was eventful for Abramovic but not in the ways you might expect.
Anna Novakov wrote of the work in her 2003 article for the Womans Art Journal, Point of Access: Marina Abramovic’s 1975 Performance “Role Exchange".
She wrote: “According to Abramovic,. Role Exchange was advertised with a standard gallery invitation sent to hundreds of people. The exhibition attracted a large art audience and was documented with black-and-white still photographs taken inside the gallery and outside the brothel window. There was no direct audience participation in the gallery, although the brothel had three male visitors who came in off the street.
"One was drunk and left immediately, one didn’t want to pay the going rate, and the third man only wanted the woman who usually worked that window.”( E-mail exchange, November 2002.) The exhibition received good press coverage. Documentation of Role Exchange and many other early performance pieces was exhibited in the mid-1990s as framed photographs and texts. The Role Exchange photographs were taken by Ulay (in front of the brothel) and the De Appel Gallery staff (in front of the gallery).”
Topics: Marina Abramovic
James Moorhouse