Ryan Lader wrote “The Artist is Present and the Emotions are Real: Time, Vulnerability, and Gender in Marina Abramovic’s Performance Art” for his capstone essay in a WR 100 “Gendered Expressions of Performance” seminar focused on women playwrights and performance artists. Students’ examination of gender politics culminated with Serbian-born performance artist Marina Abramovic’s 2010 Museum of Modern Art retrospective “The Artist is Present.” Abramovic’s equally subtle and strenuous performance challenged students’ notions of art, and questioned the importance of gender in a seemingly “gendered-less” performance.
Lader’s essay does an excellent job of creating a conversation with various (and at times fairly disparate) sources: a gender theorist, a performance artist, and a theatre director. By engaging these sources, Lader finds a way into Abramovic’s cerebral art; he ultimately better understands why her art so fiercely impacts the audience through the critical, and creative, connections he makes. Lader worked especially hard on incorporating Judith Butler’s seminal essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” which was the seminar’s most challenging text. Lader’s rigorous intellectual work to find intersections between Abramovic and Butler paid off: his argument pushes through surface-based and reactionary observations of Abramovic’s controversial performance and examines its subterranean intelligence.
— CARRIE BENNETT
WR 100: Gendered Expressions of Performance