I have been lucky in relation to a couple of great performance pieces. I was able to be in Marina Abramovic's work "the dream bed" which was a corollary of "the house with the ocean view." Abramovic is one of the progenitors of performance art---her stuff from the 70's is amazing still, her recent work just as good. "The House With the Ocean View" was spectacular. I was there for more than half of it---the first day I spent all day there after my stint in the dream bed. I think this review has some discussion of The Dream Bed in it...but the best part is the photo of The House With the Ocean View. That photo was on the Sean Kelley website front page for months and is now THE image of the work that you see reproduced everywhere. Who is that Big Butt looking through the telescope? Moi. My ass is all over because of that photo.
http://www.haberarts.com/marina.htm
Here's an interview about the works:
http://www.thebrooklynrail.org/arts/win ... movic.html
Here you can see a picture of someone inside The Dream Bed, when it was used separately in another exhibition. You don't get a very good idea of it from the picture though.
http://www.providencephoenix.com/art/tr ... 503833.asp
Here's something I wrote about the experience for another website:
The Dream Bed: Marina Abramovic and Me
On the first day that Abramovic's week-long endurance work opened at Sean Kelly gallery, I participated in a companion work, The Dream Bed.
The Dream Bed was wonderful. It’s a narrow wooden box that you lay in wearing the Dream Clothes. The "clothes" are a one piece that's like a cross between a child's snow suit and a Hazmat coverall. It’s also got a Teletubbie vibe to it too. I got a Tinky-Winky purple one. Your feet are covered; you wear padded mittens, and pull a hood up over noise reduction headphones. You also get a pair of glasses which block your vision. And the suit has very powerful magnets sewn into it at strategic body energy points.
The magnets made it really hard to put on since the arms and legs kept sticking to each other and the whole thing stuck to the wall of the room I was changing in. It was like being 2 or 3 years old and not able to negotiate your arm holes from the leg ones. It wasn't heavy or uncomfortable; it was like wearing a fun spacesuit costume, or pretending your pajamas were a fun spacesuit costume. I did think a bit of Penny and Will strapped into their pods in the Jupiter II when I got into the bed. Too bad there was no Dr. Smith in the gallery (or perhaps there was. A friend later told me Francesco Clemente peered in at me while I snuggled in the box).
The bed/box also contained a beautiful marble head rest. I’ve seen photos of these from other Abramovic performances, and she uses two in her part of this performance---on her bed and as a head rest on her chair in the three “rooms” that make up The House with the Ocean View. The headrest was astonishingly comfortable. I used to wonder how the Egyptians and ancient Japanese stood those hard neck rests, but now I kinda want one too.
I fell asleep almost at once, deeply enough to dream, but lightly enough to still hear the sound of water lapping in the video piece (Stromboli) in the next room, as well as feel the air currents on my face when people were walking through the gallery. I say "asleep," but maybe it was more like a trance state: I
was dreaming, but I was also hyper-aware of my surroundings despite the ways the suit dampened my senses. I could tell when people were looking at me by the infitesimally slight changes in the air above my face. I few times people talked about me: "is it real? I think its a big doll. No she's breathing," and once somone whispered to me, "Hey, hey. Are you really asleep?"
I felt completely peaceful and calm while drifting in and out of consciousness. Complete thoughts about being in the performance trailed off into dreams about being in the performance. I was surprised when the gallery girl came to get me out; it hardly seemed like an hour at all. She actually told me it was more like an hour and half. She'd tried to wake to me several times but couldn't get me to wake up. I was pretty disoriented, getting yanked out of that still, beautiful bliss. In fact it was very hard for me to concentrate enough to write anything much in the Dream Book that constituted the final part of the piece. I'm afraid I just rambled in my comments about sensory deprivation tanks and bondage scenarios where the dampening of some senses heightens others. In fact, even now, I'm not sure what I’d write about if I had a “do over” with the Dream Book, since the biggest impact of the experience was specific to the time spent in the piece---the “super-present” moment produced by such duration works.
Afterward, I found myself drifting to the word "spiritual" to describe the almost out of body feel of it. I remembered seeing and listening to Marina, but of course I was "asleep" in another room and she never spoke during the performance. This sense of a connection lingered, too. I spent the rest of the day in the gallery watching the performance. Not much "happened" during these hours, but for most of the time she and I were the only people in the gallery. I looked through the telescope, the first time her eyes met mine through this instrument I was in tears before I knew it.
From the Ernest L. Wilkinson Diaries: "ELW dreams he's spattered w/ grease. Hundreds steal his greasy pants."
