Aesthetic experience in performance art : Marina Abramović the artist is present

Abstract

This thesis explores the possibility of an embodied, corporeal and transforming aesthetic experience that performance art may reveal. The artistic practice of Marina Abramović, who witnessed and pioneered the paradigm shifts in the performance art sphere, will be examined in conjunction with the performative turn and affective turn that art has been going through. In addition to a comprehensive overview of the former academic studies done on Abramović’s body of work, her latest performance The Artist Is Present (2010) and the critical reception it received will be discussed within the framework of aesthetic experience as a path to affective encounter in the area of contemporary performance art. John Dewey’s idea of art as a form of experience that creates an active engagement with oneself, and the others, in addition to the contemporary affect theory that is rooted in Gilles Deleuze’s concept of affect will lead us to see how affects grow in the area of performance art, and how aesthetic experience is constituted in and reinforces this affective engagement.