Performance death: artistic / actual

For Day of the Dead

Top: With its coupling of a naked young model and a bleach-clean plastic skeleton, Marina Abramović’s performance art at the Museum of Modern Art, 2010, seems to eroticize and romanticize death.

The Guardian wrote:

For more than 40 years, Abramović has pushed herself through superhuman feats of will and endurance in the name of art. Suffocating herself, slicing her stomach with razor blades, drugging herself with various prescription medicines and, notoriously, having an audience member hold a loaded gun to her head, are among the early performances that confirmed her place in art history.

As is often Abramović’s intention, the audience is made uncomfortable—although in many cases, far less so than the self-abusive artist herself.

Below: And then there is the death of a person in El Salvador, set afire and dumped on a public street to make the intended “audience” feel raw terror at the regime's power to punish suspected rebels. The lesson, like Abramović’s piece, contains elements of the performative, but there is nothing romantic or erotic about this real death, this murder.