Sinthome of Abramović

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In the constellation of 20th-century art, some stars are destined to converge, collide, and end in a magnificent explosion. The meeting of Marina Abramović and Ulay was precisely this. Abramović, the "mother of performance art" from the former Yugoslavia, carried with her Eastern Orthodox mysticism, the stark imprint of her military upbringing, and a fanatical exploration of the body's limits, like a primal, unyielding force. And Ulay, the German artist born Frank Uwe Laysiepen, represented another kind of intellectual acuity with the cool, conceptual qualities he displayed in his photography, Polaroid collages, and performances.

In 1976, they met in Amsterdam; two extremes of a single soul had found each other. They became not only lovers but also fused their individual artistic practices into one, declaring the birth of a collective entity called "The Other." In this entity, the individual "self" was deliberately dissolved, and two bodies became a single medium, a single laboratory for testing all the unspeakable dimensions of human relationships: binary oppositions, gender identity, endurance, and, most importantly, trust.

Their collaboration was a twelve-year feat of endurance that completely fused life and art. In Imponderabilia, they stood naked on either side of a museum entrance, forcing every visitor to make a compressed choice between them, thus materializing the sense of boundaries and awkwardness between people. And in the final chapter of their collaboration, the performance titled The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk, they transformed the ritual of their breakup into an epic journey across the Chinese mainland. Starting from opposite ends of the Great Wall, they walked for three months, finally meeting in the middle to say goodbye. This was not just the end of an emotional relationship, but a monumental work of art about convergence and separation, set against the backdrop of entire mountains and rivers.

In 1988, this legendary collaboration came to an end. Abramović's artistic career entered a new phase. With an ever-more mythic presence, she created works like The Artist is Present, which resonated globally and pushed her explorations of the gaze, time, and existence to their absolute limits. Ulay, in turn, returned to the quieter practices of photography and visual art, remaining active until his death in 2020.

The twelve years they walked together set an almost insurmountable benchmark for performance art, leaving behind a series of unsettling and unavoidable questions about human connection. And the most stark, the most condensed, and the most fatal of these questions was compressed into the four-odd minutes of Rest Energy.

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A bow, an arrow, its tip pointed at a heart. This is the whole of Rest Energy, and it is everything. Marina Abramović and Ulay, the most famous lovers and adversaries in art history, compressed their entire world—the entanglement of emotions, the play of power, the sweetness of dependence, and the impulse for destruction—into these four-odd minutes of stillness.

This piece is less a performance than a publicly executed contract, an oath wagered with life itself. Trust here is not a gentle, tender word; it is a law of physics, the sole fulcrum maintaining balance. Abramović’s body leans back, delivering her full weight and faith; Ulay pulls the bowstring taut, his every breath, every tremor of his muscles, deciding the life or death of the lover opposite him. Together they form a precise, precarious system, where the collapse of either one means the annihilation of both. The bow, this ancient weapon, is at once the bond that connects them and the sword of Damocles hanging over their relationship.

The only sound in the space is two infinitely amplified heartbeats. Thump, thump, thump… This is not background music, but fear itself translated into language, the primal echo of life confronting the void. This sound yanks the audience from their safe seats as spectators, forcibly thrusting them into this airtight field of tension. What we hear is our own suppressed panic. What we see is a human allegory in an extreme state: love and relationships, in their essence, are a willing adventure, a gamble in which both parties agree to place a deadly weapon in the other’s hands.

The allure of the performance lies precisely in its "stillness." All the drama is internalized; all the violence is on the verge of release. This state, named "Rest Energy," is in fact what is known in physics as "potential energy"—an accumulated, unstable energy that could be converted into kinetic energy at any moment. It is not peace, but the dead calm before a storm. This work strips away narrative, strips away superfluous symbols, and finally arrives at a pure archetype: two people, within a latently violent structure, relying on an invisible force (trust) to fight against entropy and the fate of collapse.

When the four minutes are over and the bow is lowered, as that taut energy instantly dissipates, what remains is not just the artists' exhaustion, but an aftershock in the hearts of the audience. We are forced to wonder, in our own lives, to what extent are our relationships with others also such an invisible, tightened bow? How much have we given, and how much has been given to us? Rest Energy acts like a sharp probe, piercing the skin of everyday affection to let us glimpse the naked, dangerous, and yet profoundly sincere dependence that lies beneath. It offers no answers, only posing that ancient question anew, in a manner that is almost unbearable.

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If Rest Energy is a microcosm of Abramović's relationship with another person, then her entire artistic career is a long confrontation with the entire world—with that vast, nameless entity known as "the Other." Her weapon, from beginning to end, has only ever been her body.

Abramović's body has never been a safe abode. It is a battlefield, a laboratory, an altar. She has carved a pentagram on her stomach with a razor blade, fallen unconscious from oxygen deprivation inside a burning wooden frame, and surrendered 72 objects symbolizing pleasure and pain (including a loaded pistol) to the audience for their arbitrary use. Why? Any rational explanation pales in the face of these actions. We can perhaps only dive into deeper places to find the primal force that drives her.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, this near self-destructive repetition is a classic "compulsion to repeat." The artist seems to be ceaselessly, ritually re-enacting a primary trauma. This trauma may stem from the strict control of her military mother, from a childhood that did not permit the expression of vulnerability. Art thus became the only domain where she could reclaim sovereignty over her own body. But her method of reclamation was not to grant it comfort, but to push it to the limits of pain. It is as if to say: "Only I can decide my body's pain and punishment." In this freely chosen suffering, she achieves a paradoxical healing, an experience that transcends the pleasure principle, which Lacan called jouissance—a thrilling sense of being alive, obtained by approaching death and collapse.

Her art cannot exist without an audience, without the gaze of "the Other." She exposes herself to this gaze almost beseechingly. In Rhythm 0, she anesthetized herself, becoming a thoroughly objectified body for others to manipulate, allowing the audience's desires and malice to be inscribed upon her. Her self, it seems, can only be confirmed, shaped, or even torn apart within the gaze of the Other. This is a profound anxiety, a continuous questioning of "Who am I?" She seems to be proving through extreme means that the so-called "self" is but a phantom born from the desires and projections of the Other. So, let me be the one to stage the birth and destruction of this phantom.

Herein lies the allure of the death drive. Freud believed that life has an instinctual impulse to return to an inorganic, silent state. For Abramović, the death drive is no longer a shadow but is transformed into creative fuel. She is not running towards death, but dancing on its edge and drawing energy from it. Every time she places herself in peril, she is testing the boundaries of existence, engaging in a dangerous negotiation with the force of destruction. In the end, she survives, covered in scars, but also with a deeper understanding of life.

One could say that Abramović's entire body of work constitutes a long, public self-psychoanalysis. The art gallery is her consulting room, performance art is her free association, and all of us in the audience become her analysts and witnesses. She unreservedly displays her vulnerability, her fear, her desires, forcing us to watch how a soul, through repeated rehearsals of "death," confirms its own "presence." In this process, the "self" shaped by society, family, and history is dismembered time and again, while a tougher, purer artistic subject is reborn from the ruins, like a myth.

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So, where is the spearhead of this self-destructive drive aimed? It targets the very "self" born from the gaze of the Other and the Symbolic order—a narcissistic phantom co-authored by the judgment of others, the expectations of society, and the norms of culture. Abramović's art is a protracted assassination of this false self. What she wants to destroy is the imprisoned, defined, internalized image. Sartre once said, "Man constitutes his world by his suicide at every moment." Abramović, in turn, has transformed this philosophical maxim into a series of watchable performance pieces.

Her art, therefore, becomes a reverse mirror, reflecting the "quiet desperation" of our time. The digital survival rule of our era—the endless performance, liking, and being watched on social media—is precisely a cheap response to this existential anxiety. We meticulously construct a perfect virtual persona, craving symbolic validation, but this only deepens the hollowness of reality. Abramović's destructive art moves to the other extreme. It rejects this false prosperity and chooses to confront trauma directly. The dramatic conflicts, the heart-wrenching injuries, the extreme endurance—with their irrefutable intensity—anchor the meaning of existence at an unprecedented height.

When a person returns to daily life from such an extreme experience, that "quiet" is no longer tranquility but a thin, tasteless, unbearable void. And so, the memory of trauma becomes fatally alluring. Compared to the insipid life of the present, the pain of the past is so real, so vivid. Only by compulsively returning to that familiar, painful situation, in the moment the wound is torn open again, can the suspended, numb self once again truly feel "I exist." This compulsive repetition of pain is the core mechanism of the death drive and the wellspring of the artist's creation.

However, if we stop here, we are still treating her art as a pathological symptom. The late Lacan proposed a more refined concept: the sinthome. The sinthome goes beyond the "symptom"; it is not a riddle to be deciphered and cured, but a unique, irreplaceable mode of survival that the subject invents in order to live. It is the core knot that holds one's being together when the Symbolic order fails to function properly.

Marina Abramović's art is her sinthome.

This series of masochistic, ritualistic acts is likely not a choice for her, but a necessity. It is the very means by which she weaves together her fragmented psychic world and organizes her own jouissance. It is not the illness, but the medicine she has invented for herself. Through this one-of-a-kind sinthome, she transforms the death drive, which could have annihilated her, into a bottomless well of creativity, successfully elevating a deeply personal survival strategy into a universally powerful public art.

In the end, what she invites us to witness is not just a performance, but the functioning of her sinthome. She shows us how a subject, through a self-invented and painful craft, re-knots herself to the world. In one public execution of the "narcissistic self" after another, she does not move towards destruction but instead forges an incredibly resilient artistic myth. With her entire life, she proves that the most profound creation can spring precisely from the unhealable, innermost crack in life itself.