I call this work a semi-fictional memoir. I am aware that "semi-fictional memoir" is seen as an oxymoron or paradox to some. There are many people who believe that it is possible to tell an absolute truth from our limited single-human perspective. I do not believe this is true. I believe that ALL memoir and autobiography has an element of fiction in it, in that we tell our stories from our own perspectives. What is true for us is not always true for the other people involved in those stories. Still, THIS work pushes that boundary even farther by building actual fictions into the story.
The primary fiction in this work, as I have discussed in The Introduction, is the concept that Marina Abramovic is my mother. Of course, she is not my biological mother. The work asks you, the audience, to consider that certain people, certain artists seem to BELONG to us in a deep, meaningful, often unexplainable way. Marina Abramovic is only my mother in that her work connected to something so beneath language in me that it made me FEEL as if she and I were somehow connected, that she knew me, that I had come -- somehow -- from her. The work suggests that Marina Abramovic is my cultural mother. If you follow Abramovic's work at all, you will know that I am not alone in considering her a cultural mother. She has trained and worked with many artists who seem to have a similar connection with her. She has touched the lives and hearts of many of her audience members. In each act of Marina Abramovic Is My Mother, there is a performance -- it is usually the first piece. These performances were written in imitation of the format that Abramovic uses to write out her plans for a performance. As a writing artist, I was fascinated by Abramovic's self-made genres. She invented a way to write out a performance. She invented a way to tell her life stories in these tiny vignettes. The texts that appeared near each work in her retrospective at MOMA were as interesting to me as the work itself. I sought to emulate and imitate her genres in some parts of this work. The performances that begin each act of Marina Abramovic Is My Mother have not been performed. I do not have any intention of performing them. They were written as a kind of magical, dreamlike symbolism. They are complete fiction. Another voice in Marina Abramovic Is My Mother that borrows the form of Abramovic's memoir-vignette is "The Self." These little stories start with titles and they are all true stories from my real life. And yet, they are also a dramatic reenactment of an imagined history in which I am actually/ biologically the daughter of Marina Abramovic (which, again, is a fiction). Every mention of Abramovic and I interacting in these stories is complete fiction except for the concept that "Marina" becomes a symbol for my own relationship with my creative life. Occasionally, I mention something that, for Abramovic, was fact -- she did really walk the Great Wall of China to meet her partner, Ulay, for their final performance together. They did really perform a piece called Communist Body/ Fascist Body in which they slept in bed. However, she was not abandoning ME to walk the Great Wall and I was not sleeping between the two of them in their sleep performance. What is true in these stories is everything having to do with my real mother, Ramona, and the rest of my family members. What is not true in these stories is that Ramona was not my real mother and her husband was not my real father and her other children were not my real siblings and so on. In these stories, I PRETEND that Marina Abramovic is my biological mother and this other family was just the family I was forced to live with. The second-person "Energy Dialogues" are truth. These are pieces in which I am talking to myself about the fine mess I've gotten myself into. Of course, in these pieces I sometimes use figurative language like "You were born to a family of wolves." I was not born to a family of wolves. Wolves are a metaphor in this sentence. As a poet, I don't think metaphors are lies. Metaphors help us understand reality on a level that falls below language. There ARE however two primary lies in the "Energy Dialogues": I have actually been married twice and I have two children, not one. It was not meaningful to the story and only made a complex work overly-complicated to leave both of my marriages and both of my children in. Thus, for the sake of this semi-fictional memoir, I re-wrote my story to only having been married once and only having one child. Also, "Energy Dialogue" itself is a borrowed genre, of sorts, from Abramovic. She speaks of "energy dialogues" occurring frequently in her performance work. This is how I imagined "energy dialogues" might look in writing. There is a lot of poetry in Marina Abramovic Is My Mother. The "Can I..." Questions after Erickson's stages of Social and Emotional Development; The Daughters; The Mothers: these are all poetry. And so, none of these can be considered fiction or nonfiction. They are as true as poems are true. The language of poetry is metaphor -- and I've already explained the difference between metaphor and lies. In these poems, there are many specific references to Abramovic's performances and her life: cutting the belly, star on fire, breaking glass with her hand, her mother dreaming she was a snake, slapping his face, breathing into each other's mouths, among others. These poems are my responses to Abramovic's work and the beginning of an explanation for what they stirred in me. When I chose to re-tell the story of the ugly duckling in this work, I had no idea that Abramovic had been asked to illustrate a version of The Ugly Duckling. In fact, I made this re-telling part of Marina Abramovic Is My Mother in 2012 while her version of The Ugly Duckling didn't come out until 2017. When I found out about this, I was shocked and frankly... weirded out. It felt like another connection between us. In retrospect, it is POSSIBLE that I absorbed some information in my study of Abramovic's work and life that she had an affinity for the story of the Ugly Duckling and that is one of the reasons that I made a re-telling part of my work. BUT... even if that is the case, before I even attended "The Artist is Present" at MOMA in 2010, I had been working with a therapist back at home in Michigan in 2009 who asked me to identify the overarching narrative of my life -- and I identified "The Ugly Duckling." So, if I read somewhere that Abramovic had an affinity for that story, I only felt more connected to her then as I had already recognized my own affinity as well. In any case, the re-telling of the ugly duckling in this work is a dramatic reenactment of what my young life felt like to me. It is also symbolic. It is also metaphor. Obviously, I was not a duck or a swan. In truth, I was a human. My mother was a human. So, the re-telling of the ugly duckling in Marina Abramovic Is My Mother is a way for me to sensationalize and fairy-tale-ize my childhood story. This is extremely appropriate and helps ME to recognize a "big T" Truth about the story I told myself about my childhood -- it was sensational and it was a fairy tale. There were monsters and villains in the story I told myself about my childhood. I was the victim. This re-telling of the ugly duckling is "true" in the sense that this was how my childhood FELT to me. This re-telling of the ugly duckling is absolute bullshit in the sense that I was a fucking kid, so what did I know? There you have it. I had hoped to make a concise list of what was true and what was fiction in this work but, as it turns out, the point is... that's impossible. There is, perhaps, more truth in the fiction that there is in the truths. In each of the truths there is the overriding fiction of my personal perspective. Thus, I think, it would be best to attempt to experience this piece NOT by sorting out what is "true" and what is "fiction" but by simply letting it be what it is: art. I feel arrogant when I proclaim my work "Art" and I can understand if readers think I am arrogant when I proclaim my work "Art." But, do understand, I'm not telling you this is good art or bad art. I am merely declaring that Marina Abramovic Is My Mother is attempting to function as art; not as a historical document and not as a self-help essay, as art. Therefore, this work is best experienced, just like Abramovic's performances, as the reaction your inner-world has to it; as whatever it is capable of stirring inside of you.
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AuthorJodiAnn Stevenson is a poet and writer living on the Northwest Coast of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. Her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in various print and online journals since 1996. She is the author of three published chapbooks of poetry: The Procedure (March Street Press, 2006); Houses Don't Float (Habernicht Press, 2010); and Diving Headlong Into a Cliff of Our Own Delusion (Saucebox Books, 2011). She has also produced the chapbooks In the Temple of the 7 Buddhas, I Wrote This Poem For You, Hung With A New Rope, Midnight in the Blackbox Theater Saloon, To Make the Words that Made the Language and The (Human) Body for The Broken Nose Chapbook Collective which she co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Benson. She co-founded Binge Press and its sister online journal, 27 rue de fleures, in 2004 with Rebecca Hardin Thrift and served as the managing editor of both until 2014. She is the author of www.bowlofmilk.com which has been a one-woman show of visual poetry since 2004. You can connect with and support JodiAnn on her Patreon page or by emailing her. ArchivesCategories |