The art of living dangerously

If you visited the Irish Museum of Modern Art over the weekend of October 19th-21st this year, you were bound to experience some stranger than usual art works. You could peer through a slit in the doorway of one of the ground floor galleries and see Paolo Canevari, lost within a bizarre, lumpy costume fashioned from inner tyre tubes, like some mutant beast in a zoo. You could, elsewhere, receive one of his religious identity stamps on your forehead, and be kissed on the cheek by the scarlet-lipped, hysterically house-proud Neskat Ekici. And you could visit the chapel, a perfect setting for Chiharu Shiota, who slept at the centre of what looked like a giant spider's web criss-crossing the entire interior.

All were part of Marina Abramovic's weekend festival of performance art, Marking the Territory, which turned out to be one of the most ambitious, and most successful events at IMMA during what has been a difficult year for the institution. Sarah Glennie and Annie Fletcher handled the IMMA end of the proceedings.

Over the weekend, visitors were treated to a packed schedule of performance art works, day and night, involving around 40 artists (including 16 who make up Abramovic's own class of 2001 from the Braunschweig School of Art in Germany).

The exceptional level of audience interest and the sheer buzz that attended the weekend served to support Abramovic's conviction that we are witnessing a major revival in performance; and, moreover, that performance art itself is at a particularly exciting juncture. While Marking the Territory was to some extent a state-of- performance-art survey, to her great credit Abramovic avoided any temptation to do a greatest hits-style compilation and concentrated exclusively on a younger generation of artists.

"I tried," she said, "to present what I think performance art is today. It's a subjective view, because art is not objective. I didn't look nostalgically back, because quite frankly I thought it would be boring to see an older, 1970s artist doing 1970s performances again."

Abramovic is herself one of those artists, an influential veteran of the classic performance era of the 1970s. She was born in Belgrade, in what was Yugoslavia, in the immediate aftermath of the second World War. Both her parents had been prominent partisans with Tito during the war. Her father, a Montenegran, was a general, her mother a major, but their diametrically opposing temperaments did not knit well together in the postwar world. "Father liked danger, mother liked order," as curator David Elliott once summed up the difference. The atmosphere at home sounds emotionally chilly and overly controlled, and Abramovic's father chose absence whenever possible.

She was at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts in 1968 when he made an extraordinary gesture in support of student dissent. In defiance of riot police at a mass student meeting he marched up to the podium and proceeded to tear up his Party card - not something to be done lightly. She followed suit and quit the party herself. She was making paintings at the time, but from 1973 she embarked on a series of ferociously committed performance works centred on the endurance of discomfort and pain.

These tough, troubling and, to some extent, troubled works continually tested the limits of the - that is, her - body and psyche. They often entailed her involvement in situations of physical and mental vulnerability, and sometimes very real risk. Subsequent collaborative works exploring the nature and limits of human relationships maintained the same level of perilous intensity. It is fair to say that, while her more recent work still displays exceptional physical and mental commitment, it is not as wildly dangerous as some of her earlier performances.

Much of that work, even viewed in retrospect, and hence released from the uncertainty of the live moment, retains the capacity to shock. Yet, she says, quite reasonably in the context of her overall oeuvre, that her motivation was never to shock. What did interest her was "experiencing the physical and mental limits of the human body and mind". The audience was integral to this process because, she maintains, of the "energy dialogue" generated by the electrifying contact between witnesses and performer, something that performers in any area could relate to.

Now based in Amsterdam, she teaches and continues to make her own work. Even without knowing her background, one would be tempted to say that, poised, fit and impeccably turned out, she is possessed of a certain authoritative, military bearing herself. She comes across as a formidable personality, a popular if demanding teacher with a direct manner, a nice line in dry humour and more than a hint of charisma.

While performance art as a phenomenon extends back to some of the early 20th-century avant garde movements and arguably much further, it was in the 1970s that it became established as a distinct area of expression. The huge upsurge of performance in the 1970s came out of the shake-up in art practice from the late 1960s onwards, when artists were trying to devise radical models of practice that by-passed and superseded the conventions of the traditional media, the museum and the art market. Since then, performance has consistently been part of the scene. Moreover, the number of practitioners and the size of the audience have increased exponentially, though not uninterruptedly.

As Abramovic sees the rise of performance art: "It was strong in the 1970s, then with the resurgence of the art market in the 1980s it faded into the background. But in the 1990s there was a revival in the context of nightclub culture. All the work in Marking the Territory related to the body. The body was the main subject and object of the event. Throughout the 1990s, I think, because of AIDS, because of so many wars and famines and other disasters, there was an increasing awareness of the body, of the vulnerability of the body, of temporality and death. Against this background it was natural that there was a revival of interest in temporary performance, where you have to be here right now, where there is a shared immediacy.

"Performance is the only immaterial art form, the only one that has this sense of happening in the moment, which is why it is so strong, why we come back to it again and again."

Abramovic guards the autonomous virtues of performance jealously. When asked if it shares some of its appeal with theatre and dance, she reacts as though personally offended by the suggestion. Theatre, she implies, is a much safer, tamer, milder business altogether. In performance, the actor is the artist, the moment of contact is more volatile, the outcome likely to be unpredictable - a fair point from a woman who, in the course of one of her own performance pieces back in 1974, threw herself on what turned out to be the less than tender mercies of an audience who proceeded to strip, cut and threaten her.

"But," she adds, "while performance artists in the 1970s hated theatre, what has happened since then is that theatre directors have taken elements of performance art and used them in theatre.

"Someone like Pina Bausch, with her Dance Theatre of Wuppertal, for example, incorporates elements of performance art in what she does. This sort of exchange is happening widely. As a result, everything is possible right now."

While, as Abramovic emphasises, she doesn't regard shock as a useful end in itself, a certain transgressive element has been a consistent feature of performance art, if not quite a prerequisite. Some of its more celebrated and notorious manifestations have leant heavily on shock value such as, for example, influential Austrian artist Herman Nitsch's Orgies, Mysteries, Theatre events in the 1970s, involving elaborate and gory rituals with slaughtered animals and blood-soaked, naked, quasi-sacrificial performers.

Or Californian artist Paul McCarthy, currently the subject of a retrospective at Tate Liverpool, whose shambolic, scatological, gross-out work weirdly parodies American family values, consumerism and popular culture.

The point would seem to be that, if performance doesn't have that or some other edge, it allows the audience to assume an habitual pose of detached superiority. And the rationale of performance is to jolt us out of that state of soporific consumption of routine visual thrills characteristic of popular culture. So that when, at IMMA, Daniel Muller-Friedrichsen asked spectators to scratch words into his bare skin with a toothpick (only one man declined), or when a spot- lit Amanda Coogan urinated - copiously and with dramatic amplification - on stage, we were, whatever else, unlikely to be blithely indifferent.

This perceptive shift need not be related to the pure shock value of what we encounter. The transgression can be more subtle. In fact, one of the best pieces of the IMMA weekend, Exergie (Butter Dance), was also one of the most subtle. To a percussive soundtrack, Melati Suryodarmo-Lutz tried earnestly to perform a ceremonial Indonesian dance, barefoot, on a floor spread with slabs of butter. Inevitably she began to slip and fall, further spreading the butter.

Every time she fell she would, deadpan, stand up and attempt to continue the dance. The audience were torn between laughing at her increasingly desperate and inevitably comical efforts to maintain her balance, and gasping at the thud each time she failed, and landed heavily on the ground yet again.

It may sound daft, or perverse, or pointless. And, in certain respects, it was clearly all of those things. Yet it was also undeniably compelling and uncomfortable, became cumulatively unbearable and really did force us to question our own responses. It was, in short, along with several other works over the weekend, pretty good evidence for Abramovic's case.

A video document, Marking the Territory, featuring Marina Abramovic and all of the artists who participated in her performance weekend, is available from IMMA's bookshop, priced £9.99.