Educational Media Reviews Online

Marina Abramovic is a New York-based Serbia Montenegrin performance artist known for her innovation and unique style of performance art. In this DVD a group of amazing presentations titled 7 Easy Pieces is partly recorded. On seven consecutive nights in November 9-15 2005, for seven hours each, Abramovic recreated five performance works by her peers from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as two of her own works, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The pieces performed were Bruce Nauman's Body Pressure (1974), Vito Acconci's Seedbed (1972), Valie Export's Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), Gina Pane's The Conditioning (1973), Joseph Beuy's How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Abramovic's Lips of Thomas (1975), and Entering the Other Side (2005). Each of these performances required great physical and mental exertion by the artist; for instance, Pane's work requires the artist to lie on a bed frame suspended over a grid of lit candles for seven hours. As Abramovic is quoted as saying, "I do not want the public to feel that they are spending time with the performances, I simply want them to forget about time." More information is available at seveneasypieces.com. A warning: there is nudity in the video.