Sanja Iveković, Marina Abramović and the Global Politics of Authentic Experience

This article analyses the concept of authenticity of experience as it arises in the recent criticism of Marina Abramovic, and in Sanja Ivekovic's art since 2000. The controversy around Abramovic's participation in the 2011 Los Angeles MOCA gala demonstrates the limitations of a concept of ethics within contemporary art that is based on authenticity, in particular because of the commodity status of experience within high-profile performance and participatory art. Ivekovic's artworks Looking for Mama's Number (2002) and The Disobedient (2012) are useful in this context because they materialize an ethics not based on authenticity. They do so by problematizing the recovery of experience, particularly as it pertains to political commitment, in a way that is consistent with reflections on the ideological status of historical narrative from within critical left-wing histories of the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Ivekovic's recent emphasis on the unknowability of experience can be seen as a tactical respons...