The Mourner Is Present: Performance Art and the Mycenaean Funeral (20 min)

Presenters

David M. Wheeler, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

In the spring of 2010, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) staged an exhibition of the work of Marina Abramović, one of the most influential performance artists of the past 50 years. The retrospective, titled The Artist Is Present, presented reperformances of some of Abramović’s most seminal works in the galleries of MOMA alongside photographs, recordings, and objects that documented the original performances. In this respect, The Artist Is Present has a great deal in common with Mycenaean mortuary practices, which required mourners o return to the chamber tomb and perform the funeral surrounded by the artifacts and human remains of previous burials. This comparison with Abramović’s work invites us to reconsider the relationship between artifact and embodied action in the Mycenaean funeral (what performance theorist Diana Taylor refers to as the archive and the repertoire) and suggests performance theory as a methodological framework to explore this and other questions. To that end, this paper draws on the work of Abramović and performance theorists to interrogate how the interaction of objects and embodied reperformances shaped the Mycenaean funeral and possibly Mycenaean society more broadly. I argue that the juxtaposition of artifact and performing body within the chamber tomb cultivated a performance tradition that blurred the boundaries between archive and repertoire, calling on objects to perform and bodies to stand as evidence. This interplay made the chamber tomb a potent archive with a central role in the production and preservation of social memory that could not be contained by the cemetery. The bodies, objects, and performance repertoire of the funeral were not limited to the mortuary sphere and could be transferred to other contexts. Therefore, through the act of reperformance, the knowledge produced in the tomb could move “sideways” to impact other aspects of Mycenaean society, possibly even challenging palatial narratives.