Seven Easy Pieces

Seven Easy Pieces involved Marina Abramovic’s 2005 reperformance of six key performance works: two of her own works Lips of Thomas (1975) together with her new work and Entering the Otherside (2005) and earlier works by other artists: Gina Paine’s The Conditioning (1973), Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Valie Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, (1972) and Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure (1974). They were each performed for seven hours each, and approach the works as if they were like a music score. This work directly addresses the problem of conservation strategies for performance and time-based art and documentation. Abramoviç could be interpreted as naming her exhibition Seven Easy Pieces in competition with quantum physicist Richard Feynman’s popular book Six Easy Pieces. Her love of science is further demonstrated by her love for Nikola Tesla’s observation of the frequencies of everything; her collaboration with a neuroscientist to use an Emotiv neuroheadset; her discussion of thought consciousness, telepathy and quantum physics with Antonio Damasio. CPAB facilitates instruction based telematic telekinesis competition, which is linked to Abramoviç’s own use of crowdfunding for the development of Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI) as well as wider crowd funding for projects involving telekinesis. The Emotiv brand neuroheadset used by Abramoviç and a team of collaborators also gained crowdfunding development support with advertised telekinetic promises, as have at least two Kickstarter funded computer game campaigns that have similarly promised telekinesis through neuroheadset interaction – Son of Nor and another game that invites one to throw trucks with one’s brain.