Seven Easy Pieces - a series of performances given by Marina Abramovic at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2005.
In an interview in the New York Times in early November, 2005, Abramovic explained the impetus for the performances. The interview states that "she felt a strong need to preserve the memory of performances that influenced her as an artist. There's nobody to keep the history straight ... I feel almost, like, obliged. I felt like I have this function to do it.' And this sense only grew stronger when she began to see ideas behind many important performances borrowed with no credit given, or appropriated by advertising and fashion."[1]
Beginning on November 9, Abramovic presented Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum. On seven consecutiv… nights she recreated the works of five artists first performed in the 60s and 70s, in addition to performing two personal pieces.
Here is a full list of the works performed:
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 Beuys's How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965)
Abramovic's own Lips of Thomas (1975)
Abramovic's own Entering the Other Side (2005)

With Seven Easy Pieces Abramovic reenacts seminal performance works by her peers dating from the 1960s and ’70s. The project is premised on the fact that little documentation exists for most performances from this critical early period; one often has to rely upon testimonies from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given piece. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibility of redoing and preserving an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral. Read more...