Marina Abramovic

Ulay and Marina Abramović, "AAA AAA", 1978 The 9 minutes and 51 seconds of performance art documentation portrays Abramovic and Ulay standing and facing each other. They look each other and make 'AAA' sound with open mouths. Gradually the 'AAA' sound gets louder and louder and for last fifteen minutes, they move closer and almost yell into each other's opened mouths. Sometimes they breath at the same time; sometimes the duration of the sound varied. For instance, while Ulay keeps making 'AAA' sound Abramovic takes a breath in. In the beginning, Ulay and Abramovic's bodies seem balanced and parallel. They both make sounds and scream at each other's faces. Their bodies give a balance of both contents and contexts. They slowly build up the tension raising the volume of the sound. The subject of this performance is voices and sounds. Until exhaustion, they scream at the top of their voices into each other's mouths. Their continuous and gradual change of sounds gives both animalistic quality and challenge of human body. They kind of communicate each other just making 'AAA' sound without any linguistic words. They use the space quite tight because the camera takes both artists filled in the whole scenes. Also, the gradual zoom-in gives the intensity and the extremeness of increasing pitch of screaming. The performance was documented in black and white film . Also, "the performance was repeated to be filmed a year after its original creation in Amsterdam by Louis van Gasteren, for documentation purposes."