Performing the Absolute. Marina Abramovic Organizing the Unfinished Business of Arthur Schopenhauer

Abstract

Performance is a way of organising for value creation. The kind of value performance art aims to generate is neither use-nor exchange-value but aesthetic value, philosophically defined as searching for `the absolute'. Philosophical esthetics, from Kant to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, thus claims that art is the modern gateway to metaphysics. Pictures, texts and other artefacts are spin-offs of artists main function; performing the absolute. This paper illustrates this philosophical position by taking three practical examples which show how the artists Hans Makart, Herman Nitsch and Marina Abramovic — three famous performance art managers — go about organizing the supply of an art to satisfy a demand for metaphysics.