Reproducing the White Bourgeois: The Sitting-Room Drama of Marina Abramović

In the late-19th-century Euro-American theatre of domestic realism, the tête-à-tête on the sitting room set was the signature convention for the staging of intimate relational exchange. Since the 1980s Marina Abramović has been reproducing this sedentary bodily arrangement in much of her work. While Abramović has sought to position her performance art in counterpoint to white bourgeois theatre, her sedentary dramas are haunted by the ghosts of this seemingly unrelated genealogy of performance.