Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art. Volume 1 - страница 11

Eadweard Muybridge, Woman Walking Down Stairs, Chrono-photography, 1887

In another project, “The Abramovic Method” (2016), at the Benaki Museum in Athens, the viewer becomes part of the performance that takes place on a gently sloping ramp that connects floors of the museum on the way to the main exhibition space. The artist has deliberately chosen a space in the museum that is usually considered secondary, to be passed through quickly. Participants in the performance are forced to move in slow motion, concentrating on a more profound consciousness of their bodies in time and space; this is particularly noticeable in contrast to the movement of other visitors to the museum. In this way, Abramovic induces the viewers to focus, through body experience, on a specific “episode” of life.

Artists began to portray movement on stairs in painting at the end of the 19^>thcentury. Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1912 cubist painting, “Nude Descending a Staircase” (V1, p. 183), which The New York Times christened “Explosion at the Tile Factory”, depicts a woman’s motion down five steps along a spiral staircase through the successive overlapping of individual fragments. The painting was inspired by the new technology of cinema and particularly by Eadweard Muybridge’s famous series of photographs “Woman Descending Stairs”, made in 1887.

Gerhard Richter’s “Ema. Nude on a Staircase” (V1, p. 185), painted in 1966 is a comment on Duchamp’s work. Like Duchamp, Richter based his painting on a photograph. The model was the artist’s wife, descending an ordinary staircase devoid of details that would indicate a particular time. Richter’s almost ghostly image, seemingly woven of dreams and memories, renders Duchamp’s experiment to the limits of traditional portrait painting, a genre much out of favor in the art world of the 1960s. Richter’s painting later served as an inspiration for Bernhard Schlink’s 2014 novel, “The Woman on the Stairs”.

The phenomenon of movement both up and down steps is the subject of Mario Ceroli’s sculpture “La Scala” (V1, p. 186). His staircase with profile cut-outs of men and women, made of unpainted wood, captures the various phases of this movement, focusing on the contrast of static and dynamic. In her live installation “Plastic” (2015–16) by the artist and choreographer Maria Hassabi explores the same dichotomy of static and dynamic, examining pauses both plastic and temporal in a museum space. Hassabi placed performers along the flight of stairs lying perfectly still, contrasting sharply with the rapid flow of visitors around them. Thus, the artist expands our idea of the obviously utilitarian significance of the stairs in the museum, slowing down the rhythm of our reaction to its meaning.