Seven Easy Pieces screens at the Contemporary

On Thursday night The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center is hosting a screening of and commentary on Seven Easy Pieces, a 2005 film of seven Marina Abramović's performances at the Guggenheim. Owing to her wildly popular and much talked about retrospective at MOMA, Abramovć has become the closest thing to a pop star in the world of performance art lately. She's been making gold food with "literary" icon James Franco, having telepathic conversations with Bjork, and generally receiving the sort of attention that an artist working in her field rarely does.

In a way, that's exactly what's so cool about Seven Easy Pieces. Five of the seven performances are reenactments of work from her peers from the 60's and 70's, lending a bit of her prominence to other artists who seriously deserve it. If you're looking for an introduction to a larger understanding of performance, these reenactments of work by artists like Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci are a great place to start. If you're already familiar with those names, it may be even more profound to see Abramović recreate works that were hardly documented though continue to be talked about today.

A screening like this isn't easy to come by (don't bother looking for it on Netflix) and a DVD couldn't possibly provide the same sort of commentary that Contemporary artistic director Stuart Horodner will provide during the film.

Seven Easy Pieces, a documentary by Babette Mangolte, screens for free at the Contemporary on Thurs., July 22 at 6:30 pm.