C magazine | 2010
Review of Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010, by Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh.
This spring, New York became host to an exhibition that was deemed legendary even before it opened. Marina Abramović’s retrospective The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art spanned nearly 40 years of this performance artist’s groundbreaking career. The combination of historic documentation and reenactments represents one of the first serious attempts at presenting a retrospective of performance work to a broad audience within a museum context. The show raises fundamental questions about the future of work that is ephemeral and deeply entangled with a single persona. Few living artists have achieved the same iconic status as Marina Abramović, self-proclaimed “grandmother of performance art”.
Filling the monumental atrium of MoMA is The Artist Is Present (2010), a new performance by Abramović based on Nightsea Crossing (22 performances, 1981-1987) which was made in collaboration with her former partner in art and life, Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). Abramović holds court, sitting calm and statuesque on a wooden chair, staring toward another chair made accessible to visitors. Each day a long cue developed and was populated by young performance artists coming to pay homage, curious first-timers to the museum, and an astonishing cast of recognizable personalities such as James Franco, Lou Reid, Chrissie Iles, Björk, and most movingly, Ulay. In total she faced 1545 visitors over 716.5 hours. The performance was illuminated with elaborate film lighting and streamed live on the museum’s website, infinitely expanding access to the show and establishing a platform for gaining 15 minutes of fame.
Abramović’s career was divided into three distinct sections: early solo pieces, collaborations with Ulay, and recent work. Before entering the main, visitors were faced with Abramović and Ulay’s iconic Citrôen military van which contained their naively optimistic manifesto. In the manifesto, the artists vow never to repeat themselves which is a rather paradoxical proclamation, given Abramović’s more recent ventures into re-enactment. This document hails from another time when presence was of primary concern and political consequence.
The first part of the exhibition consists of video and photographic documentation of past actions, ephemera, and re-created performance props. Most prominent is a video of Rhythm 0 (1974) for which Abramović made herself available to an audience who could use 72 different objects on her naked body however they wanted. The gun, bullet and lipstick on display are enough to give one chills.
The second part of the exhibition bleeds together with the first through the re-performance of Imponderabilia (1977), where two naked performers face one another in a doorway and visitors are free to pass between them (re-performance is the term adopted by MoMA’s for these re-enactments.) The piece was originally performed by Abramović and Ulay at Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna Bolonga. During my visit, a doorway leading from the first to second spaces of the exhibition was flanked by two naked men positioned with so little space between them that I could not help but graze their bodies with my own as I passed between them. There was intensity to the experience, which came from breaking their steady gaze, and invading their personal space.
This re-performance opened up fresh questions while maintaining the most poignant element of Imponderabilia; the direct engagement with, and challenging of the audience. However, unlike the Abramović and Ulay original, the audience at MoMA did not have to pass through the performers since there was an unobstructed entrance a few meters away. This work was re-enacted by both male and female performers in variable combination, meaning that sometimes two men or two women performed together. This created an interesting queerification of what was originally a hetero-normative piece; an appropriate modernization of a piece that is more than 30 years old.
Unfortunately, the re-performances Relation in Time (1977), in which two performers are bound, back to back, by matting their hair together, and Point of Contact (1980), where two standing figures extend their index fingers toward one another while staring each other in the eye, are disappointing in comparison to Imponderabilia. This is largely due to their confinement in cordoned off spaces that are lit like theaters. Furthermore, I got no sense that there is anything a stake on a personal level, as with Abramović and Ulay.
The third section is dominated by Abramović’s Balkan Baroque (1997), an installation comprised of an overwhelming number of cow bones that are the reminisce of a gruesome and arduous cleaning project undertaken during the 47th Venice Biennale. Alongside the remains are a video of the act, some other more didactic footage, and props from this stomach turning piece.. Balkan Baroque introduces the paradigm for her more recent solo work. Themes of loss, death and traces of her Balkan ancestry are everywhere. One startling exception is Seven Easy Pieces (2005), a series of re-performances, done by Abramović at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which bring her iconic performances from earlier in the century back to life.
In Seven Easy Pieces, Abramović tests the implications and practicalities of presenting historical performance before staging her own early performance works. The artist may be present now, but she is clearly preparing for a time when these works will have to stand without the support of her formidable presence. More than anything, Seven Easy Pieces brings back the intensity for which the artist is known and revered. Her love for and commitment to performance is made clear, and she takes a stand on what the future of performance can be and places herself at the center of that discourse. The Artist is Present shares with her Guggenheim re-performance an unyielding commitment to challenging audiences and herself. Most of her recent works lack the interpersonal element since many of them are made directly for the camera. Ironically, it is Seven Easy Pieces that reinvigorates this part of her oeuvre. She combines the kind of live, and interpersonal works for which she has gained a committed audience and at the same time challenges the notion that she need be there at all.
Upon leaving the exhibition and passing Abramović performing The Artist Is Present a second time, urgenent questions arose: what happens to work like this when artists are replaced by actors? To what degree does the museum context necessitate a theatrical and even stagy presentation? Who controls the right to re-perform works? Who is given this opportunity and by what means? In its multiplicity The Artist Is Present admits that there is no one answer.