Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present
Marina Abramović. Portrait with Flowers. 2009. Black-and-white gelatin silver print; photo: Marco Anelli. © 2010 Marina Abramović. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Abramovic has always dealt in shock and endurance, punishing the body, pushing viewers out of their comfort zones and the show at MoMA deals with these full on. At MoMA she is attempting to go the limit, and also to reproduce literally the metaphysical interchange between artists and viewers. For the 700 hours of the exhibition, Abramovic will sit in the middle of MoMA’s atrium, at a table. You can sit across from her. There you will stare at her while she silently stares back. Viewers cried, ran away, or looked sick. There’s something powerful and uncanny and pure about an unbroken gaze.
Probably the most talked-about part of the exhibition is a re-creation of a 1977 work in which Ms. Abramovic and her partner then, the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay, faced each other naked within the frame of a gallery doorway, forcing people who wanted to enter to squeeze between them. I felt it too personal, too much of an invasion of their space to walk between them but almost more interesting was watching how other people reacted and responded. Rather than shock or disgust, though, the overall mood in the galleries tended to be one of great seriousness, occasionally verging on reverence.
The one that moved me close to a trance was a woman perched nude on a bicycle seat high on a gallery wall, bathed in light, in a pose reminiscent of a crucifixion. Another a nude man lay under a skeleton to make it appear to breathe. In “House With An Ocean View” (2002) she lived in Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea for 12 days, confined to three rooms, together they suggested a triptych elevated above the floor, with the front wall open, allowing visitors to watch her ritualistically nap, shower, dress, drink water and urinate, then do the same all over again was beautifully recreated.
Whether you like this exhibition, laugh at it, or think of it a freak-show, there’s little doubt that Abramovic is opening up MoMA, injecting it with life, altering its course in ways that are excited to imagine for the future.
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