Ten Notes on Marina Abramović's 'The Artist is Present'
It’s now 44 days (and counting) since I visited the opening of Marina Abramović’s major retrospective, ‘The Artist is Present’, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. That’s also 44 days (and counting) since Abramović embarked on her longest ever durational piece, a new work also entitled The Artist is Present, in which the artist sits in silence at a table in the museum’s huge atrium gallery, and members of the public are invited to sit on the chair opposite her to share in silent contemplation of each other. Visiting the exhibition again this week prompted a few thoughts.
1. ‘The Artist is Present’: yup, she certainly is. There she is on posters in the subway, on the wall-size portrait photograph of her at the exhibition entrance, on the covers of the piles of catalogues in the museum shop, in the portraits of her in the final room of the exhibition and, of course, in the works themselves. Her image is everywhere you turn in this show. This is not an exhibition about the body, or performance, or re-performance, or whatever – though it is, of course, about these things too – but about the life and career of a 63-year-old artist born in the former Yugoslavia, her relationship and work with the artist Ulay, and the subsequent development of her work after they parted ways. Abramović herself has said that her body is the subject, object and medium of her work. This is exhibition-making as autobiography.
2. All those images of Abramović make me think that she is as much an artist who uses performance to create images, as she is a performance artist. Some of those documentary photographs of her are so iconic (with all the religious resonances of that word – see point number 5), that the fact of the performance can seem almost secondary. I’m thinking here about a piece such as Rest Energy (1980), in which she and Ulay hold a bow and arrow in tension, the arrow pointing at Abramović’s chest. It’s less of a record of a performance than a striking and carefully constructed image, one both instantaneously grasped (you don’t need to study it for more than a second to work out what’s going on) and laden with symbolism.
3. This sense of pictorial composition is strongly emphasized by staging in ‘The Artist is Present’. At least four of the re-performed works are presented in the exhibition like images: the 1977 piece Relation in Time, in which the performers sit back to back, their long hair tied together in a knot; Point of Contact (1980), where the performers hold their fingertips as close as they can without touching whilst maintaining eye contact; Nude with Skeleton (2002–5), in which a naked performer lies underneath a human skeleton, and Luminosity, a piece Abramovic originally performed in 1997, hanging naked on the wall whilst maintaining a cruciform pose. At MoMA these re-performed works are presented with dramatic spotlighting, like venerated Old Master paintings. Relation in Time and Point of Contact are presented in the ‘frame’ of a specially built temporary wall/box – Relation in Time is watched through a rectangular window and Point of Contact re-performed beneath a kind of mini proscenium arch.
4. Bodies are mostly symmetrical forms, but the world they inhabit isn’t. Abramović’s presentation of her body is notably classical: in pictorializing it, in her staging, she privileges symmetry, a strong central image, and formal balance. In ‘The Artist is Present’, for instance, the table and chairs are placed centrally in a large demarcated square area of the atrium. Four strong lamps at each corner of the square illuminate the piece. The colour of her dress (there are three dresses apparently: red, dark blue and white) against the grey of the gallery floor and the beige of the wooden furniture, serves to keep the viewer’s eye centered on Abramović.
5. These formal layouts, and the content of some of the works themselves, speak of ritual and highly stylized types of interaction. I’m not sure how I feel about this, since it seems to me like religious affect. Of course, you can extrapolate religious or spiritual themes from her interest in the limits of consciousness as perceived through the body when it is pushed to extreme limits through pain or duration. So too her interest in the singularity of the self in relation to another individual or to a group. But I can’t help thinking of flagellantism and various extreme penitent Catholic orders when I see some of Abramović’s work, which for me gives it an uncomfortably pious aspect. This sense of piousness is an effect of the solemn register in which the work exists, its demonstrative gravitas. (This register admits little levity, which seems sad to me, since our bodies and how people interact can be pretty funny – a key part of being human.) There’s also a studied austerity in the work, a kind of quasi-monastic aesthetic: the simple wooden table and chairs in The Artist is Present, for instance, or the hard wooden block that the performer lies on in Nude with Skeleton. It makes me think that this is art made by someone who at some level still believes in the sacred aura of the secular white cube art space.
6. I wonder to what extent, on some subconscious level, the ritualistic atmospherics account for the kinds of reactions people have had to participating in The Artist is Present?
7. Speaking of all things formal, what of the long ball gown Abramovic is wearing for The Artist is Present? Or the crisp white shirts and black suits worn by the people re-performing Relation in Time and Point of Contact? The similarity of these clothes to those worn by Abramović and Ulay in the original performances fixes the pieces to a particular moment in time, which makes ‘re-performing’ these works more like historical re-enactment than re-performance in the present. There’s also something awfully old-fashioned about the formal clothing, like classical musicians dressing in smart evening wear for a concert. You might say it gives the work a sense of occasion, though would it make that much difference if they were done in jeans and a T-shirt?
8. Why are the naked performers all of such similar slim, good-looking and well-toned body types? Do you have to share a similar physique to the young Abramović and Ulay in order to perform the works? Is there an age limit? Are they re-performing the works or are they just avatars? Are the rotund, the beanpole-thin, the ugly, the old or the awkwardly shaped not representative of the human body too? Do they not also experience pain, endurance, fear, danger and states of meditative exaltation?
9. The power of Abramović’s performances from the 1970s and early ‘80s to some extent lies in the specific circumstances and intensity of her relationship with Ulay. You can recreate the work, but not the relationship.
10. Abramović’s exhibition opened around the same time as another much-talked-about performance-based show in New York closed: Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim Museum. Sehgal’s exhibition included the piece This is Progress, which involved a continuous conversation from the bottom to the top of the museum’s famous spiral ramp. It began with a child who asks the visitor for their definition of progress. As you walked up the ramp, the child handed you over to a teenager, who continued the conversation, then you moved to a thirty-something, and finally someone in late middle-age. I saw the show and ‘did’ the piece three times. Repeat experiences made me think that Sehgal’s piece was like an artificial intelligence software programme: something that had the appearance of exchange, of conversation, of dialogue, but which when repeatedly engaged with revealed itself to be built around certain fixed rules of engagement. It couldn’t refer to itself, for instance; the performers wouldn’t answer questions about the piece of work. You could ‘reset’ the piece by going back to the beginning, and try having a different conversation each time, but the effect was remarkably similar even down to having the same conversation if you happened to end up with the same performer more than once. Abramović’s method of communicating with her audience is to sit in silence with them. Sehgal’s method is to engage his in multiple simultaneous conversations. In both instances, the conversation is one that exists in and creates a public spectacle. But what, really, is the conversation about?
It’s now 44 days (and counting) since I visited the opening of Marina Abramović’s major retrospective, ‘The Artist is Present’, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. That’s also 44 days (and counting) since Abramović embarked on her longest ever durational piece, a new work also entitled The Artist is Present, in which the artist sits in silence at a table in the museum’s huge atrium gallery, and members of the public are invited to sit on the chair opposite her to share in silent contemplation of each other. Visiting the exhibition again this week prompted a few thoughts.
1. ‘The Artist is Present’: yup, she certainly is. There she is on posters in the subway, on the wall-size portrait photograph of her at the exhibition entrance, on the covers of the piles of catalogues in the museum shop, in the portraits of her in the final room of the exhibition and, of course, in the works themselves. Her image is everywhere you turn in this show. This is not an exhibition about the body, or performance, or re-performance, or whatever – though it is, of course, about these things too – but about the life and career of a 63-year-old artist born in the former Yugoslavia, her relationship and work with the artist Ulay, and the subsequent development of her work after they parted ways. Abramović herself has said that her body is the subject, object and medium of her work. This is exhibition-making as autobiography.
2. All those images of Abramović make me think that she is as much an artist who uses performance to create images, as she is a performance artist. Some of those documentary photographs of her are so iconic (with all the religious resonances of that word – see point number 5), that the fact of the performance can seem almost secondary. I’m thinking here about a piece such as Rest Energy (1980), in which she and Ulay hold a bow and arrow in tension, the arrow pointing at Abramović’s chest. It’s less of a record of a performance than a striking and carefully constructed image, one both instantaneously grasped (you don’t need to study it for more than a second to work out what’s going on) and laden with symbolism.
3. This sense of pictorial composition is strongly emphasized by staging in ‘The Artist is Present’. At least four of the re-performed works are presented in the exhibition like images: the 1977 piece Relation in Time, in which the performers sit back to back, their long hair tied together in a knot; Point of Contact (1980), where the performers hold their fingertips as close as they can without touching whilst maintaining eye contact; Nude with Skeleton (2002–5), in which a naked performer lies underneath a human skeleton, and Luminosity, a piece Abramovic originally performed in 1997, hanging naked on the wall whilst maintaining a cruciform pose. At MoMA these re-performed works are presented with dramatic spotlighting, like venerated Old Master paintings. Relation in Time and Point of Contact are presented in the ‘frame’ of a specially built temporary wall/box – Relation in Time is watched through a rectangular window and Point of Contact re-performed beneath a kind of mini proscenium arch.
4. Bodies are mostly symmetrical forms, but the world they inhabit isn’t. Abramović’s presentation of her body is notably classical: in pictorializing it, in her staging, she privileges symmetry, a strong central image, and formal balance. In ‘The Artist is Present’, for instance, the table and chairs are placed centrally in a large demarcated square area of the atrium. Four strong lamps at each corner of the square illuminate the piece. The colour of her dress (there are three dresses apparently: red, dark blue and white) against the grey of the gallery floor and the beige of the wooden furniture, serves to keep the viewer’s eye centered on Abramović.
5. These formal layouts, and the content of some of the works themselves, speak of ritual and highly stylized types of interaction. I’m not sure how I feel about this, since it seems to me like religious affect. Of course, you can extrapolate religious or spiritual themes from her interest in the limits of consciousness as perceived through the body when it is pushed to extreme limits through pain or duration. So too her interest in the singularity of the self in relation to another individual or to a group. But I can’t help thinking of flagellantism and various extreme penitent Catholic orders when I see some of Abramović’s work, which for me gives it an uncomfortably pious aspect. This sense of piousness is an effect of the solemn register in which the work exists, its demonstrative gravitas. (This register admits little levity, which seems sad to me, since our bodies and how people interact can be pretty funny – a key part of being human.) There’s also a studied austerity in the work, a kind of quasi-monastic aesthetic: the simple wooden table and chairs in The Artist is Present, for instance, or the hard wooden block that the performer lies on in Nude with Skeleton. It makes me think that this is art made by someone who at some level still believes in the sacred aura of the secular white cube art space.
6. I wonder to what extent, on some subconscious level, the ritualistic atmospherics account for the kinds of reactions people have had to participating in The Artist is Present?
7. Speaking of all things formal, what of the long ball gown Abramovic is wearing for The Artist is Present? Or the crisp white shirts and black suits worn by the people re-performing Relation in Time and Point of Contact? The similarity of these clothes to those worn by Abramović and Ulay in the original performances fixes the pieces to a particular moment in time, which makes ‘re-performing’ these works more like historical re-enactment than re-performance in the present. There’s also something awfully old-fashioned about the formal clothing, like classical musicians dressing in smart evening wear for a concert. You might say it gives the work a sense of occasion, though would it make that much difference if they were done in jeans and a T-shirt?
8. Why are the naked performers all of such similar slim, good-looking and well-toned body types? Do you have to share a similar physique to the young Abramović and Ulay in order to perform the works? Is there an age limit? Are they re-performing the works or are they just avatars? Are the rotund, the beanpole-thin, the ugly, the old or the awkwardly shaped not representative of the human body too? Do they not also experience pain, endurance, fear, danger and states of meditative exaltation?
9. The power of Abramović’s performances from the 1970s and early ‘80s to some extent lies in the specific circumstances and intensity of her relationship with Ulay. You can recreate the work, but not the relationship.
10. Abramović’s exhibition opened around the same time as another much-talked-about performance-based show in New York closed: Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim Museum. Sehgal’s exhibition included the piece This is Progress, which involved a continuous conversation from the bottom to the top of the museum’s famous spiral ramp. It began with a child who asks the visitor for their definition of progress. As you walked up the ramp, the child handed you over to a teenager, who continued the conversation, then you moved to a thirty-something, and finally someone in late middle-age. I saw the show and ‘did’ the piece three times. Repeat experiences made me think that Sehgal’s piece was like an artificial intelligence software programme: something that had the appearance of exchange, of conversation, of dialogue, but which when repeatedly engaged with revealed itself to be built around certain fixed rules of engagement. It couldn’t refer to itself, for instance; the performers wouldn’t answer questions about the piece of work. You could ‘reset’ the piece by going back to the beginning, and try having a different conversation each time, but the effect was remarkably similar even down to having the same conversation if you happened to end up with the same performer more than once. Abramović’s method of communicating with her audience is to sit in silence with them. Sehgal’s method is to engage his in multiple simultaneous conversations. In both instances, the conversation is one that exists in and creates a public spectacle. But what, really, is the conversation about?
