Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present – Sitting with Abramović

Museum of Modern Art
New York, NY
March 15 – May 31, 2010

Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present, Museum of Modern Art, NY

© 2010 Marina Abramović. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Scott Rudd, courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, NY.

A good friend who is an artist and curator from the West Coast had come to New York for the first time in five years mostly to see this show and to try to sit with Marina Abramović. We went early to get to the Museum and wait on line so that we would be in a good position to do just that. But, as it turned out, we weren’t early enough. There were at least thirty or more potential sitters-with-Abramović on line ahead of us. After they were escorted to their holding area, the relevant guard came and announced that there was ZERO chance of getting to sit with her that day. Bummer. And all the way from the West Coast.

We waited a bit longer before we were admitted to the exhibit, at which point we immediately went up to the MOMA Atrium – a vast vertical space – and entered the arena where Abramović was already sitting in a chair wearing a long white dress. (I gather that sometimes wears red or blue instead. But apparently she always wears her long, black hair in a braid that descends on the left side of her neck.) We sat down right at the edge of the demarcated square around which there were careful instructions not to go inside, and the first participant (I almost want to say contestant) entered the square and sat across from MB. They sat there and looked at one another and the rest of us sat there, or stood there, looking at them. There were four intensely bright photo lights perched high above The glare took some getting used to.

There was something striking about this group of several hundred people ranged around this square looking at two people sit silently. I found it pretty exhilarating, actually, and wound up sitting there for about an hour.

My friend wound up positioning himself in MB’s line of view so that he would have the sense of looking at her, and she him, even though he had not, alas, been one of the selected participants. It turned out to be a good second best for him and, in the end, he felt like he had something reasonably close to the experience of sitting with her.

Though I just sat on the sidelines, not in a direct visual line, I also had the feeling of sitting with her, which was nice. And, for that matter. I had the feeling of sitting with everybody else who there. The piece was minimal, in the sense that it just involved sitting and looking, but I thought it was great. It had a monumental quality in the midst of its minimalism.

In his great painting, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor, 1656), Velásquez depicted something about the act of looking, about being an artist in relation to an audience, and about being the subject as well as the witness of the work. Here, Abramović enacts, rather than depicts, the same set of themes and there is something captivating about the fact that she is there looking at her subject, being looked at by her subject, and creating a scene in which an audience is watching the lookers looking. (You might check out Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, for a thorough treatment of Las Meninas.)

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (detail)

The rules of the game regarding this performance are that anyone can come and sit in the chair opposite Abramović for any length of time. The first few people in the morning took about fifteen minutes each, and it looked as though the line were moving along at a reasonable pace. Maybe they would take more than the allotted thirty for the day? Should we try again to get on the line?

As it turned out, we did not get on the line, but decided to go see the other part of the Abramović show, the retrospective. It’s a good thing we decided to do that because, as it turned out, there was a woman dressed all in black – the flip side of Abramović’s all white – who settled in for the entire afternoon. So, as it turned out, there were a bunch of those original thirty who wound up waiting the whole day without ever making it to the hot seat.

Seeing this, questions of the moral economics related to the participation in the performance welled up in me. Sure, it seemed like a great thing, in one sense, to try to sit there, opposite Abramović, for as long as possible – after all, Abramović was sitting there for as long as possible. But then, wasn’t that kind of unfair to all of those minions waiting on the line?

When we got to the museum in the morning, I heard a rumor that there was going to be a “take a number” Deli counter type system that would allow people who were lining up to go do other things and check back once in awhile to see what number was being served. But no, it was not like that – if you wanted to sit with Marina, you had to stay in line. As well, there was some running and shoving to get into line, which did not go along very well with the meditative tenor of the piece.

It would have been nice to figure out a more equitable and reasonable system for letting people sit with Abramović. I am anxious to see, in Abramović’s documentation of the show, whether this soft social underbelly will get acknowledged as part of the performance itself. Other performance artists – I’m thinking of Christo and Jean-Claude – take social processes peripheral to the performance, but related to it, as relevant parts of the larger work. Will Abramović do this? Will she regard how long some people choose to sit with her as related to the distribution of scarce temporal and aesthetic resources? Or, will she be self-focused, and dwell only on the act of the individual sitting encounters which make up the formal part of the work? It should be interesting to see what her take on it is.

As can be seen from the body of works comprising the retrospective, Abramović has emphasized, throughout much of her career, the cathartic element of performance. This piece develops, from that, into a more meditative direction. In the 1980s, Abramović and her partner Ulay performed a sequence of works that involved sitting across a table, looking at one another for seven hours at a stretch, in twenty-two different locations around the world. In that case, the works were separated in time, not done, as in the current work, day after day after day for a series of months. Though they did not demonstrate the monumental and continuous commitment of effort required by the current work, they did embody much of the same blend of the meditative and the – what shall I call it – exhausting – that the current work involves. But the cathartic element, though implied in the exhaustion, is not explicit, as it is many of the earlier works.

The current work offers a set of associations which play off one another: on the one hand, as mentioned above, it is a work about an artist looking at her subject who looks back at her and all of which is looked at by an audience of onlookers. (And, of course, the whole scene is documented, on film and video, to the hilt, so there is the additional looking of the artist as documentarian as well.) In addition to this, there is the act of endurance displayed in the continuation of the work which, on the surface, is placid, but which, by virtue of its insistent, daily demands, is implicitly brutal.

In the course of looking at Abramović and her sequence of partners look at one another, a natural question arises: they are looking, but what do they see? And perhaps this is the final and most binding impression of this piece. It is, on the surface, about the act of looking, but along with that, it is about what is on the other side of looking. And when we, as an audience, look at looking, what do we see? Why do hundreds of us sit and watch patiently as the artist sits and watches? Why do we line up for hours hoping that we may be the ones that get to look into her eyes, and to be seen by them? In the future, when we look at the documentation in book or video form made of this performance, how will we see those, with what quality of attention will we offer them, and what, in practice, will be the effect on our ways of looking and seeing?

I will deal with the other part of this show, The Retrospective, in the next post, to be published shortly.

– BADMan