Body of Work

So simple and direct.  An artist agrees to sit still in a space, across from anyone who cares to sit in her presence, every day for going on 70 days.  An ordeal, a stunt, the distillation of a body of work to its most essential.  Marina Abramovic: the Artist is Present charts the progress of artist Abramovic’s title piece for her monumental retrospective of performance art held at MOMA in New York in 2010.

Near the end of the film of the same title, the show’s curator Klaus Biesenbach describes the work as self-portraiture.  The art and artist are inseparable, both are present simultaneously.  Through her physical, live presence and mute stillness, Abramovic is both art object and art maker. The human aspect of her feat is never absent; she is adamant about the mental preparation necessary for the work of being present to thousands of visitors.  And watching her with a succession of sitters, the effect is unquestioningly moving.  Many sitters find tears welling up and trickling down their faces.  Is it the cumulative exhaustion of waiting for their time with the artist?  Or does the simple act of undiminished presence—minus distraction or digression—move people in unexpected ways?

When a young woman, inspired by Abramovic’s work and example, attempts an intervention of her own, she — like another would-be art upstager — is removed.  Where the male interventionist wants to confront Abramovic wearing a screened image over his face —providing another layer of comment or response to her work—the young would-be nudist seems less calculated, more naively in thrall to what she perceives as an opportunity to be spontaneous and “in the moment.”  There’s a part of me that questions why the security guards don’t permit her to remain.  Do they fear the work becoming some sort of sideshow, with sitters using their turn with Abramovic to perform bizarre stunts?   These two viewers want to turn the gallery into an ersatz theatre, adding themselves as performers to what is already a carefully calibrated performance.

Looking at art when the art can also look back, breathe, and emote.  That’s what “The Artist is Present” is all about.  In every way, this piece is a summation of Abramovic’s work, paring back her earlier provocative, often disturbing pieces, to their minimal essence: viewer and art.   No noise, distractions, props, and only minimal movement.  By taking Biesenbach’s cue in titling the retrospective The Artist is Present, Abramovic underlines the quintessential aspect of all art: its relationship to the viewer.  In this particular case, however, it also speaks to the endurance of the artist herself, whose performance exists only in time, not space.

The conundrum of how a performance artist survives within a commodified art market is touched on by Abramovic’s gallerist.  Through the sale of stills of her performance pieces, he created a mechanism to fund her work that has since increased in demand.  In her work and on camera, Abramovic is striking, a woman fully in control of her medium and confident of her impact.  Not that she’s immune to nerves; days leading up to the exhibition’s opening, she is seen vomiting and sick in bed from anxiety about the endurance test ahead.  One of the most moving encounters during The Artist is Present occurs near the beginning when Ulay, her former partner and collaborator of twelve years, sits across from her.  As she opens her eyes and recognizes him, tears well in her eyes as they do in his.  Breaking from her posture of stillness, she reaches across the table for his outstretched hands.  Applause breaks across the gallery.  

The glimpses of their work together—along with hints at their life as a couple—are tantalizing.  Abramovic was clearly the instigator of several of the pieces.  Her strength and stamina—a legacy of her war hero parents—are acknowledged by Ulay who found himself unable to withstand the physical toll of "Nightsea Crossing."  In that piece, Ulay and Abramovic silently fasted across from each other sitting at a table, in some durations, for several weeks at a time.  Later in the film, Ulay addresses the distance Abramovic has travelled in her career, her dedication to her art, the fact that she, unlike other contemporaries, is still making demanding performances.  If there’s a touch of envy of her fame and comfortable stature—we see her delight in designer couture—there is also respect and admiration.

If she were not so seductive—Biesenbach astutely describes his relationship with Abramovic as an affair—the artist would seem dauntingly formidable.  Moments of humour and candour go far in leavening the rigorous discipline and determination that feed her work.  It’s heartening to catch a glimpse of her at play with David Blaine, a magician, who wants to stage something “special” for the exhibition.  When her gallerist hears of Blaine’s proposal, he immediately shuts it down and Abramovic agrees.  With a history of work taking performance art’s examination of the body to dangerous extremes, Abramovic is alert to her gallerist’s distinction between her work’s reputation for absolute reality and magic’s true claim to illusion.

That art was once entirely illusionistic seems largely old hat.  Yet watching footage of Abramovic’s earlier work and recreations of her historic pieces where the performers are mostly nude, connections with the-Nude-in art are hard to miss.  If the radical performance artists of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s sought to attack the nude as subject, the cumulative effect of Abramovic’s work seems to have revived what might otherwise have seemed academic.  Having to literally walk through the narrow space between a nude couple facing each other, museum visitors must come in physical contact with one or both nudes.

While the bane of performance art may always be the ease with which it can be dismissed as a stunt, The Artist is Present shows a range of viewer responses that the apparently average 30-second view of traditional paintings and sculpture does not enjoy.   Confronted by art, with the artist, present, so-called ordinary folk are moved by what is a unique and personal experience.