End of a Credo
Mills, Nicolaus
THE LAST PAGE In the field of performance art, Marina Abramovic is a legend, and her recently concluded six-week show, Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art in New...
...In April alone, three people were removed from MoMA for "inappropriate touching...
...The two figures are so close together that the muse-umgoer must pass sideways and make the decision of whom to face...
...THE LAST PAGE In the field of performance art, Marina Abramovic is a legend, and her recently concluded six-week show, Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has been a turning point in giving performance art mainstream status...
...It is an idea that did not originate with Abramovic...
...As early as 1965, Yoko Ono staged a Carnegie Recital Hall performance, Cut Piece, in which she invited the audience to cut pieces out of her clothing while she sat immobile on the floor with a pair of scissors next to her...
...One elderly man even had his thirty-year MoMA membership revoked...
...The irony is that in the end what was most important about The Artist Is Present is that it defied the emphasis performance art has traditionally placed on spontaneity and the uniqueness of the moment...
...NICOLAUS MILLS...
...But it was hard to know what emphasis to give it when it was also competing with film of Abramovic cutting a five-pointed star on her stomach with a razor or lying on blocks of ice arranged like a crucifix...
...It turned out, however, that for a small number of museumgoers, the question of which way to turn became, Whom to grope...
...When I was at The Artist Is Present, most men, myself included, turned toward the woman (better, I thought, to brush up against two breasts than a penis...
...A few seconds later, you enter the main galleries of the show, and you have a sense you don't have at a theater or a concert hall that you have in some way contributed to the performance...
...At the political core of the sixty-three-year-old Abramovic 's work, like that of many performance artists, is the egalitarian belief that those who come to see her should not remain passive spectators...
...The "no repetition" credo that Abramovic and her fellow performance artists have lived by since the 1960s is over...
...But over the years Abramovic has taken participation much further than Yoko Ono ever did, and nowhere is her stretching of artistic boundaries clearer than in "Imponderabilia," the Abramovic performance at MoMA that got the most attention from the media...
...Most women did the opposite...
...Balkan Baroque" was repellant, bloody, and painful to watch...
...Nonetheless, the imposition of a penalty for touching raises a key question: how much does Abramovic 's reputation depend on teasing rather than challenging middle-class sensibilities...
...The answer to that question is, too much...
...For those of US who ride rush-hour subways in New York and have learned tight-quarters etiquette, such punishment seems about right...
...Abramovic 's willingness to restage her own and others' works under the auspices of MoMA means that, for the future, performance art will no longer have to be perishable to be authentic...
...The most powerful political piece in The Artist Is Present was "Balkan Baroque," which featured film from 1997, when, to mark the genocide that had taken place in her homeland, the former Yugoslavia, Abramovic washed 1,500 fresh beef bones while continually singing folk songs from her childhood...
...In "Imponderabilia," the museumgoer is asked to walk between a nude man and woman (Abramovic describes them as naked) in order to get from one gallery to another...
...They should join in the performance and help determine its outcome...
...If you don't mind becoming part of a nude sandwich, the passage is fun...
Vol. 57 • July 2010 • No. 3
