Artist Marina Abramović has been pretty quiet since her 2010 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, The Artist Is Present. But she’s back! She’s here! And she wants you to know where she’s been.
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Think of the most overexposed figures in creative culture. I’ll give you a few hints: One stared at people for months straight in a major museum, had an opera made about her life, and is creating a museum devoted to her chosen medium. The other has turned his life into performance art, dabbled as a sculptor, and written a vanity short story collection, alongside a stint working on a soap opera.
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On eBay right now, you can buy a piece of tape used to mark the position of the visitors’ chair for Marina Abramović’s epic 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art. That might strike you as a fairly minute and extreme bit of fan ephemera, which it may very well be. But it’s also an artwork by Man Bartlett.
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MIAMI — There are many stories about the origins of art: ancient Greek historian Pliny suggested art was born when a Corinthian maiden traced the outline of her lover’s shadow on a wall, while an Asian legend tells of a young man who could not paint the Buddha because of his enlightened glow, and so was forced to paint his reflection in a pool of water. What these two stories share is the emphasis on the rendering of people as a foundational element of art. Fast-forward many millenia, when the story of high-priced contemporary art is vastly different from those origin stories, and walking through the latest incarnation of Art Basel Miami Beach, I was struck by the marginalization of the human form in the blue-chip work on display. What happened?
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“Your mind is not here,” she explains. Standing in the center of the room clad in a floor-length black dress, she is a sharp contrast to the stark white walls. The sweeping space feels anything but, packed as it is with onlookers — some seemingly starstruck, others bewildered — sitting closely together on the gallery floor. “We have to figure out how we can put your minds right here.”
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BERKELEY, California — On BlueServo, webcams are streaming live webcams stationed at potential border-crossing hotspots on the line between Texas and Mexico. Anyone in the world can go to BlueServo and guard the border virtually, 365 days a year and 24 hours a day. If a viewer was to spot suspicious activity they can report it to the local authorities, all without leaving the comfort of their keyboard. In my mind, BlueServo connected immediately to the work of NYU professor Wafaa Bilal.
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As we detailed two weeks ago, Mitt Romney made it clear in a recent interview with Fortune magazine that funding the arts is not his priority. Obama and his team haven’t exactly responded with a resounding defense or promotion of the arts (Will Brand speculates on why over at the L Magazine), but last night the Obama camp did at least show that it’s got a little bit of art history under its belt.
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I was standing with a female painter friend in the Metropolitan Museum recently, in front of work by Van Gogh, when she said, “There are no rules.” Then, after a beat, she added, “Or he was hallucinating all the time and painted exactly what he saw.” For women, rules define a set of social expectations that are meant to keep them under control. In the arts, purportedly so much more liberal than the rest of society, this problem is acutely magnified, since culture tells us who we are, both literally and imaginatively.
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No, the artist was not present at Film Forum for a screening of her documentary, The Artist Is Present, a couple of weeks ago. The artist is Marina Abramović, and though she wasn’t there — neither was the director of the film, Matthew Akers — I kept expecting her glamorous self to storm in as a last-minute surprise. But who was there was the reason I showed up for the screening: Mr. Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator at large of the Museum of Modern Art and director of MoMA PS1.
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Hyperallergic writers and siblings Brendan and Marisa Carroll recently went to see Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, a documentary about the performance artist’s Museum of Modern Art retrospective. The museum retrospective included photos, videos and re-creations of Abramović’s performances from her 40-year career, but the documentary, directed by Matthew Akers, focuses almost solely on Abramović’s new piece for the exhibition, “Sitting With Marina.” In that work, the artist sat motionless in the same chair for seven hours a day, every day that the show was on, and museumgoers were invited to sit across from her, silently, one at a time. Brendan visited the exhibition back in 2010; Marisa did not. Below are their impressions of the film.
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