Comings Together/Comings Apart
Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art
Marina Abromovic "The Artist is Present"
We’re just past the halfway point of the run of Marina Abramović’s retrospective at MOMA, “The Artist is Present,” and chances are good you’ve already seen it, or maybe seen one of the blogs that has materialized in response. Abramović, born in Yugoslavia in 1946, is arguably the most enduring and prolific performance artist currently working. She has proven over the past half-decade that in the midst of reflecting on her past work and speculating on the possibilities of preserving and restaging past performances by herself and other artists, that she will soldier on (and I do mean “soldier”) in the production of performance work that brings herself, and her tests of the limits of body and mind as close to audiences as she can. The works presented begin with transcripts of her early instructions for theoretical (in some cases impossible) performances and photographs of her developing solo work (the “Rhythms”), through videos of her collaborations with Ulay, her former lover and collaborator of twelve years, and up to the present moment’s performance at MOMA, which is intended to extend through the duration of the exhibition. The retrospective occurs just four years past her widely praised 2005 Guggenheim show “Seven Easy Pieces,” in which Abramović performed five previously performed works by other artists, one of her earlier works, “Lips of Thomas,” as well as a new work by her, over the course of seven consecutive days, each work performed for seven hours.
The history of Abramović’s experiments in instruction, sound, rhythm, and partnership laid out through the galleries in photographs and videos possesses a beautiful and terrifying capacity to render the processes of comings-together indistinguishable from the processes of comings-apart. Somehow she manages this in both individual works and those with Ulay. In “Breathing In / Breathing Out” Abramovic and Ulay kiss, only breathing through the exchange of deep air from one pair of lungs to the other, until the action suffocates them for lack of new oxygen. In “Light/Dark” they casually and rhythmically tap one another’s faces with the soft parts of their open hands, almost like a children’s game, and gradually as the rate of touch increases, and the tempo of the sounds of their hands on faces and laps accellerates, the quality of their contacts shift from friendly acknowledgment to formal action, to percussion, to affront—faces that are initially impassive predict the impact in expressions something like concern, maybe indicating pain, but also commitment and determination, foolish or brave.
The naked bodies in the reperformance of 1977’s “Imponderabilia,” poised in near relation to one another at a passageway, are isolated in their vulnerability. In iterations of two women, two men, or a man and woman, they stand face to face to allow gallery visitors to pass between them to enter the next gallery. They are always about to come together, and constantly separated, the space between theoretically functional, forced into use. Fatigue here intensifies their relation, over time suggesting a desire for an inward collapse that would close off the traffic between them, but mark a kind of failure as well. In 1997’s “Luminosity,” the naked performer climbs a ladder into a box of projected light to perch on a bicycle seat, her feet placed on padded metal brackets, and her extended, taxed arms express a magnanimous benediction, wholesome stretch, and something nearing the “hands up” of a police arrest, one sense seeming to feed another over the course of the performance.
Live, unitary performances do ask that viewers acknowledge the human body in a way that documentation of such performances does not, and, I would argue, in a way that the witnessing of the reperformances here in the gallery challenges. These reperformances in the gallery do feel like iterations, echoes or layers of previous or future acts or encounters. The context itself makes the experience in the present very difficult. While the careful, if a bit clinical seeming, “changing of the guard” ritual allows the active performers to retire and new performers to take up their roles with a certain amount of gravitas, it seems to preserve an underlying sense of containment infecting these performances that ultimately undermines their impact. Accompanied by video or stills of their original stagings, surrounded by the chorus of sounds produced by so many videos, not to mention the bodies angled in multiple directions against the grain of your own, one feels invited to imagine the effects more than to actually experience them. The hollow bongs of Abramović and Ulay’s bodies striking the pillars outward along with the intermittent applause and “bravos” emitted by video of 1977’s “Expansion in Space,” become background for the two people framed in a kind of window box performing 1977’s “Relation in Time.” Their sag, their half-opened eyes are read through these sounds and through the dim wails and mumbles from the other room. The place of touching at their shoulder blades and down their backs begins to feel as incidental as the more violent collisions of Abramović and Ulay playing in loops all around. But ultimately, determining the success or failure of the live reperformances included in “The Artist is Present” seems less the point than realizing that each is staged as a kind of form, that one might, given permission, allow oneself to stand in the place of the standers, to point as a pointer, to lay with one laying, and lean and sweat with another who leans and sweats against you, to accomplish the
art’s function.
But let me end with what was the beginning, with what has become the main event: the opportunity to seat yourself at a table with Marina Abramović and look into her eyes, her face, meet her gaze with your own, offering her your eyes, and your face. This encounter is difficult to describe. What is suggested by its terms? Very public, streaming live, each sitter documented and web-published by photographer Marco Anelli, one is left with a somewhat curated series of faces suggesting nothing less than the fact of the loneliness of human interaction. Abramović is herself the concomitant illustration of our collective fatigue and the paragon of our potential to acknowledge, in transcendence and suffering, the endlessness of need that brings us to the silent stranger’s table. What do we see there, in those faces? How many conversations have I heard about jewelry, facial hair, iris color, and makeup? And her face—a stark and soft mask-mirror which shows the extent to which we, what we bring to our encounters with others, produce that encounter and that other. Whatever sense we make of it, using our knowledge of Abramović as an artist, whatever motivations we find to fund the ex post facto hermeneutics, the story of self and other that arises in this silent face-to-face is enormously private, individual, speculative.
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