This sense of piousness is an effect of the solemn register in which the work exists, its demonstrative gravitas. But I can’t help thinking of flagellantism and various extreme penitent Catholic orders when I see some of Abramović’s work, which for me gives it an uncomfortably pious aspect. So too her interest in the singularity of the self in relation to another individual or to a group. Of course, you can extrapolate religious or spiritual themes from her interest in the limits of consciousness as perceived through the body when it is pushed to extreme limits through pain or duration. I’m not sure how I feel about this, since it seems to me like religious affect. These formal layouts, and the content of some of the works themselves, speak of ritual and highly stylized types of interaction. The colour of her dress (there are three dresses apparently: red, dark blue and white) against the grey of the gallery floor and the beige of the wooden furniture, serves to keep the viewer’s eye centered on Abramović.ĥ. Four strong lamps at each corner of the square illuminate the piece. In ‘The Artist is Present’, for instance, the table and chairs are placed centrally in a large demarcated square area of the atrium. Abramović’s presentation of her body is notably classical: in pictorializing it, in her staging, she privileges symmetry, a strong central image, and formal balance. Bodies are mostly symmetrical forms, but the world they inhabit isn’t. Relation in Time and Point of Contact are presented in the ‘frame’ of a specially built temporary wall/box – Relation in Time is watched through a rectangular window and Point of Contact re-performed beneath a kind of mini proscenium arch.Ĥ. At MoMA these re-performed works are presented with dramatic spotlighting, like venerated Old Master paintings. At least four of the re-performed works are presented in the exhibition like images: the 1977 piece Relation in Time, in which the performers sit back to back, their long hair tied together in a knot Point of Contact (1980), where the performers hold their fingertips as close as they can without touching whilst maintaining eye contact Nude with Skeleton (2002–5), in which a naked performer lies underneath a human skeleton, and Luminosity, a piece Abramovic originally performed in 1997, hanging naked on the wall whilst maintaining a cruciform pose. This sense of pictorial composition is strongly emphasized by staging in ‘The Artist is Present’. It’s less of a record of a performance than a striking and carefully constructed image, one both instantaneously grasped (you don’t need to study it for more than a second to work out what’s going on) and laden with symbolism.ģ. I’m thinking here about a piece such as Rest Energy (1980), in which she and Ulay hold a bow and arrow in tension, the arrow pointing at Abramović’s chest. Some of those documentary photographs of her are so iconic (with all the religious resonances of that word – see point number 5), that the fact of the performance can seem almost secondary. All those images of Abramović make me think that she is as much an artist who uses performance to create images, as she is a performance artist. This is exhibition-making as autobiography.Ģ. Abramović herself has said that her body is the subject, object and medium of her work. This is not an exhibition about the body, or performance, or re-performance, or whatever – though it is, of course, about these things too – but about the life and career of a 63-year-old artist born in the former Yugoslavia, her relationship and work with the artist Ulay, and the subsequent development of her work after they parted ways.
Her image is everywhere you turn in this show. There she is on posters in the subway, on the wall-size portrait photograph of her at the exhibition entrance, on the covers of the piles of catalogues in the museum shop, in the portraits of her in the final room of the exhibition and, of course, in the works themselves. ‘The Artist is Present’: yup, she certainly is. Visiting the exhibition again this week prompted a few thoughts.ġ. That’s also 44 days (and counting) since Abramović embarked on her longest ever durational piece, a new work also entitled The Artist is Present, in which the artist sits in silence at a table in the museum’s huge atrium gallery, and members of the public are invited to sit on the chair opposite her to share in silent contemplation of each other. It’s now 44 days (and counting) since I visited the opening of Marina Abramović’s major retrospective, ‘The Artist is Present’, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.