By now it would seem everyone with a pulse has heard about the historic and marathon performance piece that Marina Abramović is currently enduring/undergoing/exhibiting at MoMA, aptly titled, The Artist is Present. In an audio piece for the exhibition, Abramović explains that the title for the show is derived from the habit of many show or exhibition cards stating somewhere prominently that at the opening reception, "The artist will be present." In her two-and-a-half-month long piece, she goes on to say, "We go a step further...I will be present with you for the entire time of the exhibition." And present she has been—every single day that the Museum of Modern Art is open from March 14, 2010 through May 31, 2010. When the exhibit closes after Memorial Day, Marina Abramović will have "been present" for 42,990 minutes (or 716 hours and 30 minutes).
Installation view of The Artist is Present, © Scott Rudd for MoMA
The conceit of the piece is astonishingly simple: there are two chairs, a table between them. Marina sits in one, the other is open for anyone to join her for as long as they wish. There can be no speaking or touching. You are to sit across from her, and she from you, and the two of you are then "present" to one another; consciously sharing one another's space while being entirely conscious of each other in that space. Emblematic of many performance pieces, the "audience" is a necessary component of the piece, and the performance could not exist without audience participation. Often described as a "staring contest" (the New York Times rightly honed in on the fact that "strangers staring at each other in the eye [is] one of the final taboos of modern New York"), the experience of sitting across from Marina has been described eloquently and at length by the likes of Irish novelist Colm Tóibín and earnest and honest anonymous people on metafilter.
With all the press that MoMA and Marina have been getting about The Artist Is Present, there's an aspect of this show that has been comparatively under-reported: photographer Marco Anelli has been documenting every single person that sits across from Marina through the duration of the piece. For every one of the over 42,000 minutes Marina is performing, Anelli is at work making certain that he's produced a faithful document of the sitter and their experience. Posted on MoMA's Flickr set for the exhibition, each sitter is labeled with the day during the performance, their number in that day's sitting sequence, and the duration of their stay with Marina. While he's not sitting and engaging the artist directly, the fact of his meta-performance, which is posted to the Flickr stream daily, is a compelling testament to the power of the gaze and of one's connection to the Other.
Marco Anelli photographing sitters at The Artist Is Present, © Joseph O. Holmes
Sometimes the sitters are famous themselves; sometimes they are fellow performers making their own performance piece out of their experience; many times they cry. Some sit all day; some come back again and again. Marco's camera captures them all, every single one, every single time.
Day 4, Portrait 23, 9 minutes, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, Photo by Marco Anelli. © 2010 Marina Abramović
Day 10, Portrait 1, 52 minutes, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, Photo by Marco Anelli. © 2010 Marina Abramović
Day 20, Portrait 20, 20 minutes, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, Photo by Marco Anelli. © 2010 Marina Abramović
Whether or not one has been able to sit across from Marina, regardless of whether one has even been able to stand on the sidelines of the second-floor atrium and watch the performance, the documentation of it—be it the live feed or through Anelli's photographs—has been fascinating and addictive for those who have. On the face of it, the question begs to be answered, What Is So Interesting About These People? Face after face, day after day—the same lighting, the same ratio of face-to-frame. Maybe MoMA never intended or could anticipate that these photographs, a flickr stream set, would generate such a devoted following or enthusiasm from virtual on-lookers.
My sense is that there are two factors at work here: one is the very unmediated and intentionally non-conceptual framework of the portraits themselves. In Anelli's stream of sitters we have an exhaustive rendering of a defined subset of people that face after face, day after day, amounts to a project that's a 1:1 scale representation of this performance piece. Akin in this regard to August Sander's socialist revolutionary work People of the 20th Century, what we are seeing is a large-scale classificatory photographic project, adhering to a broadly applied structure or set of rules, that ultimately renders to us, the end-viewer, something very real and un-performed that we are clearly experiencing an emotional response and/or connection to. This is where the second factor comes in: while the portraits are generally un-posed objects themselves, it is the performance that Marina is engaging in with each sitter that successfully renders every individual into a bared vulnerable state that is then captured by Anelli's camera.
In a really great interview with Laurie Anderson in Bomb magazine from 2003, Anderson asks Abramović a question that forms the crux of her orientation to the performance currently on view"
Anderson: How do you see the audience?
Abramović: It's such an important question, because the relation to the audience is the essence of performance. In my case, the need to be completely open and vulnerable, to give everything I can, 100 percent, is extremely strong. Every single person in the audience is important. I don't have this kind of feeling in real life, but in performance I have this enormous love, this heart that literally hurts me with how much I love them. In the last performance, when I lived for 12 days, totally exposed, in the Sean Kelly Gallery, almost nothing happened. But just being there, with this openness--there is just skin and bones; there's nothing else but being there for them. I was there to be projected on. The whole thing has to be almost an invisible exchange. You asked what the connection was like in that performance. I really looked at the people in the gallery. To me the eyes are a door for something else, and whatever is happening in their lives, I pick it up. You can't imagine how much I cried in that piece. This sadness comes because they project their own sadness onto me and I reflect it back. And I cry out in the saddest way, so they are free. People would come like drunks—instead of a shot of vodka they came to have a shot of this connection with the eyes. They came in the morning; at quarter to nine they were there waiting, in business suits. The gallery would open at nine, and they would come in, look at me for 20 minutes and go away. A lot of them told me later that they are not even connected to art. I was thinking that people usually don't look at them in this intimate way, so maybe they just needed to be looked at in that way before going to work.
These minutes or hours or an entire day of engaging with and contemplating a complete stranger has been transformative, transcendent and terrifying for the sitters. Paddy Johnson gets that it's an emotional stand-off. Jerry Saltz concedes that, "There's something powerful and uncanny and pure about an unbroken gaze." Colm Tóibín got it when he wrote that the experience, "...was serious, too serious maybe, too intimate, too searching. It was either, I felt, what I should do all the time, or what I should never do." It is this unsettling is-ness that nearly every sitter is reduced to, and what comes across in this stream of images that Anelli has produced. A rare and wonderful thing to see something so obvious and unguarded shown to our normally guarded selves in seeming endless repetition of what I can only surmise to be a kind of vulnerable hope.
Marina Abramović in The Artist is Present will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art until May 31, 2010.
All of the photographs that Marco Anelli is making of the sitters in the performance piece can be viewed on the MoMA Flickr stream.