Abramović redux

Not long ago I wrote a couple of posts prompted by a review by Arthur Danto of a piece that was a central part of a recent MOMA show re: performance artist Marina Abramović. As I mentioned in the earlier posts, I usually find Danto insightful and interesting. In this case, though, I was more than a little flummoxed. Danto now has published a brief follow up to his initial essay; you can find it here. What follows are some of the interesting bits:

"In 1964, Andy Warhol exhibited wooden facsimiles of shipping cartons. A work of art and a mere shipping carton can look exactly alike. What explains the difference? What is the difference between sitting down with someone in a performance and merely sitting down with someone? The work of art has meaning; it is about something. And it embodies that meaning.

Many people thought that Marina Abramovic’s act of sitting across from them was a case of the emperor’s new clothes. But for most who sat with her, the act was fraught with meaning. It was in a sense a sacrifice on the artist’s part, an ordeal, an immense favor conferred on those who sat with her.

[. . .]

Think of the title of Marina’s show, “The Artist is Present.” And what presence means. The sitters are honored to be in the presence of the artist. It is a ritual moment, and understood as such by their own ordeal of waiting. The woman who sat for the entire period (seven hours) tried to make the presence hers. The next day Marina was present but the woman who sought her presence was gone. Marina’s presence was a treasure that could only be conferred. These are some of the hermeneutical aspects that the artist understood, and sitters mainly acknowledged. Think of all the photographs that shows tears in their eyes! People will discuss this event for years. It was a moment of spiritual exchange. How many of those do we have in a life?

[. . .]

The spiritual wiring of the human soul remains to be diagrammed. That is what art is for."

So here is what I think the crux of the matter is for me. As Danto makes clear in these passages, and what I complained about earlier, this "sitting" was passive for the viewers - an "act" of homage, an experience of being orchestrated or choreographed for the artist's purposes. Abramović, on Danto's own view, is bestowing on viewers some sort of gift; she is doing them a "favor." I therefore don't quite get his claim that "The Artist is Present" exemplifies performance art insofar as that category or genre "has ignited in the public imagination the idea that one can do more than passively experience works of art." It seems to me to convey the reality that, for viewers, their "participation" is wholly ancillary. Moreover, insofar as Abramović entered into some sort of trance-like state during the performance she offered no recognition of viewers as agents. Would she even have noticed had the chair across from her were vacant? Conversely, how might sitting across from someone who is oblivious to your presence differ from viewing an inanimate object (painting, sculpture, photograph)? Perhaps that is the message Abramović sought to convey - that all art (at least in the industrial-gallery-museum complex) ultimately takes the form of such supplication on the part of viewers. I doubt it.

Perhaps I am way too jaundiced, but I simply don't buy Danto's claims (with respect to Abramović specifically, not art in general) about "spiritual" connections and so forth. Indeed, the real relevance of Warhol to all this - especially for the various repeat "performers" I pictured in the second of my earlier posts - lies in his overused remark about the fleeting and shallow nature of celebrity.
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P.S.: The image I've lifted here shows the woman (seated to the left) to whom Danto refers in the passage I quote - she showed up, dressed like the artist, and sat for the bulk of an entire day of the show.

People Who Need a Hobby or, On Second Thought, Perhaps They've Found One

Here are a half-dozen repeat walk-on performers in Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present. I surely missed some others. Each portrait of the respective person is from a different day. All these folks turned up between day 25 (top) and day 59 of the exhibition. They came day after day, stood in line waiting and then sat there playing their assigned role. (Did they bring a book to read while waiting on line? Or did they watch the action?) In several instances they are cataloged on the MOMA Flickr page as having been adjacent in line, so must've become familiar with one another. Denizens of the MOMA page have identified a couple of the culprits - one is herself a "performance artist" (does this constitute plagiarism or poaching?), another just a fellow attracted to the performance as if by magnetism! Good grief.






























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All images from Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present Photographs by Marco Anelli. © 2010 Marina Abramović.
P.S.: Glancing at the newly uploaded images of attendees for days 60-65, it appears that several of these people just cannot stay away.

Here's Looking at You Kid ~ Marina Abramović

The other day The New York Times ran this report on this exhibition at MOMA written by philosopher and critic Arthur Danto. The show is actually a "performance" entitled The Artist is Present by Marina Abramović; the piece, which is part of a retrospective of Abramović's work consists in the artist sitting in a chair (generally clad in red white or blue) across from an empty chair. Visitors line up for the opportunity to sit across from Abramović for as long as they like. (One morning a woman apparently showed up dressed like Abramović and sat virtually all day.) The sitters are being photographed and their "portraits" are being posted on this Flickr page; my rough guess is that somewhere just shy of 1200 sittings have taken place so far. From what I can tell the entire ordeal is being filmed for posterity as well.

I actually have learned a lot from Danto's writings over the years. But my colleague and friend Rachel, who teaches in the Rochester VCS program recently referred to him as a "dork." Given that he seems to really, really like this whole exercise, I have begun to wonder myself. Of the current performance Danto writes that the "performance has brought MOMA itself to the cutting edge of contemporary artistic experiment" and that "It has captured the imagination of everyone interested in contemporary art." I guess I am just not all that interested.

I will come back to some "interesting" aspects of The Artist is Present in a companion post. Here I just want to pose some questions that Danto tacitly raises. Here he is:

"Performance art, as currently practiced, emerged as an avant garde movement in the 1960s and ’70s, and some of its features made it difficult to visualize how it might make the transition from galleries and public spaces to the more institutional environment of the museum.

For one thing, the medium of the artist is his or her own body, sometimes nude or engaged in highly dangerous circumstances. Pictures of nude bodies doing dangerous things raise no such obstacles in a museum space, but performance art itself is real in all dimensions. Before it can be translated and presented in a museum, a number of problems, both practical and philosophical, must be worked out.

One method would be to allow the pieces to be re-performed, which purists naturally disallow. For them, a performance is a one-time event, unlike a play, which is made to be re-performed; in theater, the distinction between character and actor is widely accepted. In the purist’s conception of performance art, there can be no such distinction; the artist and the performer are one, and must use his or her own body in the work. No one else, they argue, can do this, for reasons both moral and metaphysical.

Marina Abramovic is one of the early performance artists whose works have the deep originality that justifies their inclusion in great museums.

[. . .]

What is clear is that the possibility of sitting with Marina has ignited in the public imagination the idea that one can do more than passively experience works of art, that one can be part of a work of art for as long as one is willing or able."

I am sure that there are theorists of art who will think my puzzlement is naive, but do we define art by what can make it into a museum? And isn't the shift into "the more institutional environment of the museum" pretty much an invitation to passivity? In the current instance Abramović seeks to control the terms of the entire "experience"; that she is not quite able to do so does nothing to mitigate the fact that any creative participation by the folks who line up to sit with her is at the margins of her plan. I wonder if anyone has walked up to the sitters and spoken to them or offered to purchase the place of the person sitting with Abramović - a novel way to cut line. I'll bet not. (Maybe said purchaser would then insist that the chair remain vacant while she perused the other parts of the retrospective. Imagine the ire of the MOMA security, to say nothing of the artist, in such a circumstance.) Everyone surely is polite and well-behaved. Passive. Compliant. Proper. They all know how to comport themselves in a museum. They are indeed a "part" of the work, playing a role that has been engineered for them.