Abramovic at MoMA: Museum Mediation

courtesy of MoMA

I didn’t get a chance to see The Artist is Present before this past week, the week before it closes. Fortunately enough, my visit towards the end of the show was a way for the visit to point out to me the brevity of presence, and what presence means in a museum context.

The title work of the show is the one in which Marina Abramovic sits in a large square and receives visitors who can sit facing her for as long as they want. Abramovic doesn’t speak, reciprocate movements, or move much at all, and the viewer is limited to a set of actions as well (not to touch, place anything in front of, etc., the artist).

While this work can be read on many levels, especially in light of her retrospective on display four flights up, I found it a perfect example of the museum altering behavior and perception, both implicitly and explicitly. Something as simple as a non-verbal human interaction when transplanted into the museum becomes infinitely more complex and regulated. For me, the show revealed more what a museum needed and imposed onto people, than what people did onto themselves.

1. It needs a defined and contained space. A large square was drawn on the ground with electrical tape, outlining the border of the work, and more importantly, where the work was not taking place. The boundary on the floor was the limitation of Abramovic’s presence. People outside were only engaged peripherally with the work, while the one person inside confronted the work.

2. It needs obedience and responsible behavior. There were rules about what one could and could not do in the square, how many people could be inside it. The encounter between any viewer and Abramovic was heavily mediated by the museum, through the security guards, the guidelines, the boundary described in the first point. Also, any person sitting with Abramovic would feel the pressure of the line of others who wait for hours and continue to wait for their turn; the individual viewer then also becomes responsible for the viewing experience of everyone else.

3. It needs finite start and end times. Abramovic’s performance and presence were dictated entirely by the museum’s hours. They suggest that one could sit there as long as they wanted to but really, one can only sit there until the museum closes, and only visit when the museum opens again. The sense of ongoing time, or even unlimited time, is false. The body obeys the habit of the museum.

4. It needs documentation. Though this is less visible than the others, the very layout of the piece suggests some of this. An abstracted tally divided into months on the wall keeping track of Abramovic’s total hours, reduced the piece to a calendar and a number. Furthermore, there were cameras positioned on two ends to broadcast it. But this could also be the very nature of performance art itself, whose legacy and scholarship lives through documents.

This is a show worth seeing, if not for the legendary personality, then for the experience of an institutionally mediated encounter between the many and and artist. For autobiographical, art historical, theoretical, and generally better texts on Marina Abromavic, please see any of these below.

The Artist is Present
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street  New York, NY 10019
Through May 31, 2010