Seductive, fearless, and outrageous, Marina
Abramović has been redefining what art is for nearly forty years. Using
her own body as a vehicle, pushing herself beyond her physical and
mental limits––and at times risking her life in the process––she creates
performances that challenge, shock, and move us. Through her and with
her, boundaries are crossed, consciousness expanded, and art as we know
it is reborn. She is, quite simply, one of the most compelling artists
of our time.
She is also a glamorous art-world icon, a lightning rod for
controversy, and a myth of her own making. She is most certainly unlike
anyone you have ever met before.
The feature-length documentary film MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ THE ARTIST IS
PRESENT takes us inside Marina’s world, following her as she prepares
for what may be the most important moment of her life: a major
retrospective of her work, taking place at The Museum of Modern Art in
New York. To be given a retrospective at one of the world's premiere
museums is, for any living artist, the most exhilarating sort of
milestone. For Marina, it is far more: it is the chance to finally
silence the question she has been hearing over and over again for four
decades: "But why is this art?"
As the film opens, we find Marina in the final throes of planning her
exhibition. We see her flitting around the museum, consulting with
curators, gallerists, and designers, cracking jokes and charming
everyone who crosses her path. As longtime friend and MoMA curator Klaus
Biesenbach puts it: "Marina is never not performing." In a
strategy meeting, she sets the stakes for what lies ahead: at 63, she
has lost patience with being a fringe artist. What she wants now is for
performance art to be legitimated. She is thinking of her legacy––and
the MoMA show, as she well knows, can secure it once and for all. It is
one thing to be "alternative" when you are 20 or 30 or 40, she says to
camera. "But excuse me, I'm 63! I don't want to be alternative
anymore!"
The mounting of the retrospective and its three-month exhibition at
MoMA is the narrative spine of MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ THE ARTIST IS PRESENT,
and over the course of the film, we return again and again to the
museum. There, as the "set" is built for the new work that will be the
centerpiece of show, Marina sketches her ambitious plans: all day, every
day, from early March until the end of May, 2010, she will sit at a
table in the museum's atrium, in what she describes as a "square of
light." Members of the audience will be invited to join her, one at a
time, at the opposite end of the table. There will be no talking, no
touching, no overt communication of any kind. Her objective is to
achieve a luminous state of being and then transmit it––to engage in
what she calls "an energy dialogue" with the audience.
The piece, aptly entitled The Artist is Present, will be the
longest-duration solo work of Marina's career, and by far the most
physically and emotionally demanding she has ever attempted. When she
conceived it, she says, she knew instantly that it was the right piece
because the mere thought of it "made me nauseous." The work's simplicity
and purity has the potential to crystallize all that is best about her
art, but it also demands that Marina return to her roots––and forgo the
overt theatricality that has characterized many of her recent
performance pieces. Perhaps more than any performance she has done
before, The Artist is Present has the power to fulfill Marina's own
dictum about long-durational work, in which, she says, "performance
becomes life itself."
Performance becomes life––and life becomes art. For Marina, the
boundaries are quite porous––a reality made vivid as the film delves
back in time to explore the genealogy of The Artist is Present, from
Marina's early solo career to her hugely influential twelve-year
romance/ collaboration with Ulay, who remains a towering figure in her
life. From the story of their relationship and their intensely charged
reconnection in the runup to the MoMA retrospective, a parallel Marina
emerges––a flesh-and-blood foil to the art-world icon––a woman who is
driven by passion, desperate for admiration, and maddeningly riven by
contradictions.
Throughout the three months of her exhibition, the film follows
Marina, day after day, watching as she sits at her small table in the
museum's atrium, gazing steadily at the scores upon scores of people who
come to take the chair across from her. The audience is fuel to her––in
effect, a lover; she needs the audience, Biesenbach says, "like air to
breathe." Meanwhile, the audience gazes back––and inevitably begins to
grasp the power of her spell. As art critic Arthur Danto observes, The
Artist is Present represents an entirely new experience in the history
of art. "For most masterpieces people stand in front of it for thirty
seconds. Mona Lisa: thirty seconds. But people come and sit here all day."
Elevating traditional documentary techniques with an artistic gloss
befitting its subject, MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ THE ARTIST IS PRESENT is by no
means a typical "art film." With total access granted by Abramović and
The Museum of Modern Art, MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ THE ARTIST IS PRESENT is
instead a mesmerizing cinematic journey inside the world of radical
performance, and an intimate portrait of an astonishingly magnetic,
endlessly intriguing woman who draws no distinction between life and
art.
