96 minutes into Matthew Akers’ 105 minute documentary Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, a young woman walks up to the chair placed across from a perfectly still, seated Marina Abramović, slides out of her dress and is quickly rushed away by security. She had been waiting, like many others, for hours – possibly days – to sit across from the “grandmother of performance art.” A few minutes before this scene, she even calls the act of waiting to sit across from Abramović “kind of a [performance] piece in itself – dedicating this much commitment to her.” Abramović has apparently had a huge influence on her work, and the younger artist “just wanted to be as vulnerable to her as she makes herself to everyone else.”
Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present follows Abramović as she prepares for her 2010 performance retrospective of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show includes video documentation of performances, both solo and with her long-time former collaborator and partner, Ulay; artifacts like the set up for Rhythm 0 (1974), where 72 objects (including a gun and bullet) where placed on a table for the audience to use on her; reenactments of pieces by a hand-selected group of performers; and a new piece in which, for the duration of the show, she silently sits across from members of the public. At first this is done with a table between the two seated bodies, much like Nightsea Crossing (1981-7), originally performed with Ulay, but eventually the table is taken away, leaving her more vulnerabie to whatever the person sitting across from her might do, as noted by Tunji Adewiji, Director of Safety at MoMA, who seems to be personally overseeing Abramović’s security.
As stated and re-stated, Abramović is no stranger to giving much of herself to her work, to her audience, and to performance art as a whole, sometimes even putting her body in extreme danger. In Rhythm 0, her shirt was ripped off and a rose attached to her chest via its thorns. Despite a signed document claiming herself as the only accountable party if anything should happen, the performance was cut short when the cops were called because a loaded gun was put in her hand, pointed towards her head. Her work with Ulay involved acts such as spinning until neither could get up anymore, balancing a taut bow between the two of them with an arrow pointed at her heart, and in their final piece, walking the length of the Great Wall of China until they met in the middle, ending their personal and artistic twelve year relationship. She has spilled her own blood and endured extreme, self-inflicted tests of physical and mental strength.
Now, at 63, she is sitting as still as possible for 7 hours a day, 6 days a week, for 3 months. In describing just how she is able to sit so still for so long, she states “The moment you really go through the door of pain, you enter to another state of mind, this feeling of beauty and unconditional love. You start having this incredible feeling of lightness.” While it is no question that her endurance pieces require immense mental and physical strength, Akers really focuses on the strength she receives from the audience. Klaus Beisenbach, Chief Curator at Large at MoMA and Abramović’s ex-husband, says “she needs the audience like air to breathe.” He recounts feeling so loved by her at the beginning of their relationship only to realize that what she really loves is the entire world, not just him.
In many ways, this performance takes the idea of being in love with the entire world, or at least with her audience, almost literally; after all, it was clearly developed from Nightsea Crossing, a piece famously performed and re-performed with Ulay. Instead of her partner sitting across from her, the audience is. They don’t get 19 straight days across from her, but they do get a few moments, in between her eyes closing for what seems like a reset, where they stare at her and she stares at them. She describes being a mirror for whomever is seated across her. Sometimes smiles are shared, sometimes tears. She would indeed literally be no one without those who come to see her and her work, two things inherently fused, and in the thousands of individual moments that comprise this piece, she sees them.
Once she decides to take away the table separating her from her audience, Beisenbach simply comments “The priest doesn’t need the cross.” While I think she’s maybe more of a god/profit/priest hybrid if that’s the analogy you’re going for with Abramović, this statement pretty succintly sums up the one aspect of her work I wish Akers had explored more, if at all: just how, for better or worse, it has changed. Abramović repeats throughout the documentary that she wants not only her work but the whole of performance art to be mainstream. (I was actually pretty amazed, in discussing this documentary with others, just how many people have little to no idea who she is.) She’s devoted over 40 years to both her own work and the training of future performance artists, a process we get to witness when the 30 performers used in her retrospective partake in a “performance art boot camp” at her upstate New York estate. She’s been called crazy by many, the validity of her work has been questioned over and over again (and continues to be, as shown by clips of a few local newscasters shouting ¡Escándalo!...though I mean it’s not like they have art history degrees or anything. Not that only people with degrees can enjoy art, but still.), despite influencing and being adored by millions.
She’s given a lot of herself and worked really hard to get to the place that she is, but she just isn’t the young woman who stood naked across from a naked Ulay while men fondled her as they slid past the two bodies to get into a gallery. She would never perform Rhythm 0 again. She’s an art rockstar, she’s in her 60s, and her performances now require a security team that responds to signs from Abramović to take away anyone who makes her uncomfortable. She’s not completely unvulnerable, but she’s puh-retty close to it.
Akers’ documentary does way more than just depict how Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present was made; it includes stories of her childhood, her relationship with Ulay (who she is reunited with for the first time since they broke up, like, 20+ years prior), documentation of a lot of her work, her search for love. She’s incredibly charming, and when she talks about getting her nails did and buying her first designer clothing after breaking up with Ulay, a relationship during which she lived in a van in order to continue making work, all I wanted to do was rejoice in her success. She works and has worked so hard, she’s endured so much, she deserves the money, the fame, the legitimacy. Plus OMG her awkward laugh. It’s really hard not to root for her and also understand that, duh, she needs to be protected. There are crazies out there and a shit ton of people waited hella long to silently sit across from her. (I’m trying to think of a way to fashion Abramović’s name into something akin to Bebliever. Suggestions?)
But then there’s this moment when a young performance artist walks up to her, takes off her dress, and is quickly whisked away. The crowd boos. She is interviewed as she waits to possibly get another chance at sitting across from Abramović, and apparently she “thought in that space, in that square, ... the audience is, like, part of the art and what you bring to it,” which is basically what we, the viewers of the documentary, were made to believe. Plus, I mean, the fact that she was removed for getting naked in front of Marina Abramović is sort of laughable. Not only are there videos and photos Abramović naked all up in that show, there are also actual naked people. So much nudity.
In a cameo way less annoying than James Franco’s but still sort of strange, David Blaine eats some glass with his wine in Abramović’s apartment and suggests an intervention of her performance in which he very publicly and very gruesomely kills her. When she presents this idea to her gallerist, Sean Kelly, he makes a face and is all like “He’s an illusionist. Your work doesn’t have anything to do with illusion; it’s all real.” (Last aside, I swear: Her actually bringing this up to her gallerist was one of my favorite parts; as someone who’s worked as an assistant to many artists, I was giddy at the fact that Akers showed that even the best artists have god awful ideas.)
While I definitely think this documentary is really entertaining and serves as an important record of Abramović’s work, life & practice, it leaves a pretty unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach, particularly as someone who works in performance. While we are being told by MoMA security, by critics, by those who go to see her, even by herself that she is incredibly vulnerable during The Artist is Present and so much of the focus is on the audience, this naked woman being taken away in tears shows that those statements are just no longer true. It isn’t “all real,” especially if real is talking about this piece with the same language as her older work. Given her age and fame, she will never be able to make the same type of work that she used to, and I mean, that’s fine. It’s really amazing and impressive that she’s still producing, let alone such physically arduous work. I just wonder, with all of her lamentations of being underground for so long, of being called crazy, if this is the price performance art will have to pay for going mainstream. I honestly don’t think that most of it will at all ever, and while it sucks to realize there’s a part of you that’s ok with never having any sort of financial stability via what you love to do, I’m pretty chill with that.
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