Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (and so are you)

On a recent Saturday, a woman behind me in line to get into MoMA said, “I hate the young.” She was assuming they were there en masse to see the museum’s grotesque hagiography of Tim Burton (every scrap preserved). If true, they didn’t limit themselves to the man who made a mockery of Sweeney Todd but poured out into other galleries, their numbers mitigating against anyone’s engagement.

Obviously, the problem is not the young but the museum, which needs to determine what is a sustainable number and what is a stagnating overflow. People were four or five layers deep in the Cartier-Bresson. Who can see his immaculate, small prints in such a physical cacophony? Full of respect for those who forged ahead, I gave up, thinking of Yogi Berra: “That place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.”

In such a mob scene, the courage of Marina Abramovic’s performance retrospective, The Artist is Present, is overwhelming. She’s there every day, all day long, as members from the audience in three minute increments take a seat in front of her and lock into the energy of her presence. Surrounding them is a parted sea of humanity hushed by her intensity.

What a dazzling exhibit. (Hats off to curator Klaus Biesenbach.) Performance retrospectives are a difficult breed of cat. If you missed the originals, you’re limping along afterward with description, analysis and documentation impersonating the real thing. Instead, with fifty works spanning four decades (including sound pieces, excellent videos and photographs), this exhibit recreates a number of her major pieces by restaging them with a frequently nude cast of others. (They deserve bravery badges too.)

Back to the audience, swollen into a problem for itself. It’s an enormous hurtle for Abramovic, who either makes contact or makes nothing. Even with thousands around her, she succeeds, both in the galleries and in the atrium where she presides, inspiring many who signed up to sit down with her to cast off their public shell and give her something back.

Marco Anelli’s photographs of the sitters on flickr are a record of the audience as artists, sharing what they are capable of sharing with the woman in front of them. (Via) I love these faces. Hearts open.

Through May 31. 

Tim Burton’s last day is Monday, which will undoubtedly thin the herd. What will be left is the chill of the architecture. There is no grace in the new space.

Also managing to triumph over crowds in a chilly surround is William Kentridge: Five Themes, organized by Mark Rosenthal for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art.

In prints, charcoal drawings and animated films based on charcoal drawings, he surveys the human predicament. I wish I’d seen this show in San Francisco. Here, the videos dominate, as the drawings are tough to see cheek to jowl to baby carriage with others. He calls his cut-out drawings of shadow puppets stone age. Across a rocky terrain they come, carrying their plows,
their parents, their prisoners, their party props and weapons. It’s
human history in motion: The fleet, the lame, the guilty and innocent,
burdened by their sick and their dead. In the middle of it all, a real
human eyeball pops up, and later a real cat.
Shadows enlarge, dissolve and double into shadows of shadows, stories
lost and found; the dynamic, overlapping chaos of history. 

Through May 17.

Down in the basement, Marilyn Minter’s video, Green Pink Caviar from 2009 drew a cluster of the gorgeous young. Watching them watching, it occurred to me that Abramovic, Kentridge and Minter are all from my generation. The young look great, but they’ll have to work hard to catch us.