MoMA
Art Vent Letting the Fresh Air In
October 29, 2011
A few nights ago, I had a dream where I was floating and diving underwater like a dolphin and—as when swimming in real life—I never wanted to stop.
Yesterday I had an art day like that: long, solitary experiences with four very different kinds of work that invited endless immersion. Whenever, as happens all too frequently, I start to wonder why I’m in this field, I can look back on this day and remember why.
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| Photo: courtesy MoMA. |
Willem de Kooning, Pirate (Untitled II), 1981
Oil on canvas
7' 4" x 6' 4 3/4" (223.4 x 194.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund, 1982
© 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
7' 4" x 6' 4 3/4" (223.4 x 194.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund, 1982
© 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
I got to MoMA early to see the de Kooning exhibition again, this time on my own, and went straight to the back in advance of the hoards with their walkie-talkies. Except for the guard, I was alone in front of de Kooning’s Pirate (Untitled II), and the longer I stood there, the more it revealed to me. The experience was so animated it was like watching TV, only better. After about twenty minutes the guard, an older black man, came up and said, quietly, “Looks as if you like that painting.” I asked him how he felt about it, seeing it day after day—did it hold up?—and he was enthusiastic and knowledgeable. I told him how much I love the wispy late work, as opposed to the ones with looping closed lines, which feel static and tight. The guard pointed out that they were the very last ones de Kooning painted, and suggested that perhaps by then the artist’s mind really was gone. He showed me the area he liked best, a wall of somewhat earlier large abstractions that reminded him of Lee Krasner, and told me, proudly, that he’d worked at MoMA for more than twenty years.
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| Photo: Carol Diehl, 2011 |
JANET CARDIFF (Canadian, b. 1957)
The Forty Part Motet (2001)
Reworking of “Spem in Alium Nunquam habui”(1575), by
Thomas Tallis
40-track sound recording (14:00 minutes), 40 speakers
Dimensions variable
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jo Carole and
Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Rolf Hoffmann, 2002
I could have stopped there, completely fulfilled, but instead I took the E out to PS 1 (only two stops from MoMA). While I’ll do almost anything to avoid 9/11 nostalgia, Sasha Frere-Jones, in a recent New Yorker article, mentioned the Janet Cardiff sound installation from 2001, The Forty-Part Motet, which is part of PS 1's September 11 exhibition, and I was eager to experience it. Frere-Jones wrote:
I’ve been a fan of Cardiff's ever since the percussive piece she and George Bures Miller installed in 2006 at Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, which gets my all-time favorite award for site-specific art (read my review here). Happily The Forty-Part Motet lived up to my expectations—was exalted and exhalting. I could have just as easily been in Canterbury Cathedral during Evensong, but there’s also something about the anonymity of the experience that makes it surprisingly personal. While I was there, two young women were inspired to dance, but attempting to photograph them (with their permission), I was sharply remonstrated by the guard—an action that was jarring and surprisingly upsetting in the way it pierced a euphoric moment. Something like that would never have happened in Europe, I thought, especially in England where museum attendants can be sensitive to the point of being apologetic. So I left the room and came back again later when—with the exception of a different guard who lurked quietly in the corner, absorbed in his cell phone—I was able to listen to the whole thing again, this time completely alone.
Cardiff re-created the performance of a forty-member choir, each singer emerging through a separate speaker, performing the 1573 Thomas Tallis piece “Spem in alium.” In eleven minutes, it uses a stunning variety of overlapping, interlocking parts, as deft in its repetition as anything Steve Reich has done. The interplay of the voices is also moving—I have rarely visited the work and not seen people crying within minutes.
I’ve been a fan of Cardiff's ever since the percussive piece she and George Bures Miller installed in 2006 at Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, which gets my all-time favorite award for site-specific art (read my review here). Happily The Forty-Part Motet lived up to my expectations—was exalted and exhalting. I could have just as easily been in Canterbury Cathedral during Evensong, but there’s also something about the anonymity of the experience that makes it surprisingly personal. While I was there, two young women were inspired to dance, but attempting to photograph them (with their permission), I was sharply remonstrated by the guard—an action that was jarring and surprisingly upsetting in the way it pierced a euphoric moment. Something like that would never have happened in Europe, I thought, especially in England where museum attendants can be sensitive to the point of being apologetic. So I left the room and came back again later when—with the exception of a different guard who lurked quietly in the corner, absorbed in his cell phone—I was able to listen to the whole thing again, this time completely alone.
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| Photo: Carol Diehl, 2011. |
JAMES TURRELL (American, b. 1943)
Meeting (1986)
Interior fluorescent light and open sky
Room: 259 x 279 ½ inches (657.9 x 709.3 cm);
portal: 157 x 177 inches (398.8 x 449.6 cm)
Long-term installation, MoMA PS1, Long Island City,
New York
Where I went to recuperate was James Turrell’s Meeting (1986), unexpectedly open in the early afternoon where, for more than a half hour, I was alone in one of my favorite places in the world. At one point a man opened the door, stuck his head in, and immediately left, having had his fill—but that was all. The sky “ceiling” was picturesquely blue and wisped with clouds on that sunny day, while soft, cool breezes wafted about the room. Perfect.
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| Photo: courtesy MoMA, PS 1 |
BARBARA KRUGER (American, b. 1945)
Untitled (Questions) (1991)
Photographic silkscreen on vinyl
66 3/16 x 92 5/8 x 2 1/2 inches (168.1 x 235.3 x 6.4 cm)
Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for
Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New
York.
On my way out of the September 11 exhibition I passed this piece from 1991 by Barbara Kruger. While I didn’t spend half an hour communing with it, it’s stayed with me, as it seems particularly relevant to the present time. If I haven’t posted lately, it’s because I’ve been caught up in the issues around Occupy Wall Street, without quite knowing how to process them as far as my blog was concerned. With the mainstream press reporting so little in the beginning, Facebook became my news source. Suddenly I was grateful that I’d accepted as “friends” over 1,000 people I don’t know, and their links to video footage, news reports from outside the country, and on-the-spot commentary, was riveting, inspiring, and disturbing. The actions of the police, in one scary videotaped scene after another—especially in Oakland—are unconscionable. If this were China, we’d be appalled. Why do we accept it as business-as-usual in a country that gives lip service to free speech and human rights? Now that it’s turned on us in a big way, we can see what the black community has known all along, that police forces are often made up of people who are excited by violence, who can’t wait to use their authority against such dire threats as Citibank customers endeavoring to close their accounts, or Naomi Wolf in her evening dress (an event that made the headlines in The Guardian, which I subscribe to online, but was significantly left out of the New York Times). Not to speak of the group that's most armed and dangerous: nurses.
I’m just enough of a Quaker, an idealist—and an American—to believe, like Marine veteran Sergeant Shamar Thomas in the now-famous video where he successfully talks down a bunch of cops, that the police should be protecting our Constitutional right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Is that really so far-fetched?
Comments (2)
October 19, 2011
I could not agree more with Roberta Smith’s strongly worded review of Gabriel Orozco’s show at Marian Goodman, which ended Saturday (note: the images look better online than they did in person). My thoughts exactly: a case of an artist who can do wonderful things (his drawings on money and tickets being some of my favorite artworks ever), churning out stuff for the marketplace to the point that I wonder if he even knows who he is anymore. But then you have to feel sorry for anyone who shows while de Kooning is on at MoMA, and has to stand up to the inevitable comparisons.
Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52. Oil on canvas, 6' 3 7/8" x 58" (192.7 x 147.3 cm). MoMA Purchase. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Willem de Kooning. Pink Angels. c. 1945. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 52 x 40" (132.1 x 101.6 cm). Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
I didn’t see how the de Kooning retrospective could live up to the hype but it did—it was energizing and inspiring, even though some of the selected pieces (especially from the artist’s late period) weren’t the best examples, not to to speak of the pedestrian installation. Is it really necessary to group all of the “woman” paintings together in a row? At MoMA, chronology wins out over aesthetics, as if we’re all art historians for whom it’s important to compare similar paintings side-by-side. Big square rooms, white walls, everything lined up in order…hey, it’s the 21st century! How about a little originality? And also is it necessary to show SO MUCH work at one time? I know that’s a silly question since the whole idea of a blockbuster is to cram in as much as possible—and to hell with selection. Why show three black –and-white paintings when you can get ten? The result, no matter how great the artist, can be overwhelm and overkill, and it’s to de Kooning’s credit that he survives it here.
I remember approaching the gigantic 2005 
[Can we imagine Orozco choosing not to work for nine months? Caring enough not to work for nine months?]
It’s impossible to look at de Kooning and not think of all the other artists (Pollock, Gorky, Kline, etc.) he was bouncing off of, who were working in similar ways, and to recognize how—when a group is working on the same idea, if separately—they push each other to outdo each other and develop it collectively. The downside is that the pressure to adhere to a movement or style can be very confining (I know this from personal experience, having been an abstract artist in Chicago where the Imagists held such sway that the only option was to move to New York)—however it made me think that the complete freedom we have today may be the one of the reasons so little truly great art is being produced.
Leaving the exhibition we walked down the stairs to the first floor where a massive Twombly was hung over the information desk, edge-to-edge scrawls of white crayon on a uniform gray ground. My friend and I had once shared an experience at the Clark Institute with one of Monet’s cathedral paintings, which started out appearing to be almost entirely abstract—but as we looked, the sun seemed to come out and illuminate the façade until we could see its sculptural detail clearly. Similarly here, gazing at the Twombly, the fairly regular, overall pattern of loops began to form themselves into clouds, and the painting took on the unexpected illusion of movement and depth. Gorgeous.
I’ve been back to the Clark since, wanting to see the Monet in the same way again, but it resisted. By now you’d think I would have learned the folly of trying to recreate peak experiences.
Cy Twombly. Untitled. 1970. Oil-based house paint and crayon on canvas. 13' 3 3/8" x 21' 1/8" (405 x 640.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest and The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection (both by exchange). (C) 2011 Cy Twombly
September 20, 2011
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it -- earlier post), a monumental, voluminous construction made of transparent PVC that hung from ceiling to floor and took the shape of an elliptical labyrinth—which Ribé first made 42 years ago when the MoMA artist, a Brazilian named Carlito Carvalhosa, was eight years old.
But wait…the MoMA piece has a “sound” aspect: “a system of microphones hangs from various heights and records the day’s ambient noise, which is played back the following day through several speakers” something that might seem interesting when described in wall text or a press release, but in real life makes zero impact. The first time I experienced anything like that was at Chicago’s N.A.M.E. Gallery circa 1973 when a local artist recorded the sound occurring in one part of the gallery and played it back in another. I didn’t know about Bruce Nauman at the time, but I’m guessing he was beginning to work with sound then too—when Carvalhosa would have been twelve.
The global art world is flooded with hothouse conceptual art much like this, which Jerry Saltz recently coined the “International School of Silly Art.” Born in institutions, and exhibited in institutions, mechanical and denatured, it has the look but not the guts of its predecessors. Neither building on a tradition nor reacting to one, it exists in a vacuum—a rehashing of history without being part of it.
On the other hand, as I’ve pointed out before, the music of the same generation is alive and well and living in this century. Young musicians have absorbed the music of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, synthesized it and made it their own. Also to make music you can’t just say you’re a musician but must learn an actual skill, and I fervently believe that the honing of a skill—a practice (a word Peter Schjeldahl hates when applied to visual art, but I like because it implies necessary repetition)—slows down the creative process and allows the time and space for idiosyncrasy to emerge.
This is why Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present was completely effective, where the recreations of the older pieces that accompanied it were not. Everything Abramović did the past, all her experience—her “practice”—added up to a personal presence that filled the room, something a stand-in who lacked the artist’s peculiar self-training could never approximate, especially when the thrill and risk of doing it for the first time was gone. (It’s curious that Abramović, whose work involves self-awareness, didn’t get this distinction).
But, hmm, maybe the über-liberals of the art world are just following a societal trend that includes the Republicans, who rewrite history every day without batting an eye. If we can do something lame and make everyone believe it’s new, important and exciting, why work harder?
I’m not arguing for new or old, but the development of ideas and forms—any idea, any form—that takes art beyond the mundane, is something I think about the next day and am eager to revisit. Saltz again, in a 2008 interview, challenged artists to make something that seems “to put off more energy than might have gone into making it. A good Pollock,” he continued, “is like the burning bush: It burns but doesn’t burn out. You don’t use it up.”
Up until October 8th at Meulensteen in Chelsea (formerly Max Protetch) are the small acrylic paintings on metal of Ann Pibal who, while just five years Carvalhosa’s senior, has clearly thoroughly studied and digested the history of a nearly century-old form—geometric abstraction—to create work that's fresh and of its time—which is just what we want: art that doesn’t replicate history, but makes it.
Satisfaction is rare, but it does happen.
Ann Pibal, MNGO, 2010, acrylic on aluminum, 12 1/2 x 17 3/4", courtesy of the artist and Meulensteen, NY.
Ann Pibal, SPTR, 2010, acrylic on aluminum, 11 1/4 x 15 3/4", courtesy of the artist and Meulensteen, NY.
April 8, 2010
Alberto Giacometti, Full Figure III (1960), Museum of Modern Art
I have to admit I never really got Giacometti—until last Friday, when I was again at MoMA on what must have been the museum’s busiest day ever. It was a comparative study in human presence: milling crowds, silent nude stand-ins in Marina Abramović’s “re-performances” and, of course, Abramović herself. Her aura, which seems to grow more powerful with each day, filled the Atrium as she sat looking into the eyes of yet another ordinary someone. Then, leaving the Sculpture Garden, my eye caught Giacometti’s female figure, which suddenly seemed almost alive, towering over the lounging sun worshippers with a regal stillness that matched Abramovic’s. For the first time I understood that just as Monet was able to make atmosphere palpable in his paintings, Giacometti’s sculptures are not of humans, but their essence—the interior person made exterior.
I also didn’t get William Kentridge—but only because I hadn’t yet seen the MoMA retrospective, having been put off by the overwhelming hype (he’s definitely the artist of the year) which is not a good excuse. I left awed, especially by the miniature theater representation. I’m still kicking myself for not seeing “The Nose” (I hated the name—have got to revise my attitude), which my smarter friends told me was an amazing theatre experience. Sometimes things are famous for a reason.
Next was the Whitney Biennial, which has to be the blandest yet. After the bustling scene at MoMA, the Whitney seemed tired, wan, past its prime (there was a time when it was the other way around). Yes, there was a desultory queue to get in—it was Good Friday after all—but the galleries themselves were hardly crowded, the visitors wandering around with a “Why am I here?” look on their faces. I am, however, pleased to report that the video has been installed in such a way that it doesn’t distract from the static pieces and, unlike previously, I can’t have fun with the publicity material: this year the descriptions of art and artists are sensible, even readable. There’s no blurb for Charles Ray, however—did he request that there not be one, or have they just not gotten around to it?
I also went to the National Academy Museum’s annual invitational exhibition, and am beginning to feel that the whole survey show concept is so last century (or maybe the one before that—this is the 185th for the NAM). Perhaps the “Biennial problem,” its loss of relevance with each permutation, has not only to do with the Whitney’s choices, but that if one is seeking a true art experience, any exhibition where the work isn’t related through some over-arching theme feels increasingly like a waste of time.
The Biennial is the subject of David Cohen’s usually perky Review Panel on April 23rd, and I’m curious to see if three interesting critics (Roberta Smith, Christian Viveros-Faune, and
Svetlana Alpers) can be interesting enough to make the subject of uninteresting art interesting.
I also didn’t get William Kentridge—but only because I hadn’t yet seen the MoMA retrospective, having been put off by the overwhelming hype (he’s definitely the artist of the year) which is not a good excuse. I left awed, especially by the miniature theater representation. I’m still kicking myself for not seeing “The Nose” (I hated the name—have got to revise my attitude), which my smarter friends told me was an amazing theatre experience. Sometimes things are famous for a reason.
Next was the Whitney Biennial, which has to be the blandest yet. After the bustling scene at MoMA, the Whitney seemed tired, wan, past its prime (there was a time when it was the other way around). Yes, there was a desultory queue to get in—it was Good Friday after all—but the galleries themselves were hardly crowded, the visitors wandering around with a “Why am I here?” look on their faces. I am, however, pleased to report that the video has been installed in such a way that it doesn’t distract from the static pieces and, unlike previously, I can’t have fun with the publicity material: this year the descriptions of art and artists are sensible, even readable. There’s no blurb for Charles Ray, however—did he request that there not be one, or have they just not gotten around to it?
I also went to the National Academy Museum’s annual invitational exhibition, and am beginning to feel that the whole survey show concept is so last century (or maybe the one before that—this is the 185th for the NAM). Perhaps the “Biennial problem,” its loss of relevance with each permutation, has not only to do with the Whitney’s choices, but that if one is seeking a true art experience, any exhibition where the work isn’t related through some over-arching theme feels increasingly like a waste of time.
The Biennial is the subject of David Cohen’s usually perky Review Panel on April 23rd, and I’m curious to see if three interesting critics (Roberta Smith, Christian Viveros-Faune, and
Svetlana Alpers) can be interesting enough to make the subject of uninteresting art interesting.
April 1, 2010
Are we tired of Marina Abramović yet? I’m not. To the post below, Joan contributed a comment questioning (as I interpret it) the value of events that cannot be repeated. However I don’t think that need be a standard. There’s something wonderful about an event that’s fleeting, can never happen again—where you had to be there, as they say. My friend Alexandra’s example of John and Yoko’s “Bed-in” is one of the best. Certainly if Christo and Jeanne Claude’s The Gates were to be installed again, it wouldn’t have the same pizzazz. Olafur Eliasson is very aware of how the temporary nature of a work can contribute to its effectiveness. When it turned out to be such an incredible draw, the Tate Modern wanted to extend the run of The Weather Project, the artist, however, objected and it was removed on schedule. Eliasson explained his decision by saying, "The time after a show is just as interesting to me, because then it becomes an object of memory and its meanings change."
Each of Marina Abramović’s performances is an exercise that brings her to a more realized place, a stepping stone to becoming the person she is, the woman whose great personal presence dominates the Atrium at MoMA even though she’s just sitting there in silence. It is to her credit that this performance (and I believe all of her performances) cannot be successfully replicated; she embodies her work.
Nowhere was this more clear than when an artist sent me a picture of herself, dressed as Abramović and sitting across from her, which she apparently did for an entire day, calling it an “intervention.” Next to Abramović, the copy-cat artist looks like a rag doll [don’t let me go off too much, but that endeavor smacked of the over-indulgence of art school, where “commenting” on art is often allowed to serve as art, no doubt because doing something original is just too hard]. In the same way, actors in bio-pics, no matter how accomplished, are rarely able to convey fully the power of the personalities they are portraying.
I’m curious to know what others’ experience is with the Abramović exhibition. Do you think “re-preformance” works?
Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2004, Tate Modern, London
Each of Marina Abramović’s performances is an exercise that brings her to a more realized place, a stepping stone to becoming the person she is, the woman whose great personal presence dominates the Atrium at MoMA even though she’s just sitting there in silence. It is to her credit that this performance (and I believe all of her performances) cannot be successfully replicated; she embodies her work.
Nowhere was this more clear than when an artist sent me a picture of herself, dressed as Abramović and sitting across from her, which she apparently did for an entire day, calling it an “intervention.” Next to Abramović, the copy-cat artist looks like a rag doll [don’t let me go off too much, but that endeavor smacked of the over-indulgence of art school, where “commenting” on art is often allowed to serve as art, no doubt because doing something original is just too hard]. In the same way, actors in bio-pics, no matter how accomplished, are rarely able to convey fully the power of the personalities they are portraying.
I’m curious to know what others’ experience is with the Abramović exhibition. Do you think “re-preformance” works?
Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2004, Tate Modern, London February 24, 2010
Marina Abramović, photo by Reto GuntliFrom the press release:
The Museum of Modern Art presents Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, the first U.S. large-scale museum retrospective of the artist’s groundbreaking performance work, from March 14 to May 31, 2010. Internationally recognized as a pioneer and key figure in performance art, Marina Abramović (Yugoslav, b. 1946) uses her own body as subject, object, and medium, exploring the physical and mental limits of her being by creating pieces that require her to withstand pain, exhaustion, and discomfort in the quest for artistic, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual transformation….
Abramović, best known for her durational works, has created a new work for this retrospective—The Artist Is Present (2010)—that she will perform daily throughout the run of the exhibition. For her longest solo piece to date, Abramović will sit in silence at a table in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium during public hours, passively inviting visitors to take the seat across from her for as long as they choose within the timeframe of the Museum’s hours of operation. Although she will not respond verbally, participation by Museum visitors completes the piece and allows them to have a personal experience with the artist and the artwork.
I wasn’t quick enough to get my bid in to write about Abramović for the art magazines; indeed, until I attended the press preview at MoMA last week, I didn’t realize how profoundly I related to her work. I’ve done many things in my life involving ritual, meditation, a certain amount of endurance (the only English phrase my Chinese t’ai chi master seemed to know was “hold for one minute”) and even danger (studying karate at a dojo with a policy of admitting everyone, even those with “problems,’ because that’s who’s out there on the street, in life)—experiences that offer me a glimpse into Abramović’s practice.
But just a glimpse. Because no matter how rigorous my practices have been, they don’t add up to anything like Abramović’s project. The press release doesn’t mention that Abramović is committed to also remaining silent during her “off” hours, but that would seem a necessary component, as she will be taking in a lot.
I think about an exercise I did once as part of a personal growth workshop which required standing just a little too close and silently staring into the eyes of another member of the group of 150, chosen at random, for ten minutes. During the workshop I’d been sitting next to a man in his 50s, whose conversation indicated that he was very much in love with his wife—who I’d only seen from afar, but seemed hardly the type to inspire such ardor. It turned out she was my partner, and after looking into her eyes for ten minutes, I was in love with her too. Following the exercise we went back to our seats, but my first thought upon leaving the room was that I wanted to give her a hug, an impulse that turned out to be mutual.
In the same vein I sat in on a workshop that Betty Edwards (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain) gave, watching as adults went from drawing stick figures to lively, acutely representational portraits within just a few days. One of the exercises involved drawing another person, again chosen at random from the group. In the ladies room later I overheard a conversation where one participant was saying to another, “She’s not the sort of person I ever thought I’d be friends with, but after drawing her for so long, I found I really liked her and we made plans to have lunch.”
I think too of my friend Tim, a singer at the Met who, instructed by a doctor not to speak for three days, said he saw a lot of pain in people’s faces he hadn’t been aware of before.
What will Abramović see? Perhaps just a bunch of people taking pictures (I don’t yet know what MoMA’s policy will be). New Yorkers aren’t great at sitting still—or being quiet. Maybe they’ll come to confess. Whatever happens, Abramović will be changed by the experience, and it will have a profound influence on whatever she does next.
This would appear to be what Roberta Smith was calling for when she wrote (in her much-discussed article “Post Minimal to the Max”) that she wanted to see more “art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand.”--only in the case of Abramović it’s not the hand but the entire body.
This is art that comes from process, from doing, rather than thinking.
By contrast Tino Sehgal’s piece of interactive theater at the Guggenheim (see Holland Cotter’s favorable Times review) seems to spring from the head, an idea illustrated. The people who ask you questions as you ascend the ramp aren’t actors, but neither are they real people acting on their own impulses. Like the commenter on this blog, Kathy Hodge, who said, “I don’t want to be forced to interact with anyone for their own ‘social experiment,’” I don’t want to give thought to answers that will go nowhere—so I avoid as I do the television news people on the street corner who don’t really care about my opinion either. In both cases I feel as if I’m being used.
With Abramović, however, we meet on our own terms.
The Museum of Modern Art presents Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, the first U.S. large-scale museum retrospective of the artist’s groundbreaking performance work, from March 14 to May 31, 2010. Internationally recognized as a pioneer and key figure in performance art, Marina Abramović (Yugoslav, b. 1946) uses her own body as subject, object, and medium, exploring the physical and mental limits of her being by creating pieces that require her to withstand pain, exhaustion, and discomfort in the quest for artistic, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual transformation….
Abramović, best known for her durational works, has created a new work for this retrospective—The Artist Is Present (2010)—that she will perform daily throughout the run of the exhibition. For her longest solo piece to date, Abramović will sit in silence at a table in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium during public hours, passively inviting visitors to take the seat across from her for as long as they choose within the timeframe of the Museum’s hours of operation. Although she will not respond verbally, participation by Museum visitors completes the piece and allows them to have a personal experience with the artist and the artwork.
I wasn’t quick enough to get my bid in to write about Abramović for the art magazines; indeed, until I attended the press preview at MoMA last week, I didn’t realize how profoundly I related to her work. I’ve done many things in my life involving ritual, meditation, a certain amount of endurance (the only English phrase my Chinese t’ai chi master seemed to know was “hold for one minute”) and even danger (studying karate at a dojo with a policy of admitting everyone, even those with “problems,’ because that’s who’s out there on the street, in life)—experiences that offer me a glimpse into Abramović’s practice.
But just a glimpse. Because no matter how rigorous my practices have been, they don’t add up to anything like Abramović’s project. The press release doesn’t mention that Abramović is committed to also remaining silent during her “off” hours, but that would seem a necessary component, as she will be taking in a lot.
I think about an exercise I did once as part of a personal growth workshop which required standing just a little too close and silently staring into the eyes of another member of the group of 150, chosen at random, for ten minutes. During the workshop I’d been sitting next to a man in his 50s, whose conversation indicated that he was very much in love with his wife—who I’d only seen from afar, but seemed hardly the type to inspire such ardor. It turned out she was my partner, and after looking into her eyes for ten minutes, I was in love with her too. Following the exercise we went back to our seats, but my first thought upon leaving the room was that I wanted to give her a hug, an impulse that turned out to be mutual.
In the same vein I sat in on a workshop that Betty Edwards (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain) gave, watching as adults went from drawing stick figures to lively, acutely representational portraits within just a few days. One of the exercises involved drawing another person, again chosen at random from the group. In the ladies room later I overheard a conversation where one participant was saying to another, “She’s not the sort of person I ever thought I’d be friends with, but after drawing her for so long, I found I really liked her and we made plans to have lunch.”
I think too of my friend Tim, a singer at the Met who, instructed by a doctor not to speak for three days, said he saw a lot of pain in people’s faces he hadn’t been aware of before.
What will Abramović see? Perhaps just a bunch of people taking pictures (I don’t yet know what MoMA’s policy will be). New Yorkers aren’t great at sitting still—or being quiet. Maybe they’ll come to confess. Whatever happens, Abramović will be changed by the experience, and it will have a profound influence on whatever she does next.
This would appear to be what Roberta Smith was calling for when she wrote (in her much-discussed article “Post Minimal to the Max”) that she wanted to see more “art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand.”--only in the case of Abramović it’s not the hand but the entire body.
This is art that comes from process, from doing, rather than thinking.
By contrast Tino Sehgal’s piece of interactive theater at the Guggenheim (see Holland Cotter’s favorable Times review) seems to spring from the head, an idea illustrated. The people who ask you questions as you ascend the ramp aren’t actors, but neither are they real people acting on their own impulses. Like the commenter on this blog, Kathy Hodge, who said, “I don’t want to be forced to interact with anyone for their own ‘social experiment,’” I don’t want to give thought to answers that will go nowhere—so I avoid as I do the television news people on the street corner who don’t really care about my opinion either. In both cases I feel as if I’m being used.
With Abramović, however, we meet on our own terms.
December 18, 2009
Peter Schjeldahl, "
Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (894-1), 2005 11 3/4 x 17 3/8
Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (894-1), 2005 11 3/4 x 17 3/8 If, after the Orozco show, you want to indulge your senses in a retrograde manner, hop on over to the same place we first saw those Dannon lids, the Marian Goodman Gallery, and wallow in Gerhard Richter’s gorgeous scraped abstractions, up through January 9th.
December 15, 2009
What I wrote below sounded so negative, I wanted to amend it. I don’t want to discount Orozco because, while I find his much of his “conceptual” work tedious, I’m completely inspired by his drawings, small paintings, and collages. It’s just that these are regarded as ephemera rather than the real deal, when I think they are the real deal. Again, this isn’t an argument for painting and drawing over conceptual art, but for Orozco’s painting and drawing over his conceptual art, much of which, for me, falls into a genre Jerry Saltz has written about and Roberta Smith has aptly coined “Curator's Art” (whether or not they’d include Orozco, I don’t know). Asked about the Urs Fischer survey in the comments to the post below, while I find some of his work intriguing, Fischer lost my respect with the hole in the wall that, when you get too close, sticks a tongue out at you. In my book, not only is it just too easy, it sends the same message as Orozco’s shoebox: that museum visitors are idiots and deserve to be treated as such.
To show how undervalued (I'm not talking money here) Orozco’s graphic work is, I can’t even find examples on the Web of the pieces I love best. The overused image above will have to do.