Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

 Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present is a documentary film about performance artist Marina Abromovic’s body of work, her life, and her exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art in 2010 titled The Artist is Present. The film begins by giving a general overview of Marina’s early work while cutting between her past and present (at the time of the film) as she prepares for her big exhibit at the MoMA. Her relationship with fellow performance artist, Ulay, is highlighted as they were partners in every sense of the word, both romantically and artistically. Ulay was brought on to help Abramovic prepare for her exhibition and the documentary shows his involvement. The film goes on to show the many people that helped Abramovic with this. One of the people highlighted was Klaus Biesenbach, one of the curators of the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the time. Klaus gives his thoughts on working with Marina and how he tries to be very “matter of fact” with her when talking to her about her work. During the early part of the film, Marina takes in several young performance artists to her home in the countryside where they go through a performance art “boot camp”, so to speak, as they trained to recreate five of her pivotal works. While there the new artists did not eat or speak for three days. Abramovic explained they had to “empty themselves” so the performance could come from within and be pure. The second half of the film is about the exhibition itself. The Piece, The Artist is Present, is a recreation of a previous piece Abramovic did a long time ago with Ulay, where they sat at a table in complete silence while they were fasting as they gazed into each other’s eyes. They sat for hours on end until Ulay finally got up and yet she continued sitting for hours. What Marina Abramovic did for The Artist is Present is much of the same thing except this time, the audience that was in attendance is in the same role Ulay was. Originally, the audience was able to sit and gaze into her eyes as long or as little as they wanted. But as the piece became more popular, The MoMA coordinators had to give people numbers and limit people to a maximum of fifteen minutes each. Marina did this performance exhibition for three months straight while fasting food. There are points in the documentary where you can see the pain she is in while enduring the fast and she even comments that “There is pain, but the pain is like a kind of keeping secret. The moment you really go through the door of pain you enter to another state of mind.” - Marina Abramovic. As Marina sat still in the chair, the young artists she trained performed her other works in the gallery including a nude woman balancing on her groin and slowly moving her arms out and feet of the rests as time goes on at the exhibit, one where participants squeeze between a nude man and woman in a doorway like structure and some of the days it was even two men or two women, and a piece where a model of a skeleton lays over a nude person who is matching the pose. The second half of the film is entirely spent on showcasing “The Artist is Present” performance piece and how Marina goes through it. It shows many of the people who sit with her and many of them smile and even cry happy tears, like what happened when Sulay sat with her on the first day of the exhibit, they both cried and it was very touching to see. Marina goes on to say “There's so many different reasons why people come to sit in front of me. Some of them, they're angry. Some of them curious. Some of them just want to know what happen. Some of them… they're really open and you feel incredible pain. So many people have so much pain. When they're sitting in the front of me, it's not about me anymore.It's very soon, I'm just the mirror of their own self.” Interview scenes and lines from Marina herself, as well as Klaus Biesenbach, and Sulay, are overlaid and cut between shots of the interactive performance piece to contextualize what was being thought or done. The film finally ends with the closing of the exhibit and Marina Abramovic and her colleagues expressing how proud and grateful they are.  

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When the film began, I was greatly confused and unsure why I was watching the nude people and this woman who was seemingly endangering herself by standing still and nude around weapons and fire. It didn’t take too long for me to suspect it was a form of performance art, an art form of which I only recently learned the name, and as the film continued it confirmed she was in fact a performance artist. After that was established, I was able to better understand the following content and view it with a more open mind. Like I said in my overview, the film spends a lot of time dwelling on Abramovic's past, but keeps going between the past and present of her life, which is a popular style in storytelling. I vaguely remember hearing a story about a couple who both walked The Great Wall of China and met in the middle, but when they met again they broke up when they were supposed to get engaged. After seeing that part shown in this film, I suddenly understood what that old story was. The film spends a lot of time establishing Marina Abramovic’s artworks, performance style, her artistic process, and her aspirations for her exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. I am very glad the film did this because it really helped me to understand and appreciate just how influential and important she was to the modern art scene! Celebrities of the time like Orlando Bloom and James Franco appear to participate in the exhibit and goes to show how so many performers were inspired by her. As the film progressed I found myself wholly absorbed by the storyline they wove, showing how challenging putting together an exhibit of live performance art was and the amount of pain Marina had to endure during her fast. I was quite shocked but had to know what was going to happen next, a testament to the fantastic editing work done in this film. I went into this film knowing virtually nothing about Marina Abramovic, and came out feeling like an expert despite the fact that the exhibition was fifteen years ago and the film is thirteen years old, meaning she has been quite active since then. The film inspired me to look up both Abramovic and Sulay, and to try and watch more of their works in full. I also came away from this understanding more about the Museum of Modern Art and what goes into setting up an exhibition. Not only were artists trained to reperform her most famous works, but videos of many of her other works were projected onto the walls of the gallery. It was a clever way to exhibit performances in space meant for more traditional frames and canvas. I am coming away from this film and post both excited and eager to follow Marina Abramovic and see what she does in the future! 

References: 

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (Film, 2012)

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present - IMDb 

 

The Artist is Present Transcript