Dayna Moses, August, 2010
When I first attended Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present exhibition at the MoMA, a friend and I stood for a good three hours before recognizing that our chance of sitting with the artist before the museum closed was unlikely. Instead, with one hour left, we carried with us what we’d learned from the three hours of watching and waiting and proceeded upstairs to the 6th floor exhibition. The rooms were scattered with re-enactments of Marina’s performances from the 70’s and 80’s; videos, interviews, and documentation of her live performances. AAA-AAA (1978) and Breathing In/Breathing Out (1977) were particularly interesting, given the definition of space; the two videos were juxtaposed, portraying both performers simultaneously, interlinked and detached. A beautiful element about Abramovic’s work is how it is universally relatable. Anyone who has had a partner can connect with Marina and Ulay, as their performances span the emotional spectrum of electricity, anger, love, abhorrence, and frustration. Everyone has fit in there somewhere, at some point in their life, whether individually, collaboratively, internally or externally.
In April of 2010, I had the honor of sitting with Marina Abramovic at The Artist is Present exhibition at the MoMA. As a five-year follower of her work, Marina’s first movement – she lifted her head from her chest to a frontal, upright position- was a catalyst for heavy breathing and tears on my end. Interestingly, when I checked the series of portraits by Marco Anelli (http://www.marcoanelli.com/) I noticed my facial expression was nothing like any I had ever seen of myself. Naturally, experiences are not always thoroughly conveyed through words. The beauty of experience is to feel or even, not to feel. To not only see the pioneer of performance art but, to have the opportunity to sit one-on-one with her re-enforced the depth of the retrospective just a few floors above us. In flashes of images and words, I communicated with Marina. In total, I sat for 23 minutes.
Submission. I felt bodiless, or, in other words, beyond-body. Flesh was a coat, sound was non-existent, the periphery was erased. The energy between us was similar to a membrane; certain moments, flashes, images, memories, epiphanies, filtered through and others remained. Those that remained, grew and developed, like a seed in soil, becoming preliminaries for a tree. I forgot about my usual concerns; my own presence, how I appeared, how I felt. None of that mattered. This was something massive. Even as a speck in the middle of the atrium surrounded by at least a hundred people, these concerns had dried. The power of submission was letting go of societal, trained perspectives, and though this could have been done through personal meditation, it was generous of Marina to offer her partnership in the midst of her own artistic, specialized conglomerate.
