I waited in line for four hours to sit with Marina for seven minutes. I did many things during those four hours: stood, sat, read, talked to those around me, but mostly I watched what was going on and thought about what it meant. I watched the sitters look at Marina. I watched Marina look at the sitters. I watched museum visitors watch the sitters and Marina look at each other. I watched the cameras watch all of the participants. While there was very little going on, there was also a lot going on. And in spite of it being a performance, the scene made me initially think about painting in general and the paintings of Edward Hopper in particular.
Even though it was a three-dimensional space, the large square on the floor and the walls of the atrium created a frame around the two figures sitting motionless, still, almost frozen in time. Photographs stop time, but so do paintings and given the duration for which the two individuals sat, the scene for me referred more to the time-intensive process required to build up the surface of a canvas. That is not to say that making a photograph does not require time for its creation. It’s more that once the scene is set and the camera is adjusted, the image is captured in a physical instant and for me, Marina’s performance seemed more about extending time rather than shortening it.
As I sat outside of the frame watching the watchers, I felt like a voyeur secretly watching the subtle and intimate behavior between Marina and her guest. That voyeuristic quality is what led me to Hopper. Hopper’s interiors, often include just one or two individuals, set within a framed off space apart from the viewer, silently gazing outside of the frame, usually through a window. A frame within a frame. A viewer viewing a viewer. There is an existential loneliness that those portraits convey and I have often wondered what those figures were thinking about while sitting there within their own stillness.
But Marina’s work wasn’t really like a Hopper at all. It was a big budget performance, done by a big ticket artist, within the sanctified space of a big name museum. It didn’t freeze a moment in time like a Hopper painting does, it was a “lights, camera, action” spectacle that existed in actual time, unfolding over the course of hours, days, weeks and months. And in order for it to exist, it required real experiential endurance on the part of the artist and the participants. Also, the theme of isolation wasn’t the intention; it was just the opposite. Marina’s work was about creating a space in which two individuals could convene and forge a connection. At least that is what I think the artist intended.
I snapped out of my four-hour musing very quickly when I realized that I was the next one to ‘go on’. At that moment, I remembered that the work wasn’t about the thinking that occurred while waiting but about the sitting itself, the experience of being in Marina’s ‘presence’. She was in red the day I met her and as I sat waiting for my turn, I couldn’t help but think that I was about to have an audience with the pope - Marina as the performance art pope. Marina IS the performance art pope. That thought, plus all of the lights and all of the people silently watching, started to make me nervous.
I sat down opposite Marina, tried to forget about what was happening around me, and looked at her. She was pale, sweaty and clearly drained. I felt like she ‘saw’ me for a few seconds, but then her eyes glazed over, which seemed reasonable given that it was after four o’clock on a Friday afternoon. But something in me refused to be ‘ignored’ in that way. I wanted to be seen, I wanted to connect with her in an unspoken way, which I know says more about me than about the performance. I lowered my head trying to catch her slightly downturned gaze. I blinked over and over to try and wake her up but only had limited success. She came to the surface at points, but then would disappear behind a kind of endurance haze or a meditative trance. I couldn’t tell which of the two it was, maybe a combination of both, or maybe something else entirely. I couldn’t know, I will never know, but that is precisely what I want to know. Just like those figures in Hopper’s paintings, I have been left wondering what she was thinking about, where she was, what she was learning by going through it.
In addition to trying to remind her that I was there, I telepathically sent her feelings of good will. Do I believe in telepathy? I’m not sure, but I tried none the less. Over and over, I told her I loved her, I told her that she could go on in spite of her exhaustion, I told her that she was beautiful, that her work was important, that this space was important, that she was an inspiration. At some undetermined point, I knew that I was ready and needed no more time. I lowered my head, closed my eyes and she did the same.
My intention for participating in the performance was to see what would happen when I looked into the eyes of a complete stranger for an extended period of time. To hold the gaze of a stranger across a subway aisle or a crowded room is an entirely different affair and is ripe with very real consequences. In spite of not knowing what was going to happen, I expected some kind of connection between us simply because we were looking at one another. Instead, I felt more like a witness to Marina’s physical, conceptual and spiritual practice of endurance and in that regard it seemed one-sided. I have wondered, what if I had sat again, perhaps earlier in the day or the week or even towards the end of the exhibition’s run, might I have experienced the feeling of her presence connecting with my presence? I know others felt it.
-Kristy Krivitsky
