It was not about Marina Abramovic at all. Moisturized beyond belief and restrained by an impractically long white dress —spilling out on the concrete floor of the atrium— she resembled a statue onto which the sitter could manifest his anima. A living, breathing Tony Oursler projection, perhaps. The pallor of my face emerging from my standard head-to-toe black garb was inadvertently the yin to her pasty visage and black, side-braided yang. Sitting with her was not nerve-wracking. It was the brief ceremony of transforming into a collaborator that flushed my body with adrenaline. Once seated, I breathed deeply, gazed, and hallucinated. Her face became a syrupy oscillation of decay and rebirth. Her features would corrode and, as quickly as they dispersed, would reconfigure. The audience having been relegated to a blurry orbit around us, Marina too began to disappear as I pelted her with questions in silence. Why can’t I follow through with my ascetic inclinations? Why am I afraid to fail when you, Marina, have transfigured failure into sublime shtick? I reflexively glanced away once during our forty minutes. A Lesley Gore song popped into my head moments later, only to immediately fade into the pleasant din of the public. These were the only fleeting distractions during my sitting. Marina was not the therapist but the comfortable chaise I laid upon to confront my own struggles with professional identity and personal fulfillment. The multilingual closing hours rang out over the intercom and her assistant whispered in my ear that the performance was over. I gracefully bolted as Marina bowed her head and the audience clapped. I longed to race home so I could process the experience but the pawing at by inquisitive strangers made my trek a veritable obstacle course. The artist had ceased to be present. I had ascended the temporal hierarchy from spectator to collaborator and finally, performer. It had been about me all along.
- Anthony Thornton
