I. Waiting
I was in Midtown early that morning for work; I finished early arrived at MoMA soon after it opened, so there wasn’t a huge line. MoMA was crowded that day; but most of the people turned out to be there for Tim Burton. There were fifteen people in the line; that seemed reasonable, and I had a book, so I joined it. Then a wait: an hour and a half, I think. That wait was interesting: some decided that it was too long and left the line. The thought of leaving crossed my mind: I don’t like waiting in lines. No one does. A wait, of course, builds anticipation; after enough waiting, I found myself loath to give up, as I’d already invested so much time. This complicated the experience: the actual experience needed to justify itself. I don’t think this is the way it should be; but it’s how I feel as a New Yorker.
During the wait, I couldn’t help noticing, Marina Abramovic’s behavior between sitters: after each one, she collapsed into her hands, more and more exhausted. The sitters were doing something to her; and those of us in line were implicated in that. We cheered inwardly when someone ahead of us dropped out of the line; and there was a sense of relief when the person in the center stood up to leave.
II. Experience
Eventually it was my turn; I put down my book and went to the chair opposite Abramovic. There was a table at that point in time; there were cameras all around as well as heat from the bright lights in each corner of the square. It was a theatrical space, almost a circus-like space. It’s strange to look at someone for an extended period of time: it’s not something one does very often. Polite society tells us not to stare, especially not at people we don’t know. But here we’re supposed to stare; and by moving to the center, we’re implicitly agreeing to be stared at by the rest of her audience.
It’s also odd to stare at someone who’s obviously suffering. The normal human reaction is to help; but clearly help was not what was being asked for. It was a confusing situation. Staring at Marina Abramovic, I realized that I had no way of knowing what she might be thinking, experiencing, getting out of the situation, let alone understanding; to the observer, we would appear to be separate from the crowd, but was there really anything connecting us? I can’t presume to put myself into her shoes, as much as I’d like to think that I could. She’s lived an insane life, and done a lot of insane things, and what she sees when she looks at me (a person she doesn’t know from any other) is going to be very different from what I see when I look at her.
There’s also, of course, the physiological impact of looking at one thing, one person, for a long time. I lost track of time – I really had no idea how long I was sitting. Though the caption on the photo says 14 minutes I would have guessed that I was there for a shorter amount of time, 5 to 10 minutes. I also started to hallucinate slightly: we’re used to things in front of us changing, and there everything was incredibly still. I found myself blinking, almost dropping off into sleep. I was confused about how I should be reacting. Eventually I found myself wondering how long I should stay: extending my stay was prolonging the waits of those behind me in line. The performance, of course, wasn’t about me.
III. Afterward
Documentation feels something like a betrayal of the experience – but that can’t be avoided, I guess. I don’t think I would have told anyone about my experience had not the first person I ran into after leaving the chair been a reporter for the New York Times who wanted to know what I’d experienced. Dazed, I tried to tell him; reading the article in the paper, I realized how incoherent I’d been.
Looking at Marina Abramovic, the image that first came to mind, perhaps because of the museum setting, was the face of one of Antonello da Messina’s suffering Christs who looks directly out at the viewer of the painting, one of those images of martyrdom where the suffering in Christ’s face is intertwined with the idea that he’s a sacrificial victim for those who are looking at his painting. It’s a powerful idea – and Antonello’s painting is undeniably powerful – but there’s also something unsavory to it: lionizing suffering is grotesque and inhumane. This is what I saw in Marina Abramovic. I don’t know that it’s necessarily what she set out to do, but part of what made her compelling was that she was presenting herself a suffering victim. I wonder to what end that was? It’s a more complicated situation because she is a marquee name – after the Tim Burton show closed she kept drawing visitors to MoMA – and I’m sure that she’s ended up in a much better financial situation because of “The Artist is Present”.
I’m still not sure what I think of her. My time with Marina Abramovic was certainly powerful; I don’t know, however, that I can make it transcendent. Two stories by Kafka keep coming to mind when I think back about the experience. In the first, a hunger artist starves himself to death for his art, which the public disdains. In the second, an officer in a penal colony constructs a machine that will tattoo a condemned man’s sentence upon his person, finally killing him, the aim is that the prisoner might finally understand what he has done; but the officer’s machine fails in its demonstration, and ultimately, the officer straps himself into his machine, determined to prove that it will work. Both of the protagonists of these stories end up dead because of their mistaken beliefs, their work ignored by the public that they had hoped would embrace them. Are they heroes? Or foolish? They can be read either way.
- Dan Visel
