By Ann-Sargent Wooster
What made you decide to attempt a sitting? My old boyfriend was much taken with the exhibition and he had sat with Marina twice. There may be a competitiveness between us and I wanted to see what his oh wow experience was. I had seen the show several times and thought of sitting with her but it seemed complicated and open ended. The semester had ended so I decided to try and sit. I came on a Friday and thought she would end early. I got there about 10AM I don’t know what number I was in line but I thought realistically I had a shot. My current boyfriend stopped in and brought me half a sandwich, which I ate it in the sculpture garden and then returned to sit in the atrium alone because he didn’t want to stay and sit. I felt comfortable enough to see William Kentridge several times, a quick trip again through Marina and the women’s show on the second floor. I dressed to be comfortable and there was a constant buzz with the people around me in line. There was a sense of anticipation as we tried to analyze how long people would sit (it was sort of like gambling). We were usually wrong and they stayed longer than expected. The feeling of impending excitement intensified the closer we got. Some people had to leave because they had previous commitments. A woman on one side had flown back into New York from the west coast, maybe Portland, to try and sit but she had tickets to the opera and left at 7. On the other side was a black man from Hartford who had driven in to town to sit with Marina. He did paperwork the whole time he was in line. I asked him why he was here and he said there was something about her. He had felt the same way about Gilbert and George. At 8:15 he and I were the last two in line. He was a runner who had been in a bad car accident and had to learn how to run again in 2003. I asked him for a ride home. I saw him on the last day and he said he had come back on Saturday and sat with her and it had been a really good experience. In front of me was a 50-year-old college professor with green glasses. We talked and she was constantly tweeting with her peeps in Canada. At one point she went to one side and stood where the live feed could see her so the friends back in Canada who kept asking when are you going to sit could at least see she was in the space. I teach art history and so we were similar in a way. I encouraged her to do live performance, which she said she would do. She was the last to sit that night. You know you are close when Marco asks you to sign a release. I signed a release that night. I asked her how it felt. She said it was exciting like a storm but she didn’t know how much came from Marina and how much was her. My body was hurting the last 4 hours out of the 9. I really don’t like sitting on the floor and what I kept saying was that the wait in line was longer than the time it took me to run/walk the NYC marathon. In retrospect I felt in someway I was making art waiting in line and I usually work in the etching studio for 9 hours on Fridays. Waiting in line gave you a reason to watch the circus and also gave you the right to dwell in the atrium for a day instead of passing through. My boyfriend tried to convenience me via cell phone to go home but I felt very stubborn and right in staying.
I came back on Wednesday before the museum opened and was in the line for sitting. I saw my old boyfriend ahead of me in line. We talked. Then the guards opened the stairs and there was a mad rush, which I called the running of the bulls in Pamplona. The guards seemed more than indifferent, almost as if they wanted us to have problems because they thought we were foolish. After the VIPs I sat at about 11 for 3 minutes. Why so short? Time is meaningless in the chair. I felt that she was tired and I couldn’t help her and I didn’t want to be a burden. It was the strangest sensation of pity with no way of expressing it. I thought it would be like telepathy and I thought of a mutual friend and felt worse than no connection. I felt almost ejected out of the chair. I was disappointed and knew I had not had the experience people were talking about. I thought people were being theatrical and cultish, dressing in costumes and with elaborate agendas. But I knew there was something there that I had missed. I was out of my comfort zone and most of my friends thought she was a sell out or an egotist but the sitting convinced me there was something different and important about the process of sitting or waiting to sit.
My boyfriend and I came another day, arriving early, but he was not prepared for the running of the bulls and being trampled on the stairs, elbowing people out of the way to get in line. I might have been 17th but I didn’t sit that day though I had some good snacks in the cafeteria. The people I remember in line that day were more for their leaving. One woman was trying to figure out how to stand in line and interview people in the garden at the same time. Another man had a job interview. There was always the possibility of sitting. I signed one of Marco’s releases.
I came even earlier on the last, Saturday. People were giving out numbers to each other and the guards were suddenly organized and issued us into a line at the escalator. I felt I was too far back in line and went home. There was something very peaceful and centering in the act of waiting. I spent six days and one night waiting but 10 minutes total sitting so waiting was the predominate experience.
What where your expectations/hopes? On some level I was afraid the whole thing was a fraud like finding the wizard in the Wizard of Oz was a little man behind a curtain or the emperor had no clothes. Having seen a close friend involved in a cult-like meditation practice there were elements of that that made me nervous. Crying seemed to be a common reaction. In the middle of all the sitting I read When Marina Abramovic is Dead. I started with her relationship to Ullay and worked my way to the solo performances. We are the same age and I had a successful collaboration with a male partner. It was hard to invent a solo career. I never thought she was a mother to me but I saw her incarnation in the performance as historical things I know about including the worship of the Great Goddess, the Delphic Oracle and the Libyan sibyl. I have visited the hug mother which this has elements of and had a confusing experience with her. She hugged me and said, “no, no, no.” What did that mean? When I saw Robert Wilson’s A letter to Queen Victoria I wanted to be in one of his plays and attended the Byrd Hoffman workshop and was in The Dollar Value of Man at BAM. I knew there was something there and I wanted a taste of it if only to say I had had the experience
The line, trials, tribulations, and triumphs… I believe I stood/sat in line six times and sat twice. It wasn’t like waiting for a bus that never comes. What is the moment when you stop waiting and find alternative transportation home? Persistence and timing could pay off. There was only one end to waiting and that was success or clear-cut failure. Few things give you that experience in life. The sitting let you get to know the characters in the play, the annoying VIPs at the front of the line, the regular guards and the bouncer like guards imported from some night club or celebrity event. They were too chunky to guard the President, the tall man with a scarf who thought he was the impresario by virtue of a connection to Marina and sitting many times, the photographer Marco who said he didn’t speak English but did, Pablo who sat many times and glowed into handsomeness through his intense personal connection honed to love, the people who dressed as if they were in an Ashram and meeting their guru in shades of white or orange, the girl who donned a worn Japanese jacket just before sitting with Marina and whose intention was to honor/remember/mourn her recently deceased mother and sat 29 times for that purpose… Waiting was a kind of meditation where you had to practice a kind of patience not normally experienced in life. At times it seemed like a baseball game without the game except there was always a sense of who is the next batter up. While waiting there was always a sense that you were doing something. I got to within three people of the head of the line three times and signed Marco’s photo release three times I didn’t sit. The last hour was very exciting with its buzz of will I or won’t I, a sort of a linear form of pulling petals from a daisy-she loves me, she loves me not except by the end of each day it was less about Marina and more about the people before you and how much time they took up.
Triumphs. The last two days were the best for a variety of reasons. I got there at 6AM Sunday. There were already people in line including one group clustered around a large box of Dunkin Donuts. A man came out at 6 AM and said I had to move in front of the store… There were stories told to each other about how a child had run over and sat in the empty chair before the guards captured and ejected him or how somebody had run over and kissed her. I asked how did she react and I was told very shocked. The guard said to look at the person on either side of us and that would be our only guarantee of a place in line. This time it was more organized. When we were let into the lobby we formed one line and around 9:30 they let us in through one entrance in small groups in a roped off line for an escalator, the head guard seemed to care that things were done in a fair and thoughtful manner. I think a lot of bad feeling had been generated by people who sat for 5 hours not letting any one else sit. There were people who sat many times and people like me who had sat before but not in a satisfactory way. It was announced we would each have 20 or was it 30 minutes? Maybe it was 30 on Saturday, 20 on Sunday, and ten on Monday.
There was a woman from Australia who felt that because she had just flown in from Australia she had a right to be in line. She became very pushy in a frightening and obsessive way and even offered money but everyone turned her down. Finally one woman talked to her about how she was making us feel and she finally stopped. Though grumbling about camping she was one of the first people in the line that formed outside at 6pm. In the middle of the night she came and apologized to me for her over the top behavior the day before. She performed in a costume in Australia that made her look like a Raggedy Ann doll in a tutu, She was about my age and there was something tragic about her costume all stripes and a yarn wig. I like toys and I use them in my work. Raggedy Ann is a childhood favorite because my name is Ann and I thought they made a doll just for me but there was something that didn’t work for me in her middle-aged body. I wish I had asked her exactly what she did in her performances. She had changed into her costume on Monday but the guards asked her not to wear it.
Waiting in line on Sunday made me really aware that many people were there for Marina the icon of performance art but there was also a sense that many were on stage or auditioning. There are few places in the art world for the kind of exposure the live cable feed gave them. When I get bored I ask questions and there was a girl in the line that I asked the most questions of because she was wearing a pale blue cat suit. Over two days I found out many things such as the origin of the cat suit, she and a girlfriend performed in homemade ones in California. I am not exactly sure what the performance consisted of but I know they went places dressed like cats and once ended up in a swimming pool in the suit. She eventually bought the one she was wearing from an online fetish store. It had a zipper in the crotch but she had never used it. She had a favorite mathematical equation. I would write it but there aren’t keys on my computer that would let me. She had suddenly flown cross-country to sit with Marina and had brought with her only a red spring coat and the things in her pocket. She was a striking blonde with a good body that helped the surrealist charm of the cat suit. She realized while we were sitting on the edges of the square that her gamble wouldn’t pay off and she could not sit with Marina on Sunday and changed her plane ticket from 8PM Sunday to 8PM Monday. She became really good friends in line with the girl who pulled off her dress on Monday. When she pulled up the face part of the cat suit she looked more like a Mexican wrestler than a cat. There is a picture of her in my Marina album on facebook. She was so concerned about sitting that she was the first person inline at 6PM. She fell asleep and someone thought she had passed out and called EMS. They came and she woke up and a guard at MOMA gave her several blankets.
The line on Sunday had a tense coiled playful energy like a circus or sideshow. The boundaries of the square became more defined like a boxing ring or the ropes at a club. There was a girl in front of me in line who was carrying a huge mess of yarn that she was calmingly knitting a scarf from. She was a tall blonde with felt flowers in her hair and when she finally sat with Marina, she was the last sitter Sunday, she was transformed into one of Botticelli’s women, maybe Spring from the Primavera. I was attracted to that ball of yarn like a cat. One of my first adult thoughts to myself was when I was about six and my mother was calmingly rolling up a tangled mess of yarn, perhaps I had tangled it and grown to frustrated, and as I saw her bring order out of chaos I thought I want to be like that when I grow up. Her knotted clotted mass of yarn had been a prop in a performance. As she knit the bulky yarn on fat needles she said every time she came to a tangle she would break the yarn. I spent the next three hours untangling the yarn from its involuntary cats cradle. I was sure one of us was Penelope outwitting her suitors. I was completely absorbed in solving the puzzle of her yarn. Just before five o’clock I had untangled 90% of it into many sizes of pink and white wool balls of yarn. Her boyfriend had just graduated from NYU in writing. For many hours you couldn’t tell they were a couple and it was her interest in Marina and his interest in her that had brought them to the line. When there was one person left to sit he let her go. Looking like a Renaissance princess with flowers in her hair Marco circled her taking more pictures than usual while she sat with Marina. They spent the night in the street together so he could sit the next day.
Around one a clock or two a group of girls in front of me in line (25-30 mostly involved with film and performance art) began to play a game, if it had a title it would have been “enough with all this waiting lets pretend to be Marina and the person sitting opposite her”. At least six people took part alternating between keeping an immobile mask-like face and facing that face. There was a sense of endurance like staring at someone and trying not to be the first person to blink. There was a sense of playing with dolls but also the moment in Sartre’s No Exit when there are no mirrors and one person offers to be the mirror for the other. I didn’t participate but I tried playing it at home with my boyfriend and I was good at being the stoic faced Marina. There was a lot of tension in line as it moved. We counted minutes for each sitter and tried to figure out if there would be time for us to sit that day. The answer in most cases, no matter how we did the arithmetic, was no. The plan to spend the night on the street was hatched. I was asked if I was going to spend the night and I said no I had to go home, eat and feed the dog. But I most likely would be back. When the museum closed there were people outside already waiting. I went home and took a shower. I was extremely wired and tried to calm down. I changed into pants, packed a skirt, some socks, a pillow and something to lie on and took a cab back to the Modern at around 12 o’clock. There were already 30 people waiting at that point.
My secret is that I have been wanting to sleep on the street on a warm summer night for several years but could come up with no safe or logical way to do it. Everyone was in a good mood. A teenage girl and her father brought a case of water they shared. The two women next to me went home and came back with a narrow mattress like object and food they shared. I remember dumplings and baby carrots in supremely spicy humus - something I had never eaten before but discovered I really liked. A group of African American women with dreadlocks and braids came bouncing in and found an outlet somewhere and blew up a queen sized air mattress and flung themselves on it like it was a giant raft and fell comfortably asleep on later. The girls next to me fell asleep curled up on their small soft plank. Maria, the girl next to me feel asleep, I felt very comfortable considering there was only a piece of cloth under me and I slept for about three hours straight. I spent about 18 hours with these women. One had just quit her job in production at MTV to work on her own work. Another taught sociology at Hunter and her PhD dissertation was on performance. Her girlfriend was an artist involved in performance. Mosquitoes bit my ankles. Garbage trucks thundered by and one car filled with guys and loud music shouted things. We ignored them. There was a moon. At 6 AM the trees were filled with birds talking. I could look up to a really tall skyscraper and watch the sun rise from the ground up. The Starbucks on 6th Ave. had a bathroom and breakfast. Sara Douglas from a blog associated with Art and Antiques interviewed me and other people in the line.
What was amazing was how friendly everyone was. It was like a really good slumber party but when we thought about how to recreate that feeling by having another one I think we realized it wouldn’t happen because it was the reason we were waiting that brought us together. Marina wasn’t the invisible guest at the party but the string that passed between each of us and bound us together. We were no longer rivals but voyagers on the same journey. The feeling of solidarity was such that a petition was passed from the back to the front where people agreed to each sit for 7 minutes so we could all sit. I didn’t sign it but I hoped things would work out that way. We had given ourselves numbers. I was number thirty-five. At around seven, 8 people started to get dressed in costumes they had brought. One woman wove the bouquet of flowers she was carrying into her hair so she looked like a Frieda Kahlo self-portrait. A man pulled out a floor length white cassock and buttoned it up. The guards seemed nervous about costumes that day and they took him out of the line and grilled him about his intentions. He must have said something convincing because they let him back in line wearing his long white coat. The cat lady took off her borrowed overnight wear and put her cat suit back on. I gave her a toothbrush I had brought from home. There was also a man in orange with tuning forks that talked about finding the harmony/the sound of the universe.
Around nine they brought us inside and they were especially well organized even getting us a ticket if we didn’t have one by taking our corporate membership guard to the ticket seller and bringing a ticket back. They were going to let 40 in and I was still number 35. The guard gave a speech about how they were going to try to let us all sit and that the limit the final day was 10 minutes. We buzzed amongst ourselves thinking that Marina must have talked to the Museum and tightened the structure today in the interest of fairness. There were dashes to the bathroom for costume changes and other activities then back to our place in line. I am glad this is not an Existentialist play or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. This experience of waiting will have to end today. I’m not sure I can take it any more. We filed in and took our places. The ring seemed more tightly drawn today. The bouncers seemed more present, one in each corner in a dark suit standing with their arms behind their backs in an at ease position. A few VIPs were in the front of the line as usual. My friends from the day before were at the front of the line to sit.
I had come to see the act of sitting or waiting to sit as a kind of meditation. The process was not focused on creating mandatory stillness or an awareness of breath but just being there stilled the clamor of the outside world. Over time the kind of chatter and fidgety activity that is part of my experience vanished. I guess I would say I was just focused on being there. I had gone to the beach in the middle of my sitting oddsey and I found the wind, the crashing waves, and my personal life much nosier than the calmness I felt in line. Saying that, the last day was like a barrel of monkeys. One of the first girls from my group the day before and one of the first public sitters suddenly took off her dress and she was nude underneath. There had been no hint she would do something like this from anything I saw the day before. I asked her friends after and they said they didn’t know. In my head I thought, “what!!” and the air rushed out of my lungs. The bouncer type guards covered her up and hustled her out while she was crying that she would put her dress on she really wanted to sit. The cat dressed woman followed her out and tried to comfort her friend and broker a return for her. I heard the museum guards talking later and they said they would have handled it differently. The event was exciting in a way nothing else was the whole time I spent waiting. I thought about why she might have done it. She had spent the night on the street waiting to sit, the only logical explanation I could come up with was based on her complete misunderstanding of Marina’s work. Being nude was an intrinsic part of Marina’s early performances with and without Ullay. Generally she was framed by the performance and became a focus of the viewer’s gaze in an often shocking, attention grabbing way. The only pieces she was full frontally nude with another person was her partner Ullay. In the doorway piece they faced each other. You had to slide through sideways. Another idea is that she thought you have shown me yours let me show you mine, perhaps thinking they were performing off each other like rock guitarist do in concert. Yet, in the context of the present it made no sense. Marina’s face is mask-like and her dresses are robes that stringently encase her body, a ceremonial suit of armor. Although there was probably no overt intention it was a contest of women of radically different ages. Marina no longer poses nude and the woman’s gesture of taking off her dress was not one of homage ultimately but one of childish bad behavior. There are no social norms that let you take off your dress in a museum and parade around nude. When I asked her friend why she did it she said the woman had always been very spontaneous. She called me a few days later and asked me if I could give her examples from the history of performance art where similar things happened. I explained that there is part of the avant garde that is openly hostile to their audience, I could think of things that Dada and Futurist artists have done, such as screaming at the audience in nonsense words as well as Fluxus artists who have unleashed butterflies or thrown pepper on the audience or in Yoko Ono’s case let the audience cut off her clothes. More recently people have given the impression that they were squirting menstrual blood (actually chocolate syrup) on themselves and the audience or the appearance of using HIV tainted blood on stage. Hannah Wilke, Robert Kushner, and others performed nude in the 70s and early 80s but nobody did exactly what she did: confronting a clothed seated performer with an audience member’s nude body. Clearly the lines between performer, stage, and audience had become blurred.
There were three other shocking events that day. We noticed a bad smell like excrement. We were sitting in line and thought after a long night in the street we smelled. After passing our sniff test we discovered a leaking pool of fluid on the floor and an abandoned bag. Eventually we got the guards and they discovered the source of the smell, a bag of “poo,” abandoned in a puddle. We were told they had found the guy who did it and ejected him from the museum. We thought it was a sort of scruffy white guy about 30 years old. When I was having a snack to avoid the smell someone (another white guy) had projectile vomited into the square. Then pieces of paper were dropped from the top floor. They were actually quite pretty as they drifted down in a series of floating arcs. I wished there was someway to freeze them in their moment of falling like a column of snowflakes four stories high, a cross between a snow globe and the moving beams of light in The Bicycle Thief. I got hold of one and read it. It was very angry, calling Marina the whore of Babylon etc. I knew many people who would have agreed with him. What worried me was the line in the last paragraph that said perhaps there should be a gratuitous act like the Surrealists and somebody should fire a gun into the crowd. Violence and terrorism have been too much in the news. I didn’t want a Columbine in the museum. I went over to the head guard and asked him if he had read the section about the gun. He said yes and then basically don’t worry your head little lady we have this under control and many of us are former law enforcement officers. I said, “I guess that makes me feel better” and went and sat down.
The experience of sitting… I was one of the last people to sit on the last day. We had sort of made a group pact, there was a written document to that effect, though I didn’t sign it, that we would each take 5 minutes. I told the guard I wanted to sit for 5 and he said it would be less disturbing to Marina if I sat for 7. I really liked the time limit because I didn’t have to think about time and I felt there had been some really obnoxious and competitive uses of sitting time. With a time limit the issue of success, failure, and endurance did not come into play. Having a unit of time made me feel as if I had been set free. This time I tried to give her feelings of support and praise. I smiled at her and thought warm energizing and praise filled thoughts. I realized that I was also praising and validating myself. Words addressed to her were words addressed to me. I smiled. I tried to breath regularly sometimes in tune with her breath. I smiled. She looked me in the eyes. I felt a connection, a powerful one outside the realm of everyday human relations. The guard came over. I touched my heart, a sort of pledge of allegiance pose. She touched hers. I bowed, stood up, and returned to my belongings. About 4 more people who slept on the street sat with her and then the kind of people you might thank at the Academy Awards- the chief curator, the head of security, her lama who looked a bit like the Dalai Lama. Then it was over. The chair we sat in disappeared. She stood up. Her chair disappeared except for the marks on the floor. She thanked her recreaters in a ring and then went around the crowd shaking hands. I think she missed my hand but leaned forward and seemingly whispered in my ear, “You are my family.” She may have said it to everyone but it seemed like the truth, whether it was me or everybody and I felt profoundly connected to her.
Waiting but not sitting… When I was considering getting an MFA (something I eventually did) one alternative to a degree was to hang out in art bars and talk to people. I never felt I shined in bars but I said several times that the conversations in line were like the best bar conversations you never had. For me it was also a way to see between generations. I was one of the oldest people in the line. My college students are about 20 and the people I met were between my students’ age and mine. It made me wish there was a way for us to get together and talk outside of this unique context. What they were doing and thinking was interesting to me. We were, for the time being, sharing a common non-competitive ground.
Post sitting reflections… I have never felt I had the god gene and have been unable, nor desired, to follow gurus. There was something about my experience that was like a drug high that leads you to addiction trying to recapture that first intense magical moment. I know it was a performance but it felt briefly like love, the kind of love you might go to the ends of the earth to recapture but bankrupt yourself and never feel it again in the process. I know the art of the classroom where students feel there is an intimacy between you that vabushes when the class is over and the curtain comes down. I still find it extraordinary that that kind of experience with its crescendo building over time happened in an art museum.
How has your perception of the piece/your sittings changed over time? I think it was an amazing performance. Marina took something that could have been more passive and object oriented and gave it a living heart. Without her performance and command of the atrium there still would have been exciting moments, many of my students and one of my close friends could not make themselves go through the doorway framed by the two standing nudes, proving the an actual nude is very different from the nude framed and distanced by art. I watched as the legs of a woman performing the crucifixion-like piece on a bicycle seat turned blue as they filled with blood. Without the historical material there would be no context for the performance but without the performance there would have been no present tense for the show. The way Marina became the living center of the show was very powerful but I did not fully appreciate the power as a passer by. It was only when I committed myself to the waiting and surrendered my sense of busyness and self-importance that I realized how powerful an element she supplied. The connection I felt to Marina and the piece has lasted but so have the scary parts. There is a general rule in Manhattan not to offer the all you can eat specials common in other parts of the country because there are too many people here “starving” (perhaps not actual hunger but consumption) and that the sense of boundaries is limited here. With my own experiences the last day of intimacy and closeness combined with the scary agit prop events- the bag of excrement that stunk up the place, projectile vomiting and leaflets thrown from the top floor in a graceful snowstorm of hate that said what if I did a Surrealist act and took out a gun and shot into the crowd, etc. There is a sense that she can evoke tremendous power, she could be the Pied Piper or provoke a counter reaction of violence. Perhaps with great love comes great hate or we live in hazardous times. We will know in the long run which, but it was a truly great and mesmerizing performance.
