monochrome

Previously posted photographs

« previous   |   index   |   next »

The artist is present: Marina Abramović at MoMA, NYC

A few weeks ago, I attended the Marina Abramović retrospective at MoMA with Allen. We stood in line to be present with the artist, but our time was limited, and we could not measure the stamina of those who stood before us. We watched; we waited; we moved on to the sixth floor galleries where a number of her pieces were recreated.

The show was revelatory. Art so often is viewed as a result: a painting, a sculpture, a photograph. At the Abramović retrospective (and the Tino Seghal show at the Guggenheim), art was ever being created and re-created before us. The process and the art were revealed simultaneously (if not the spark of creation itself) and we as observers were complicit in its creation.

Wednesday, I attended a performance of Red, again in the company of Allen. While the play is ostensibly about Rothko, at heart it is a play about ideas: how art is created; how art is viewed by differing generations; how each generation must lay claim to art itself. Molina and Redmayne were in fine form, but it wasn't until the curtain call, when Molina broke character, that I realized once again we were witnessing art (or at least, well-honed craft). I had taken the acting for granted, and let myself slip into the intellectual questions of the play; the performances had disappeared. I didn't realize until later how good Molina was, and how he had given himself over so fully in the service of the play.

I shot this photo from the floor above the atrium, down onto the piece. I had taken a number of frames from various levels. Most showed the artist and her wordless interlocutor. As I looked through the contact sheet, I realized that this captured best the sense of the work. The artist is present, even if she is seemingly absent from the frame.

An aside, photographer Marco Anelli was invited by MoMA to photograph the participants in Abramović's piece in the atrium. He's posting the images here.