{"id":296571,"date":"2025-11-20T07:33:16","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T07:33:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/296571\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T07:33:16","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T07:33:16","slug":"moma-wasnt-so-sure-about-artist-is-present-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/296571\/","title":{"rendered":"MoMA Wasn’t So Sure About \u2018Artist Is Present\u2019 Performance\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhat if one of the most commanding performance art<\/a> events of the 21st century had never happened? What if a naysaying curator had quashed a performance that drew some 1,500 people, some of whom spent hours with the piece? These are the questions raised by an interview with performance art legend Marina Abramovi\u0107<\/a> on the Louis Theroux podcast.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the occasion of preparations for her show Balkan Erotic Epic, the legendary performance artist spoke with the British documentarian, journalist, and author known for numerous BBC documentaries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Three<\/p>\n

\n\tGerman curator Klaus Biesenbach<\/a>, then chief curator at large at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art<\/a>, invited the artist to be the subject of the institution\u2019s first performance art retrospective in 2010, with 50 works spanning her entire career, including re-performances of historic pieces that lived only in documentation. That was historic in itself, but Biesenbach\u2019s proposed title gave her another idea.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe show would be called \u201cThe Artist Is Present,\u201d the artist told Theroux, mimicking the convention of invitations to artists\u2019 opening receptions, which often included the words \u201cThe artist will be present.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe curator, Klaus Bisenbach, said to me, \u2018Okay, the show is going to be \u2018The Artist Is Present,\u2019 because you\u2019re always in the work. When he said this, I knew what I was going to do.\u201d She could easily have simply done the usual, she tells Theroux: be present at the opening, see all her old friends, have a nice dinner, and die at peace, knowing she had had a great show at a great museum.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBut I want to show the transformative power of performance,\u201d she says. \u201cI want to be there every single day, this amount of time, never moving, to see what would happen, just sitting on the chair with a table and a chair in front of me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBiesenbach, she says, was in some ways doubtful of her proposal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cKlaus Biesenbach said to me, \u2018You\u2019re totally ridiculous. This is New York. Nobody has time to sit in this chair. It\u2019s just going to be empty.\u2019 The chair was never empty.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBiesenbach, now director of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, did not immediately answer an email requesting comment.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Portrait<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tKlaus Biesenbach.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Hannes P Albert\/dpa\/picture alliance via Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\tAbramovi\u0107\u2019s 2016 book Walk Through Walls: A Memoir tells a slightly different story, in which Biesenbach actually proposes the performance, referring to an earlier piece she did with her former partner in art and life, the German artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen). \u201cWhy don\u2019t you just do in the MoMA atrium what you did in Japan with Ulay\u2014except that instead of Ulay sitting across the table from you, it is the public?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut then Biesenbach hesitated, saying, \u201cOr maybe not. We\u2019re talking about three months, all day, every day. I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t know if it would be good for you, physically or psychologically.\u201d She kept bringing it up, she says, convinced of its merits, and he kept shooting it down. \u201cBut by then,\u201d writes the artist, \u201cI realized we were playing a game, and that it was a game both of us had understood from the start.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNew Yorkers did in fact take their time with the piece, with one visitor even sitting for the entire day with the artist. Some visitors cried. Ulay famously joined her. Taiwanese American performance artist Tehching Hsieh, another legend of punishing durational performances, also showed up to pay tribute to his colleague.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEvery hour that the museum is open, she sits silently under klieg lights at a simple wood table in the museum\u2019s atrium,\u201d wrote Kristen Swenson in Art in America<\/a>. \u201cMuseumgoers are invited to sit across from her. When I visited, her meditative quiet was genuinely transformative. Teenagers stopped texting; chatty groups paused to\u2026 look at art. More viewers will witness this performance than have seen Abramovi\u0107 to date\u2014and their narrative accounts of it will, as always, be the work\u2019s most vivid documentation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe artist restaged it<\/a> in 2022 to benefit Direct Relief\u2019s efforts in war-torn Ukraine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What if one of the most commanding performance art events of the 21st century had never happened? What…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296572,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134,170020,170021,102522,64104],"class_list":["post-296571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-klaus-biesenbach","tag-marina-abramoviu0107","tag-museum-of-modern-art","tag-performance-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}