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THE ARTIST MUST BE PRESENT Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present Museum of Modern Art New York City March 14-May 13, 2010
In an age of rampant celebrity, the subtitle "The Artist Is Present" might seem a tawdry play on the promise of seeing a superstar artist in the flesh; for each day of this exhibition's duration, Marina Abramovic performed her new work of the same name. As she sat at a small table in the museum's massive atrium, visitors were invited to sit across from her for as long as they chose, basking in the presence of one of the most charismatic performance artists of our time. This clearly appealed to many: during my visit the line to do so remained indeterminably long, and in the cafeteria I overheard an adolescent tell her mother, "I liked the artist who stares the best." But the subtitle also denoted what makes performance art so potent. For the art to be efficacious, the breath-taking, heart-pumping, pheromone-emitting body of the artist must be present.
Sadly, it was this very caveat that made Abramovic's first large-scale retrospective in the United States problematic. Given its impetus - Abramovic's desire to preserve what was conceived as an ephemeral art form - the show was a priori paradoxical. The magnitude of her artistic practice alone, however, is astonishing, and praise was inarguably long overdue. Nevertheless, the sum re-presentation of these once revolutionary works was cacophonous, with...