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“The Artist Is Present” Artistic Re-­Enactments and the Impossibility of Presence Amelia Jones

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“The Artist Is Present” Artistic Re-­Enactments and the Impossibility of Presence Amelia Jones “The Artist is Present” Artistic Re- enactments and the Impossibility of Presence Amelia Jones Figure 1. Marina Abramovic;: The Artist is Present, 2010. Performance view, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010. (Photo courtesy Marco Anelli) TDR: The Drama Review 55:1 (T209) Spring 2011. ©2011 16 Amelia Jones Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00046 by guest on 28 September 2021 The live act is most often privileged as delivering an authentic and “present” body — as the 2010 retrospective of Marina Abramovic;’s performance art career at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Marina Abramovic:; The Artist is Present reveals instantly in its title.1 The exhibition galleries were staged with the actual van she and her performance partner from the 1970s, Ulay, drove across the Australian desert, signaling the brute “presence” claimed for the performance ephemera that dominated the retrospective of this important artist from Serbia, now based in New York City. The galleries themselves, with melodramatically darkened walls, were filled with spotlighted vitrines containing objects presumably deployed in the origi- nal performances and with screenings of digital video transfers of contemporaneous film and video documentation. One entire large gallery was replete with photographs of Abramovic; from her birth onward and ephemera relating to her life. In addition, the galleries, controver- sially, included several live re- enactments of the artist’s 1970s performances by younger dancers and performers. Most dramatically the center of MoMA’s large dazzlingly white modernist interior court- yard (visible in a spectacular vista from the galleries above) featured Abramovic; sitting in a chair across from another chair in which museum visitors could engage with her live-ness.2 The vis- itation element, for which she sat every day the Museum was open, and for the entire time it was open, enacted the “presence” of the artist in a literal way. The retrospective as a whole, curated by Klaus Biesenbach in close consultation with the artist, extended Abramovic;’s interest in (often her own) performance histories, and her claims for the authenticity of live art and the emotional impact of durational performance.3 However, in this case, the dependence of Abramovic; and MoMA on documentation (before, during, and after the actual time of the exhibition’s display) to spread the word of her “pres- ence” and its supposedly transformative effects, points to obdurate contradictions in the recent obsession with live art, its histories, and its documentation and re-enactments. The museum’s web documentation (paralleled by dozens of spontaneous websites put up during the show to 1. Claims of presence and authenticity are extremely common in discussions of performance art both from art his- torical and performance studies points of view. For example, film and art history scholar Catherine Elwes noted in 1985, “[p]erformance art offers women a unique vehicle for making that direct unmediated access [to the audience]. Performance is about the ‘real-life’ presence of the artist [...]. Nothing stands between spectator and performer” (165). I don’t want to scapegoat Elwes, an important theorist of feminist performance, here; in mak- ing these claims, she is completely typical of most writing on performance art particularly in the art context from the 1970s through the 1990s and even into the present. 2. The first weeks Abramovic; had a table placed between herself and the other chair, explicitly re-staging the perfor- mance Night Sea Crossing (a series begun in 1981), which she and Ulay had enacted at various venues around the world, sitting across from each other with a large table in between. She removed the table partway through the roughly three-month length of the show (14 March–31 May 2010); according to her dealer, Sean Kelly, whom I spoke with while I was waiting in line to “visit” the artist, this was because she felt the table distanced her psycho- logically from the individuals she faced (Kelly 2010). 3. Assistant Curator Jenny Schlenzka clarified the process of the show’s organization (Schlenzka 2010). Amelia Jones is Professor and Grierson Chair in Visual Culture at McGill University in Montréal. She has organized exhibitions on contemporary art and on feminist, queer, and anti-racist approaches to vis ual culture. Her recent publications include the edited volumes Feminism and Visual Culture Reader Impossibility of Presence (Routledge, 2010) and A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006). Fol- lowing on Body Art/Performing the Subject (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), Jones’s books include Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (MIT Press, 2004) and Self Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (Routledge, 2006). Her current projects are an edited volume Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (with coeditor Adrian Heathfield) and a book tentatively entitled Seeing Differently: Identification and the Visual Arts. 17 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00046 by guest on 28 September 2021 MoMA clearly promoted The Artist is Present show by putting forth, and even exaggerating, the artist’s own claims for the transcendent and mythical effects of her “presence”; their website, which went live during the show and is still active, proclaims: A pioneer of performance art, Marina Abramovic; (born Yugoslavia, 1946) began using her own body as the subject, object, and medium of her work in the early 1970s. For the exhibition Marina Abramovic;: The Artist is Present, The Museum of Modern Art’s first performance retrospective, Abramovic; performed in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium every day the Museum was open between 14 March and 31 May 2010. Visitors were encouraged to sit silently across from the artist for a duration of their choosing, becoming participants in the artwork. [...] The Artist is Present is Abramovic;’s longest performance to date. (MoMA 2010) document personal experiences and/or photographs of other “visitors”) draws on the claims for presence made by the artist herself and yet reveals the dependence of any concept of pres- ence on (in this case web) documentation — including, on MoMA’s own website, a “gallery” of photographs of visitors who sat across from Abramovic;. These contradictions play out not only in Abramovic;’s recent project, The Artist is Present, but also in Seven Easy Pieces, her important 2005 series of re- enactments of 1970s performances at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. My critical investigation has a political motivation — not to debunk Abramovic;’s practice, but to use her bold and assertive work, which casts a raking light on the dilemma of performance histories, to explore the limits of what we can know about live art. Paradoxically, Abramovic;’s recent practice, in its desire to manifest presence, points to the very fact that the live act itself destroys presence (or makes the impossibility of its being secured evident). The live act marks the body, understood as an expression of the self, as representa- tional. Thus, as someone who sat across from Abramovic; in the atrium of MoMA, surrounded by a barrier like a boxing ring, itself surrounded by dozens of staring visitors, cameras, and lit by klieg lights, I can say personally I found the exchange to be anything but energizing, personal, or transformative. Though I felt aware that the person I have met and whom I respect as an art- ist and cultural force was sitting there before me, I primarily felt myself the object of myriad individual and photographic gazes (including hers), and the experience overall was very strongly one of participating in a spectacle — not an emotionally or energetically charged interpersonal relation, but a simulation of relational exchange with others (not just the artist, but the other spectators, the guards, the “managers” of the event). For me this felt like an inadvertent parody of the structure of authentic expression and reception of “true” emotional resonance that mod- ernist art discourse (brought to its apotheosis in institutions such as MoMA) so long claimed for modernist painting and sculpture. If anything, as a visitor to The Artist is Present I felt vaguely sorry that Marina was subjecting herself to something so exhausting. And depressed and a bit distressed at the spectacularization (albeit largely self-induced) of a “body” and a “body” of work I have long admired, as a historian of art and performance. If anything, I found myself wanting to revert to reading books about performance to escape the noisy emptiness of this “real” live art experience. “Presence” as commonly understood is a state that entails the unmediated co-extensivity in time and place of what I perceive and myself; it promises a transparency to an observer of what “is” at the very moment at which it takes place. But the event, the performance, by com- bining materiality and durationality (its enacting of the body as always already escaping into the past) points to the fact that there is no “presence” as such. I felt this paradox strongly as a visitor at The Artist is Present. This paradox haunts performance studies and other discourses (such as art history) seeking to find ways to historicize and theorize — to exhibit and sell — live performance art. Amelia Jones 18 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00046 by guest on 28 September 2021 Looking at Abramovic;’s re- enactments in Seven Easy Pieces and her self-presentation in The Artist is Present, I find that what her recent projects expose, in spite of claims in the media to the contrary, is that there cannot be a definitively “truthful” or “authentic” form of the live event even at the moment of its enactment — not even (if this could be imagined) as lodged within the body that originally performed or experienced it.
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