Friday, July 6, 2012

Marina: Provocateur


Watching HBO's documentary, Marina Abramovic The Artist is Present, for me, was a very moving experience, to say the least.  It's like going through withdrawals or some sort of spiritual exorcism.  Understanding and yielding to the silence and mysteries within is very painful. But stepping through that Door of Pain becomes transformative.  For Marina Abramovic, it's a way of life on which she built an entire career as a performance artist from the early '70s to the present.  Her intense beauty and haunting charisma will seduce you into another world - into her world.  And yet the world in which we live becomes more than just her world; she sends a universal invitation to challenge your soul in a way it's never submitted to before.

A pioneer of performance art, Marina Abramović (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 Abramović: The Artist Is Present, The Museum of Modern Art’s first performance retrospective, Abramović performed in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium every day the Museum was open between March 14 and May 31, 2010. Visitors were encouraged to sit silently across from the artist for a duration of their choosing, becoming participants in the artwork. This comprehensive photo gallery contains a record of each participant. Please select “Show info” to see the date and duration of each visitor’s participation.” The Artist Is Present is Abramovic’s longest performance to date. [more...]

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