MARINA ABRAMVOIC: THE ARTIST IS PRESENT (MARCH 14 – MAY 21) / THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART RETROSPECTIVE / & ITS ONLINE PRESENCE / the architecture of the gaze, visibility, & the body
1
what interests me the most- i dare say- about the singing bowl is that it is a disembodied thing of a thing that retains a thing.
2
“wigwam,” bob dylan, self-portrait, 1989 on vinyl
v.
“wigwam,” bob dylan, self-portrait, 1989 on youtube
a disembodied thing of a thing that does not imply a thing.
3
there is a retrospective of the works of performance artist marina abramovic.
on the 6th floor, there are works in various forms of media: photographs, video, and live re-performances of some of her works.
on the 2nd floor, there is marina herself performing for the duration of the exhibition. she sits in a chair and invites the public to sit with her.
4
Foucault’s definition of heterotopia in “Of Other Spaces,” 1986:
“all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted”
(Foucault 24)
“the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place at all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organising in this a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity”
(Foucault 26)
5
3 and 4
6
there is an online presence to the museum of modern art marina abramovic retrospective:
the moma interactive website created for the exhibition at its inception.
it uses mostly time-based media to display photographs and videos.
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/marinaabramovic/
it links to the retrospective description:
http://moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/965
it links to the blog for the retrospective:
http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/category/marina-abramovic
there is a flickr page run by the museum of modern art, displaying the photographs of the live performance on the 2nd floor:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/themuseumofmodernart/sets/72157623741486824/with/4604352611/
7
5 and 6
8
“The field of performance art has a well-established critical differentiation between the live, the reenacted, and the document, which is useful when dealing with new media art, but it has to be acknowledged that much live art is opposed to using documentation of any kind instead of live bodily experience.”
Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham. Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 90.
9
“The time is out of joint”
– Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5
10
in the live performance, people watch you watch marina. marina watches you.
11
the gaze, “to ‘speak to all eyes’ (parler a tous les yeux)”
– Vidler cited in Bennet, (Vidler 1986: 141)
Tony Bennet, “Art and Theory: The Politics of the Invisible,” In The Birth of the Museum, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 166.
12
what is, visible. that which makes visible the invisible. who is, visible.
13
“we are surrounded by so-called electric phantoms”
– Abraham Moles citing science fiction author Villiers de lʼIsle Adam
Abraham A. Moles and David W. Jacobus, “Designing the Immaterial Society,” Design Issues, Vol. 4, No. 1/2, (1988), 25.
14
“A ghost escapes definition because it is not a thing, yet, like time, it works in things, as things, or invisibly on things.”
Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xii.
“Ghosts animate our connections to the dead, producing a visible, material, and affective relationship to the abstract terms of time and repetition, sameness, and difference, absence and presence. If we doubt the presence of those absent, it may be only because the abstractions are safer and more comfortable.”
Ibid, xiii.
15
the exhibition itself is more powerful than its online presence. we no longer have the exhibition. we have remains.
16
“To be just: beyond the living present in general– and beyond its simple negative reversal. A spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: “now,” future present). We are questioning in this instant, we are asking ourselves about this instant that is not docile to time, at least to what we call time. Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the specter does not belong to that time, it does not give time”
Jacques Derrida, “Exordium,” in Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, (New York: Routledge, 1994), xix.
17
thus the material speaks to the immaterial. body to body. site to site.
18
as with 1 and 2, objects outside of the body, enlarge issues of scale and space and time.
19
it will happen that a building, a container could be a disembodied thing of a thing not implied.
20
it so happened, a body, a container was a disembodied thing a of thing not implied here, there.
angeli