June 2nd, 2010 / 2:44 pm
I Like __ A Lot & Random
“This Is An Enormous Amount of Eyes”
I have been stark-raving-obsessed with Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present. I’ve spent hours at MoMA; I’ve interacted with the interactive website; I’ve scrolled through the Flikr; I’ve learned about other obsessives; I’ve read essays and reviews; I’ve watched this nifty video; And yeah, I’ve seen that blog that is just the pictures of people crying. (Love that one.) I know Ken has posted links to it twice since it’s been going on, but I’m posting them again, at risk of redundancy, because to me (and many others) this was a huge moment in art history and I think anyone who is alive and creating things right now should know about it.
Memorial Day was the last day for the exhibit and now Marina has given a pretty interesting exit interview to the WSJ blog Speakeasy. It’s full of such non-native-English-speaker sentences like, They made a lot of interesting drawings of how I pee. I didn’t even have urge. and This is an enormous amount of eyes. The interview also refers to an earlier statement she has made that “nobody ever changes when they do things they like.”
I am not sure if I entirely agree with that but it does raise some interesting questions. I know a lot of writers who say they hate writing, but they do it anyway. I don’t know how to react when someone tells me this. Are they masochists or do they feel like they can’t do anything else? I often find writing really difficult and trying, but I almost always like it. So will I never change or grow as a writer because I enjoy it so much?
And is this what Abramovic is even saying? True, her art is full of self-torture– cutting herself, lying naked on a cross of ice, standing or sitting still for hundreds of hours– and unlike most artist retrospectives, her works seem to have become increasingly powerful. Her latest piece is easily the most important, moving, historic and already influential she’s made, which is atypical for an artist that has been working as long as she has. And she’s gotten this far by doing things she didn’t like, by suffering. So… do you suffer? How? Why or why not?
I also want to tell anyone who didn’t get a chance to go to MoMA during this piece that I cannot overstate how many people were moved or obsessed or overwhelmed by this piece. There was a truly strange energy in the room where she was sitting. By the end of the exhibit the place was packed and people were sitting everywhere for hours and hours. To me this illustrates what a deep hunger there is for mediation of some kind in our lives. If my old Zen teacher Ben Wren (this was his real name) was still living, I think he would have had something funny to say about how ridiculously simple and predictable a piece it is. Once in his Zendo we meditated face to face like this– it’s a somewhat common practice– and yeah, it almost goes without saying that it provokes something deeply emotional and strange between the two people staring into each others eyes. Yet people were lining up at five in the morning for a chance to get to sit face to face with Marina. Mrs. Abramovic. Granted, she creates quite a presence and being a part of this collaboration was a once in a lifetime opportunity, but the thing you really could gain from The Artist is Present was the communion between yourself and someone else, be in Marina or the guy standing behind you in line. It’s possible to access this energy wherever you can find another person who has the time.
Tags: marina abramoic, MoMa, the artist is present
Tao wrote a piece re: Marina here: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2010/marina-abramovic-the-staring-woman-at-moma/
It’s quite entertaining, imho…
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June 2nd, 2010 / 6:29 pmmarshall—
bro…
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June 2nd, 2010 / 7:13 pmstephen—
relevant/related fact + opinion
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June 2nd, 2010 / 10:05 pmJak Cardini—
jeez
June 2nd, 2010 / 11:56 pmstephen—
nice stache bro
June 3rd, 2010 / 12:11 amstephen—
for ‘no “particular” reason’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KXjq3YDuPk&feature=related
June 3rd, 2010 / 12:14 amstephen—
‘hold up,’ this link’s better, no dj: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDOaAo2KkwI&feature=related
‘yr welcome’
June 3rd, 2010 / 12:29 amzusya—
he misspelled Internet
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June 3rd, 2010 / 10:26 ammarshall—
Are you referring to capitalization? I don’t think a consensus has been reached on that issue yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_capitalization_conventions.
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June 3rd, 2010 / 10:47 amzusya17—
‘true’.
/intentional usage of ’s
I feel like performance art isn’t really the same as writing, that these two things aren’t interchangeable. Performance art is made to twist people up, to offset and unsettle expectations and make people, including the artist, rethink and reexamine everything. It’s made to be cruel, almost, or at the least very jarring, to crawl into your personal space and shake you. It’s usually upsetting, whether happily or unhappily.
Writing certainly CAN be that, and indeed, much of the best writing is. But I don’t think it has to be. I suppose writing isn’t a catalyst unless it is, but unlike performance art, I don’t think it fails if it’s not a catalyst. It can be all sorts of things without changing the writer or the reader in a major way.
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June 2nd, 2010 / 3:37 pmCatherine Lacey—
True, I don’t think that all literature needs to unsettle or upset, but I do think that change, no matter how large or small, is a necessary by product of any writing that is worthwhile. And not just a change in the reader but also (and maybe more importantly) in the writer.
I am just wondering if suffering in necessary to that kind of change. And if so, how much and what kind. And if not, why not.
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[...] Catherine Lacey at HTMLGIANT [...]
So sad I wasn’t in New York at some point to go to this.
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People suffer and do things they don’t like all the time. I don’t think artists have to suffer as they’re performing (writing, painting, etc.), but generally most people during their lifetimes will suffer.
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I don’t think performance art has to do any of the things amber said it does. I think not only are those huge generalizations, but they aren’t even remotely accurate either.
there is plenty of “boring” performance art out there that doesn’t attempt to “stir” people up or make them uncomfortable. If I weren’t on my phone I’d link some.
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June 3rd, 2010 / 4:23 pmAmber—
I said “I feel,” which implies my own opinions, take ‘em or leave. You can leave ‘em if you want. I used to be pretty immersed in performance art (from the theatrical side), so I think my opinions have some validity, but like I said, they’re just opinions. I’m just talking about my own experience.
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my father was fond of making me do a lot of shit i didn’t want to do when i was a kid – go to church, rake the bullshit leaves, not quit football – and whenever i would whine about it and tell him i hated it, he would shrug and say “son, you gotta do what you hate”
this echoes for me that abramovic quote. i think you can learn a lot by writing things you like, they tend however (at least for me) to be superficial – i.e. “formal knowledge,” how sentences work, how narrative rives, how imagery unfolds, how sounds interlock – but if it’s a profound personal or spiritual metamorphosis you’re after, i.e. off-the-page, it’s uncomfortable and painful confrontation with the perceived pillars of your identity that must be pursued
like standing up to your father, or trying to write if you don’t (horrifying…), or trying to quit if you do… or selling all your chapbooks and moving out of brooklyn… or becoming a poet when all you ever wanted to do was make money… or if you’ve loved poetry since you were a child, writing something that is antithetical to all your own deepest held beliefs about it…
i feel like most of our best kept principles are inherited and, even if those principles are righteous, if they are inherited they must be broken down to achieve a spiritual change, then, after we have deconstructed our favorite truths, if we still want to live according to them — now with tattered edges and holes shining through them – we can choose them again, this time with honor
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[...] HTMLGIANT / “This Is An Enormous Amount of Eyes” [...]
this is amazing. thanks for posting.
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i really wish i could have seen this in person
thanks for some inside thoughts catherine
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June 3rd, 2010 / 7:37 pmKen Baumann—
Yes to this, and yes to you, Catherine.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y54iBzyTBdI
I like that she’s totally chill re: being referenced on “Sex and the City,” being accepted by mainstream culture.
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