Last Day with Marina at MoMA: The 15-Minute Limit UPDATED

Agnes Gund, Museum of Modern Art's president emerita, as seen among the posted mug shots of Marina Abramović's visitors
Photograph: Marco Anelli

If, unlike me, you want to endure a long wait in line in the Museum of Modern Art's atrium for the chance to sit opposite Marina Abramović, you'll have to do it today. The performance priestess' self-imposed penance, which began on Mar. 14, is mercifully drawing to an end. Visitors for this final day will be limited to a 15-minute stare. Previously, departure time was left up to the visitor's discretion (or lack thereof).

Although I didn't partake in the main event, I did peruse the sixth-floor show, finding the most riveting moments in the videos of Marina with her most celebrated and sympathetic performance partner, Ulay. Especially powerful was that watershed (and for Marina, tearful) meeting when, after converging from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, they agreed to part company, rather than marry, as had originally been planned. In a piece for today's NY Times, Holland Cotter dismisses much of the sixth floor, particularly the various reenactments sans Marina.

I did personally pay some performance dues by sliding sideways between the nude man and woman (originally embodied by Marina and Ulay) who flanked a narrow entrance. I resolved to face the male when I made my passage, but chickened out at the last moment, turning towards the female instead. I also realized just in time that I was carrying an extremely fat handbag, which I needed to send through the narrow space ahead of me, if I was going to fit between the sentinels.

This exercise in split-second problem-solving and adaptation made me feel very foolish. And I felt very queasy when I saw a child who must have been about seven years old perusing this definitely not-for-children display of not just nudity but bizarre and potentially very disturbing behavior. Sometimes "parental discretion" just isn't enough.

The Guggenheim's Tino Seghal show (now closed) on the other hand, began by making me feel somewhat exasperated by the cluelessness of my three sequential guides (roughly 10, 19 and 35 years old) at the bottom three-quarters of the Wright spiral, but ultimately satisfied by my fourth and final encounter with an arts aficionado of my own generation. I ended my Dante-esque journey bathed in the heavenly glow of the Guggenheim's uncovered skylight, feeling more receptive to communing with random strangers than I ever thought possible.

I immediately struck up an amusing conversation with a visitor who, like me, was staring down from the upper ramps at the performance of the Seghal-choreographed lovers on the floor of the lobby. When I got down to their level, I watched two little giggly girls gleefully rolling around on the floor in imitation of the couple. After I left the museum, I was uncharacteristically kind to foreign tourists needing my assistance in finding a bus: Instead of acting the brusque New Yorker, I not only smiled and pointed them in the right direction, but then doubled back (feeling I hadn't done enough) and advised them to ask the driver if that particular bus was going to their specific destination.

For me, the best art-experience is one that makes me see the world in a different light.

But back to Marina: It seems that the photographer for the NY Times saw the sixth-floor show somewhat differently than I did: Someone must have discreetly rearranged the skeleton in Nude with Skeleton for the slideshow that accompanies Cotter's piece. When I visited, both the nude and his penis were looking me right in the eye.

If you want to look Marina right in the eye, but don't want to or can't visit her in person, you can always click on her live web feed, which will shut down for the last time on the last day of May at 5 p.m.

UPDATE: At this writing (12:50 p.m.), it appears that the live feed isn't working. Too many hits?