Whatever else Marina Abramovic was at the Museum of Modern Art*, she was a phenomenon. Whether or not The Artist Is Present belongs in a museum like MoMA remains a matter of debate — even MoMA says it was an experiment — but the piece was unquestionably a spectacle.
Last night, I attended an event in MoMA’s lobby to celebrate the publication of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, but Marina ruled downstairs, where some 400 people were attending an event about her and the piece.
Another bit of evidence was this, posted on the Artifacts blog of The New York Times’s T Magazine by Linda Yablonsky:
It was no surprise that the audience present on Monday for the end of Marina Abramovic’s epic, 716-hour sit at the Museum of Modern Art gave her a tremendous ovation. The remarkable thing was the extent, and especially the sound, of it. The cheers lasted a good 15 minutes, filling the museum’s towering atrium with the sort of unbridled excitement that often greets (male) sports stars after a big win….
The last person to face Abramovic in the closing minutes of the performance was the curator who brought her blockbuster career retrospective to the museum, the MoMA P.S. 1 director Klaus Biesenbach.
I learned another interesting factoid last night about the piece: On May 1, Abramovic had the table that separated her and her visitors removed. The idea occurred to her because some wheelchair-bound visitors had difficulty with the table, but in the end she and MoMA felt that removing the table removed a barrier and led to a more direct encounter.
So, clearly, for MoMA this was an experiment that worked — as a crowd-pleaser.
Photo Credit: Marco Anelli, Courtesy of The New York Times
* A consulting client of mine supports MoMA.