Last Thursday, I spent almost eight hours in line to sit with Marina Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art.
I arrived just before the museum opened at 10:30am, and took my place at the back of a line that stretched to Sixth Avenue. I waited, herded by innumerable museum employees, to get to the door (15 minutes), I waited in a maze of wire stanchions to buy a ticket (10 minutes), I waited to show my ticket to the guard and walk up the stairs, and then I took a position at the end of the line for Abramović’s performance just before 11 a.m. I was 27th in the queue.
Marina was sitting with a woman around her age. Then a man in a seersucker suit and natty little Cuban-heeled boots took her place. Anna Holmes joined me in line, and then next to sit with Marina was a young guy with curly hair who wore a shawl-collared tuxedo jacket over a dark t-shirt. After a few minutes with Abramović, his chest started heaving and he seemed to be on the verge of tears. Even from 20 feet away at the perimeter, we could see his Adam’s apple bobbing furiously as he swallowed; his body language was somewhere between arousal and heartbreak. Then he got up and walked back out.
When Marina Abramovic concludes her piece, on May 31, she will have spent 716 hours and 30 minutes sitting down opposite a succession of more than 1,000 people, and counting. Where she sits, in the atrium on the MoMA’s second floor, has to be the most overlooked area of the whole museum: while I waited, faces appeared, paused, and then vanished on balconies and at windows on each of the floors above. It goes something like this: Marina looks at you, you look at Marina, and hundreds of other people look at you and Marina looking at each other. The guy ahead of me in line, a burly, bearded man in a flannel shirt and work boots so unscuffed I took them for a fashion statement, had come to the MoMA four times and never succeeded in sitting down with her. (That day he’d cleared his schedule.) We talked about how we so rarely look at each other in daily life. When two adult strangers make eye accidental contact, we hasten to look away. “It’s like we’re scared of connecting,” he said. It’s a hard thing, to really see another person, and to be scrutinized yourself in return.
The sixth floor houses a retrospective of Abramović’s career. Playing are films of her performances over the years, including 1974’s “Rhythm 0,” wherein she stood passively in a gallery for six hours, while the audience was permitted to use any of 72 objects on her body in any way they chose. (Among them was a loaded gun, which one man pointed at her head.) There are also live performers re-enacting some of Abramović’s works, like “Imponderabilia,” where two nude people face each other in a doorway that people walk through.
I cried when I watched “The Great Wall Walk,” two videos simultaneously projected, one of her partner of 12 years, Ulay, and one of Abramović, each walking toward the other from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China. When originally conceived, the wall copy explains, they had planned to perform the walk as a durational work of art, meet in the middle, and marry. But by the time permission was granted from the Chinese authorities, they were no longer a couple. (As Abramović puts it in a terse, Anne Carson-esque timeline that is reproduced for the show, first she and Ulay no longer had sex, then there was a problem in the relationship, then they got permission to walk the wall, and she found she no longer missed his smell.) When they met in the center, they separated. I can’t remember the last time I cried at a museum, if in fact I ever have.
In another video, Abramović and Ulay plug their noses, lock lips, and pass the same breath back and forth and back and forth, inhaling and exhaling into each other’s mouth and lungs, until more than ten minutes later they lose consciousness. It sounds almost romantic to hear it described — like a play on love’s cutesiness, a real folie à deux, but to see it is almost sickeningly violent. They are sucking the air out of each other’s bodies. Perhaps it is a metaphor for love.
When I visited the retrospective again yesterday, I saw Paco Blancas, the most famous of the handful of “repeaters”: people who sit with Abramović more than once. (In Blancas’ case, I believe the count is over 20.) He was in a darkened gallery where a performer was suspended on a wall, naked, her feet on two pegs, her pussy resting on a bicycle seat. The performer was framed by a rectangle of white light. Blancas looked at her for a long time. She looked back.
Down on the second floor, one thing you notice is that there are many, many more women waiting to sit with the artist than there are men. (The Flickr seems to skew about 2:1.) This is in direct contrast to some of Abramović’s other works — compare the assorted art students with quirky hair and grandmotherly types to the crowd of men who surround Abramović on the video for “Rhythm 0.” (When one leans in and rips open her shirt, I cringed and looked away.) There are young women waiting, there are old women, there are mothers and artists and office workers and the childfree — whether they are there to give props to a prominent female artist at the top of her field in the male-dominated and clannish art world, or because women respond disproportionately to the kind of communication Abramović is trying to achieve with the piece, or because women identify with the kind of masochism and self-denial implicit in Abramović’s work, or because men are disproportionately hesitant to approach a woman in a position of power, isn’t really knowable. I think it might be a bit of all the above.
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