Abramovic

In a movie lit square stage a woman sits in a bright red dress that falls around her feet and in a cushion way at her bottom. The dress reveals the artist's hands and a slight raindrop shape on the artists back where the long dress is fastened at the neck. The artist sits alone in the space with one other person, across a light brown wooden table. Marina Abromavic is at MoMA until May 31st in a exhibit called "The Artist is Present."

My first reaction of the title was that it evoked a kind of comfort- the artist is here- just here. And when I walked into MoMA's large exhibit space there she was- just there. Video cameras were the first things I saw at the ceiling, and tons of people taking pictures. People take turns reenacting a similar performance that Abromavic and her former lover Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) did called Night Sea Crossing. But instead of Ulay across from her, it is a random group of whoever is willing to wait in line for pretty much the entire day.

The space has a comfortable feeling regardless of the fact that Abromavic is probably aching in more places than one and the tally of days like markings on a prison wall. People sit and wait to look at her for hours and it isn't hard to stay there. To be free to watch her.

The first time I was exposed to Marina Abramavic (though completely subconcsioucly) was with my aunt Pat who lives in Minnesota. When I was 13, she thought it a very important time in my life to watch seasons 4 and 5 of Sex and the City. It was episode 86, in which Carrie goes to a gallery in Chelsea and meets a very attractive Russian man who turns out to be kind of sketchy in the end. In the gallery was a reenactment of Abramavic's The House with an Ocean View in which Abramavic did not eat for 12 days and lived in front of people in an elevated and open 3 rooms. There is a kind of martyrdom in her shows, Abramavic sits in front of countless New Yorkers and tourists, invisibly immersed in pain. In a sick kind of spectacle that comforts the viewer Abramavic seems to say- "its ok, thing hurt but we get through them, because we- as people- are strong." Abramaciv has used her body as her art using it to question physical and mental limitations.