Ego-Art

In some weeks the disjunctions of the artworld are illuminated with LED clarity. Such was the case a few weeks ago with the confluence of two events that indicate the real intellectual bankruptcy of too many practitioners. Marina Abramović announced the formation of the Marina Abramovic Institute: According to the press release, the Institute was “founded by Marina Abramovic and will serve as her legacy and homage to time-based and immaterial art…. [It] will focus on the study, preservation, and presentation of long durational performance including dance, theater, film, video, performance art, and music as well as new forms that may develop in the future. The institute will pursue an active role in contemporary culture by forging productive unions between art, science, technology, spirituality, and education. MAI will be an experimental space to conduct research and host workshops, public lectures, and residencies, and will serve as a venue through which the public may experience and interact with works of long durational performance.” Oh my—yet another study center devoted to the same multi-media works that museums are now rushing headlong to buy, for enormous sums. Some of these pieces exist—barely—as scripts, but the museums pay the exclusive right to right to produce them, Of course, they would never think of buying the rights to a real play. As for the Abramovic Institute, it would seem to be designed as the site where acolytes can come to kiss hem of her garment unmediated by pesky museum curators and directors. (Her distaste for the director and staff at the Museum of Modern Art, whose presentation of her staring piece catapulted her into the status of international celebrity, has been much discussed.)

Just after the Abranović ex cathedra utterance, there was, on 19 October 2013, an outdoor spectacle, “Between the Door and the street: A performance initiated by Suzanne Lacy,” as this event was entitled in the program. Occurring on a block of Park Place between Vanderbilt and Underhill in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, near the Brooklyn Museum, it was co-sponsored by the museum and Creative Time, which has promoted art in public venues since 1974. Performers, mostly women, from a wide variety of organizations gathered on the stoops or entry courtyards of the mostly renovated and very elegant brownstones on the block; all wore long yellow scarves, and the curbs on either side of the street were lined with yellow tape of the same color. The conversations among the participants in each group were “to explore some of the most provocative issues facing women today,” according to the program, and viewers were asked to “join us, wandering freely among the different groups to listen, observe, and form your own opinions, perhaps gaining a new understanding of what feminism means to different individuals in today’s world. As you do so, you will her the voices of African American feminists, male feminists; Buddhists; economists; lawyers; domestic workers; South Asian women; gay, straight, transgendered, and queer people; old people; young people, and much more, all of them unmediated by television or radio or newspapers. It is a civic encounter than can only come from art.”

Okay, and yet--virtually no one could hear any of the conversations from the street or even at the bottom of the steps. If these talks provided a focus for future conversations, it was only among the participants, not the several hundred people walking back and forth along the block. And how do we even know what they various groups were discussing? Maybe they were discussing the donuts bits that were to be served at the end of the event. Later it was revealed there was real anger among the participants at the lack of consideration given to them by the organizers, even to the lack of day care for their children (though Creative Time claimed later in the Times that it had agreed to provide twenty five dollars to any one who needed help in order to take part).

Unfortunately, as with too many of the Suzanne Lacy events, these performances seem always about her, rather than about the ostensible goals of the piece. I still remember with horror the first piece by her I saw staged, “Whisper the Wind, the Waves,” presented in the La Jolla coves in 1984. More than one hundred fifty women over the age of sixty five, all dressed in white clothes of their own choosing, were asked to descend very steep stairs to the strand, where white tables and chairs had been set up for them. At these tables they were to talk about aging. Unfortunately, there were no umbrellas and no water provided that I saw. The unbearable heat of the midday sun and the intense effort required to descend the steps caused real problems for some performers; many were overcome by the heat as the event progressed. Some were unable to ascend the steps without medical assistance. Furthermore, the sunburn a number later suffered from such exposure was catastrophic. Of course, none of this showed up in the photos and the films of the event, only praise for Ms Lacy. Perhaps she and Ms Abranović should collaborate on a piece in which they discuss the future of the world forever, with no spectators. Maybe the energy generated would restore the earth to a prelapsarian state.