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.
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