Seeing Red, Part 2: The Dress

Seeing Red, Part 1: The Play

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Marina Abramovic in The Artist is Present at MoMA

My photograph above; from Zimbio.com below
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Continuing with color, we come to Marina Abramovic’s red dress. She’s wearing it as she performs in the atrium at MoMA. There she is, sitting at a table, enveloped by noise, silently looking at people who sit on the other side of the table looking at her. While there must be a Zen lesson in there for her audience, I can’t quite wrap my head around the idea of spending eight hours a day, six days a week, staring at strangers for two-and-a-half months. So I do the next best thing. I look at the dress.

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Abramovic is living inside a high-necked, long-sleeved garment that flows over her and pools at her feet. The metaphor: She's giving every drop of blood for this performance. The visual comparison: If a Beverly Semmes dress sculpture were shrunk in the wash, Abramovic's performance dress is what it might look like. .

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Beverly Semmes sculpture, left; image from the Internet; Abramovic's fluid garment via Zimbio
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Upstairs on the sixth floor of The Artist is Present, the show goes on with numerous performers who are not Abramovic in pieces that the artist had once performed. First I squeeze between a naked woman and man to get from one room to another; I face the woman and say "Excuse me," as I press against both of them to get past. It's not unlike the subway at rush hour, except that they don't push back. (I see later that there's another entrance.) Then there are the two dressed people, a woman and man, standing and facing each other in frozen poses; both seem poised to speak. The woman, I notice, is blinking an inordinate amount. It’s the only part of her body that moves. Around the corner from them are two white-shirted people sitting back to back; they are joined at the hair. Probably because I’ve seen pictures of these performances dozens of time, I am oddly unmoved.

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There are videos—Super 8 films originally, I’d guess—of Abramovic and her then partner, Ulay, slamming into each other. Or leaning against each other separated by a sheet of glass. I wonder if Elizabeth Streb, the choreographer who puts her dancers through the most athletic and dangerous of paces, was influenced by this work. I love Streb’s troup, but again I’m oddly unmoved by the Abramovic performances.

There’s more, including a recreation of the raised living quarters built for Abramovic in the Sean Kelly Gallery some years back. You know--the one with knife blades for ladder rungs? The one Carrie goes to see in Sex and the City? Abramovic lived in/on it for a month. There’s a video of the performance. And you think your studio apartment is cramped? At least you have privacy. I walked into the gallery when she was performing the piece, but I was seized with the urge to bolt, which I did.

When I walk into the room with the woman pinned to the wall about 20 feet off the floor, I stop. My heartrate increases. OK, phew, she’s supported by a bicycle seat and there are pegs for her feet. What? I’m relieved? She's high on a wall, arms outstretched like the Vitruvian man in a tense tango with gravity. She’s caught in a headlight of massive proportions, but if you look at her, she makes eye contact with you. This has to be excruciating and I’m party to it? I bolt.

Back in the atrium Abramovic is still sitting in that dress. It’s the perfect color. What she and her performers are doing is bloody hard work. Masochistic, perhaps. Introspective, perhaps. But bloody hard nonetheless.

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You can see performance pics of the pieces described here, on the MoMA website, and on a You Tube bootleg. .A look at the performances from the performers' point of view is here.

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