"The Artist is Present"

carlosbaila:

Marina Abramovic meets Ulay

 A friend had gotten me in free to MoMA; I was just going to kill some time there before another event.  Immediately noticing some bright photo lights up on the Atrium, above where I was in the lobby, and being "into" photography at the time, I climbed the stairs towards them.  

There, in the middle of a big empty square space, was a table with two women seated at it, sitting still, facing each other.  And there were three video cameras, and a photographer who had two Canon 1Ds, with REALLY long lenses .  All the gear was trained on the two women.

Around the edge of the square was a crowd of people, sitting and standing, looking at these two women.  So I did too.

One of them had a dramatic red gown on, so I decided she was the principal.  After watching them sitting there for a while, I walked around the edge and found a plaque on the wall that explained the piece.

It said that the artist invited anyone who wished to, to sit down across from her, and then they and her would look at each other quietly, for as long as the person wanted to.  And the artist was going to keep sitting there, every day and every hour that the museum was open, for the 3-month length of the exhibition.  Hence the show's title:  "The Artist is Present". 

So right away that made it more interesting.   There was something compelling about the artist, Marina Abramovic — she had thick black hair in a very long braid — like a gypsy fortune teller, I thought.

I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back, Marina had her head in her hands, and the other woman had walked back to outside the square, where she was gesticulating to her friends in a way that made it seem she had a very intense experience.  Like electric rays had been passing from Marina's eyes into her...  Another woman took her place in the chair, Marina looked up, and the staring began anew...

So, I don't know.  I didn't completely get it.  But it did seem kind of a neat idea.

After a while, I remembered that I had seen signs that the exhibition continued up on a higher floor.   Up there,  it was a retrospective of her career as a performance artist from the 70's 'till now.

I got totally caught up in her story!     Here is an early piece where she brushed her hair for an hour, saying "Art is Beautiful, Artist Must be Beautiful"... 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_VxR3TUdoU&feature=related 

It said on a label that she would think of different things she could do, and the one that scared her the most, invariably that would be the one she would end up doing....  such as this one:

Rhythm 0, 1974

To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramovic developed one of her most challenging (and best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her.
Abramovic had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were scissors, a knife, a whip, and, most notoriously, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and actions.
Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as time passed (and the artist remained impassive) several people began to act quite aggressively. As Abramovic described it later:
“The experience I learned was that…if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed.” ... “I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.”

*******************************

At MoMA, they had the table with all that stuff laid out on it.  They also had live performers re-enacting some of Marina's old pieces, sometimes in the nude, which — I just couldn't care about them, because I had become smitten with Marina by this point — but here's an article about that part...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/arts/design/16public.html

One thing I really liked was that Marina gave a performance every year on her birthday; it was part of her artistic philosophy to do so.  And she was doing it in a different city, and she met this guy who was also doing a performance, because it was HIS birthday!  

They were the same age, born the same day, doing the same thing. So from then on they were inseparable, and performed as a male/female pair.  His name was Ulay...  here is a typical thing they did together that was reenacted by other people at MoMA:

http://catalogue.nimk.nl/art_play.php?id=7094

And here is a scarier piece....

http://catalogue.nimk.nl/art_play.php?id=1827

And another thing they did was "Nightsea Crossing", where they would sit across a table from each other, at different cities, and sit still for 7 hours.  This was actually a terribly painful and maddening thing to do.    Ulay would sometimes have to quit, but Marina never would.

They were together for 12 years, but sadly, they broke up.  The way they broke up was to walk from opposite ends of the great wall of China and meet in the middle.  Where they said goodbye.   Marina was crying (of course they videotaped the whole thing) and I felt very sorry for them.  They were soul-mates!   

The next room continued with her post-Ulay work, which usually involved some act of deprivation or endurance, such as when she lived on public display in a Soho gallery for 11 days ... 

http://www.skny.com/exhibitions/2002-11-15_marina-abramovi/ 

So. I go back downstairs. But NOW, Marina is like a movie star to me.   I got hit with the impact of her whole career's vision out of the blue, in two hours.  

I have time to watch her for another hour before I have to go ... and because I am sitting there for a while, I notice the other people who are staying still, watching, like me.  

I see this one vaguely familiar-looking guy leaning up against the opposite wall, just outside of Marina's field of view. Suddenly I think -- could it be?  Is it Ulay?   Has he come back, finally, to see Marina recreate their greatest performance, maybe to recreate it together?  That's the thought I go out with ... and that night, I find the rest of the story....

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/34097/present-and-past/

I miss living in NYC!

"Arachnophobia": Some Spiders Don't Take Getting Squashed Lying Down

One lovely morning, in the peaceful country town of Canaima, California…in front of an attractive old farm-house… down kerplops a crow! Fell right out of the sky! Dead!

Next, up pulls a station wagon, and out piles the handsome, fair-haired Jennings family from nearby San Francisco, eager to move into their new dream home. They are Ross Jennings (Jeff Daniels), a doctor, his wife Molly (Harley Jean Kozak), and their two kids.

Dr. Jennings does have this one personality quirk: because of a childhood trauma, he has “arachnophobia’—the fear of spiders.

Meanwhile, creeping off the nearby dead crow, eager to move into his new dream home—the barn—is “Big Bob”: a huge, hairy, horrifying tarantula, coming to us directly from a just-discovered prehistoric sinkhole in Venezuela, some 4,125 miles away as the crow flew (actually, Bob took a plane most of the way).

This incredible happenstance might be both funny-peculiar and funny-ha-ha, since “Arachnophobia” is billed as a “thrill-omedy”. But what it portends is: within two months all the crickets in Canaima stop chirping; several locals die of apparent heart attacks; and finally, there is Dr. Jennings poking around in his cellar, hyper-ventilating, with a homemade flame-thrower consisting of a can of spray-paint and a Bic Flic, which he fires off frantically at any moving shadow—and they all seem to be moving!

This traumatic physician-heal-thyselfing seems a bit much—why not just give him a regular, healthy fear of spiders, like the rest of us? I myself have since adopted a squish first, ask questions later policy, there is a rolled up newspaper within reach right now, ready to smash any UMO’s (unidentified moving objects) that appear.

Studies have shown that a spider’s scariness is geometrically proportional to the thickness of its legs, and Big Bob’s plump drumsticks would give anyone the leaping heebies. He somehow mates with a harmless little California spider his first night in town, and their many offspring have thinner but nimbler limbs, allowing them to quickly disperse through town, climbing up steps, scuttling under doorways and across walls, and sometimes catapulting off ceilings. They crawl into coffee cups, shoes, blankets, football helmets, and shower drains. One even becomes an unwelcome premium in a box of breakfast flakes.

The moviemakers worried about keeping us too tense for too long, so they cast John Goodman (of ABC’s Roseanne) as an eccentric exterminator.

“We needed to have somebody who the audience knows is a funny guy. When they see his name, they feel that this movie will be okay,” says director Frank Marshall (“Shot by Shot”, Premiere, 7/90). Also, though, he thought it “was very important to have it totally believable —so I used real spiders throughout the movie.” (“Thrills, Chills and Spiders”, WPIX, 7/23/90).

Entomologists may find the most comic relief in “Arachnophobia”. Their on-screen proxy, Dr. James Atherton (the dashing Julian Sands), collects specimens by blasting trees with insecticide and raking up the bodies—yet later on he insists that dead spiders are no good to study; Dr. Jennings must find him a live one.

When a member of his expedition dies suddenly, and his corpse wears an expression of supreme terror, Atherton dismisses it as “jungle fever”. When, at night, alone, looking for the poisonous Big Bob, he finds a web as big as a circus net in the Jennings’ barn, he strums the trigger thread playfully and says, “Come out, Mr. Spider, dinner’s ready.” He’s not even wearing gloves!!!

Just as using real spiders doesn’t guarantee believability, nor is simply casting John Goodman enough for the funniness—they didn’t give him enough funny things for him to say and do.

Also, the spiders are lousy actors —in their closeups, you can tell they don’t know who they’re supposed to bite, where they’re supposed to go, or anything.

Those legs definitely put the chill on you, though, and there’s so many spiders that when you try to go to sleep that night, they’ll still be swimming in front of your eyes.

Daniels and Kozak are attractive performers; the set design and cinematography are high quality; and on all counts, if you are wanting a spider movie, “Arachnophobia” is way better than “Kingdom of the Spiders”, “The Giant Spider Invasion”, or even “Earth Versus The Spider”.

The opening sequence, shot on location in the awesome Venezuelan mountains, is wonderful—there’s this one shot of two blue parrots swooping in front of a green background that I’d love to have framed —we hate to see the expedition leave this amazing place. Maybe they should have stayed in the sinkhole, giving Big Bob the home court advantage, and had Daniels and Kozak along on the expedition as the pilot and a free-lance photographer respectively. She could be initially attracted to the dashing Sands, and the timid Daniels would have to prove himself, and —ahhhhhh! [SMASH] Oops, sorry, thought I saw something moving!

— R. Rube; article first published in Hunterdon County Review, 1990

“Can you HONESTLY say you’ve read the owner’s manual?”

I have used my iPod shuffle most every day since I’ve had it — probably five years now — in fact, I’ve become totally dependent on it for a sense of companionship — but before last night, I thought you couldn’t fast forward or rewind in a track — that the Forward Arrow could only “Chapter Skip” to the beginning of the next track.  Which is OK for songs, but a real pain when listening to a 60-minute podcast, and then accidentally knock the Forward Arrow button when still only half way through it — and so you have to start back at the beginning, and re-listen to the whole thing to get back to where you were.

Well, last night I finally figured it out — you just have to hold the Forward Arrow DOWN for a couple of seconds, then it skims forward rather than skipping to the next piece.  SO simple.

The owner’s manual is only a one-sided little card with 10 lines of text on it; I saved it on my bulletin board all these years with the intention of studying it one day, but I never did  — I just ASSuMEd my Shuffle was too small to have this "bonus"-type feature.  Or if it did, that maybe it was explained on some larger owner's manual that I had not noticed and threw out with the packaging.

 Also, rather than really looking at that little card, I did a Google Search a couple of years ago, and it did find an answer, but the way it came across to me was “first you have to hold this one button down for five seconds, then you have to tap on another button, and then it will work. “  I always thought I would find that answer again someday when I have time and really figure it out.

So last night on the train, I really didn’t want to go back and re-listen to all of This American Life to find out how this one story turned out… and with  the strength of knowing that what I wanted to do was at least theoretically possible, I looked at the thing carefully, and saw there were only three buttons:  Play, Forward Arrow, Reverse Arrow.  Of the three, it was probably something to do with the Forward Arrow.  I decided to just try holding it down...

PS:  Well, it’s a few days later, and I was about to start listening to my $1 audiobook version of Anna Karenina.  (It turned out to be the same version I had rented  for about $60 on cassettes twenty-five years ago.) But, each section of  the book is seven hours long, and even with my new Fast Forward capability, I didn’t want to be FF’ing through the first five hours if I accidentally knocked a button while jogging.

It occurred to me that if the Shuffle had a FF feature, it stood to reason it would also have a Hold feature — even my old Discman had that.  So, Googled it, and Bam!   “Hold down the play button for 3 seconds and the light will blink yellow.  Hold it down for 3 seconds again to Release Hold.”

Did it, works PERFECT!

PPS: Just checked my Bulletin Board to see if I could find the little Owner’s Manual card to try to confirm that the above information was there all along, but it has kind of gotten buried under similar things (“to look at later”) that were thumb-tacked on after.  So I guess I'll never know.