The Artist Is Present Documentary Review

Marina Abramovic, Credit: David Smoler/ Music Box Films

Content Context

Marina Abramovic is a Serbian performance artist who has been active in the art world for over four decades, and is known as the Grandmother of Performance Art for her bold and groundbreaking work that calls attention to the ethics of collective responsibility, social experimentation and testing the limits of the human body.

The Artist Is Present is a performance piece where Marina literally sat as part of an exhibit showcasing recreations of her work over the years in MoMa for eight hours a day, for roughly 64 days. By the end of the exhibition, around over 1,500 people came and sat across from her over the span of 716 hours. Speechless. Contemplative, almost in a meditation. People were allowed to sit and engage with her in silence for however long they wanted, some it was 10 minutes, others it was hours on end. This performance had no real framework of strict rules or constraints- simply expectations, and is considered one of her most daring performance pieces because it had the potential to fail at any point if she decided to stop participating. Without her and her patience, there would have been no piece.

My Hot Take

In the documentary she states, "To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre... Theatre is fake… The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real." To a certain extent, I understand her perspective. Actors who push themselves to extremes in their methodology are “performers”, but one could also argue that anything is a performance if it is real for the person providing the information. I think in this way, she’s indicating a separation of theatre for fluff and entertainment versus theatre for fine art and academia.

I’ve seen bits and pieces of this documentary over the past 7 years and I’m a fan of Marina and her work. Her practice is liberating and groundbreaking. She is humorous and really quite captivating and has a magnetic presence, you can detect her charisma through the screen.

Artist Practices

As it shows in the documentary, she’s very candid with her team, she cares for them and incorporated a workshop weeks before the show to get them acclimated to the work they’d be doing in her exhibition. She took the time to physically and mentally prepare herself for the act of sitting for these great lengths and in doing so, acknowledged her limitations and took liberties to compensate for them. She had security, a personal assistant, and numerous museum staff helping her from start to finish even though in the end, she embarked on the piece alone.

“People had nowhere to escape but into themselves, and that realization brought an enormous amount of emotions.” SO many reasons why people came to sit- anger, curiosity, pain. When they sit, it alters the piece from focusing on what people can physically see, into what participants experience between themselves and their reflection in Marina. It slows people down and brings time into perspective as an element that can be measured by weight, not just length. This work lowered any and all borders between performer and audience in a way that called attention to human kind and our longing for connection on a deeper level- one that we rarely get today.

Relation to Industry

The way I relate this documentary to ANY industry is with a small but powerful practice that I’ve implemented in both my professional and personal life. I call it a "Marina Minute"- most of my friends and colleagues refer to it as “doing a minute”, where two consenting people set a timer for one minute and sit across one another in silence, no touching or big movements, and focus on grounding themselves in the energy they pass back and forth. I know it sounds a little hippy-dippy, but I swear by this exercise in breaking down barriers between people and reinforcing a type of communication that improves the way people are able to collaborate. I’ve used this to establish character mindsets between myself and acting partners, I’ve used it on film sets when I’m instructing actors and crews for stunts, I’ve even used it in a casting environment to help people diffuse nerves. I’ve found that people aren’t aware that they miss that depth of human connection and it changes you. Even if it’s as short as 60 seconds. Something happens in that time of staring at someone and openly acknowledging that you’ve entered an exchange of mutual vulnerability that stays with you long after the timer goes off.