For as long as 9½ hours straight, performance artist Marina Abramovic sits at a wooden table in the middle of the Museum of Modern Art’s mezzanine and just stares, completely frozen. She calls it art. You might call it a silly stunt not even worthy of David Blaine.
The exhibit, titled “The Artist Is Present” (and also presumably very hungry), invites museum visitors to sit opposite Abramovic and stare right back at her for as long as one would like, be it five minutes or five hours. Abramovic doesn’t seem to care either way. Her deadpan expression never changes. She never flinches, never speaks and she takes no bathroom breaks, no lunch breaks, nothing. The only time she moves is when one visitor gets up and leaves the table to make way for a new guest. The Serbian artist uses this 30-second interval to rub her eyes slowly, roll her shoulders and wonder why she didn’t become an accountant instead.
Before her “performance” ends May 31, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. So I got at the end of the 10-person line and waited . . . for six hours.
At the front of the line was Paco Blancas, a local makeup artist who was making his eighth visit to Abramovic’s table. Last month, Blancas sat making constant eye contact with the artist for seven straight hours — the museum’s entire day. The guards kicked him out at closing time.
“I didn’t really plan it. It just happened,” he says.
The problem — or beauty of the piece, depending on who you are and whether you have a job to go to — is that there’s no time limit for how long a visitor is allowed to sit. And after waiting on line for a couple of hours, it became clear that most visitors viewed their chance to sit opposite Abramovic less as a curiosity and more as a “Man vs. Wild” endurance test.
No one seemed to want to sit for less than 30 minutes, lest they look like a wuss to onlookers. Or more embarrassing, lest they look like some simpleton who doesn’t appreciate and receive the mystical vibe Abramovic is putting out.
Camille Announ, a 16-year-old from France who was on line five people ahead of me, promised to spend five minutes in the chair. He ended up sitting for about 90 minutes.
“You feel lost with yourself,” he said afterward. “She’s like your mother, and she’s looking at you and you’re just saying no. I think she wanted me to leave several times, but I said no.”
When my time finally came, a guard warned me not to make any funny faces or I’d be escorted out. Then he gave me the go-ahead to approach the table framed by four banks of spotlights. Abramovic sat wearing a floor-length red dress, her face pale, sweaty and waxen. As I sat down opposite her, she raised her head, opened her eyes and began to stare.
So I stared right back. Immediately, my vision began to blur and my eyes water from the bright lights. Blancas had said he’d worked out a lot of issues in his personal life during his session through visualization.
I visualized nothing. All I could think was, “Have I sat here long enough yet?”
I got up after 10 minutes, in part because I’d promised the other people waiting in line behind me I wouldn’t hog all the staring.
And one more thing the guard never mentioned: Abramovic has a cushion on her hard wooden chair — you don’t.