What Is the Song With the Woman Doing the Performance Art Staring
About New York
Confronting a Stranger, for Art
At 20 minutes to closing time, Matthew Koopersmith was next in line. There was no telling if the clock would run out.
"I've been here five hours," he noted.
Mr. Koopersmith, 18, was waiting his turn to sit at a table across from a adult female, Marina Abramovic, and gaze at her, and for her to stare back at him.
For weeks, people have been lining up at the Museum of Modern Fine art to practise precisely this. The museum has mounted re-creations and videos of functioning art by Ms. Abramovic that goes back to the 1970s. Many headlines virtually the evidence have focused on the functioning of people in the nude, two of whom stand in a narrow entrance to a gallery so that visitors using that door have to clasp by them. Elsewhere, a naked woman is perched on a bicycle seat.
What is truly shocking, though, is non the nudity, but strangers staring each other in the middle, one of the final taboos of modern New York.
That may explain why so many visitors, who might steal a quick glance or two at the nude performers, are absorbed by Ms. Abramovic, wearing a long red dress that exposes only her hands and her head, seated in silence at a table every hour that the museum is open, never leaving, standing or changing her expression.
One by one, they walk onto a square phase and sit down opposite her for equally long as they wish.
"This is my third visit," said Mr. Koopersmith, a senior at Benjamin N. Cardozo High Schoolhouse in Queens. "The first time I came, my brother sat with Marina. I was too scared."
Of what?
"The audience. So many people watching you," he said. Marshaling his nerve, Mr. Koopersmith went back on Wednesday, and after three hours, was the concluding one waiting when the museum closed at 5:30 p.m.
He returned at noon on Thursday, bringing a friend, Adam Kurzyna. They planted themselves along the edge of the stage.
All through the fresh spring afternoon, thousands of people drifted into the museum's 2d-floor atrium, where Ms. Abramovic will exist seated until May 31 for her performance, titled "The Artist Is Present."
"I wouldn't be able to do it," said Kristin Summers, 18, on a field trip from Greenwich High School in Connecticut with a class that was studying Surrealistic painting. "I'd express joy."
"I'd get a headache," said her classmate Kelly Re, 17.
"Just a random woman, and she's so serious," Ms. Summers said.
As they spoke in the midafternoon, a homo in an orange sweater and jeans was sitting with Ms. Abramovic. Ms. Re tried to imagine why.
"I don't empathize what he'southward getting from this," she said.
A moment later on, the man, Dan Visel, 32, rose and drifted into the crowds, not certain himself what he had gotten from information technology. "Time was passing, but I couldn't tell," said Mr. Visel, a researcher at a enquiry arrangement. "The overwhelming feeling I had was that you think you can understand a person just by looking at them, but when you lot expect at them over a long period of time, yous empathize how impossible that is. I felt connected, but I don't know how far the connection goes."
Anywhere in the metropolis outside a museum, he said, this kind of silent confrontation would seem quite mad.
"Nosotros insulate ourselves in New York Metropolis," Mr. Visel said. "Anybody goes around with headphones. It's 1 of the fantastic things about New York: you tin can be near all these people, and all the same be in your own head."
Some people sat for an hour or more with Ms. Abramovic, who occasionally shifted her hands just otherwise never moved, except to drop her head when a visiting sitter left. Meanwhile, Mr. Koopersmith and Mr. Kurzyna saved spots for each other when they took bathroom breaks. They chatted with Shehab Chowdhury, 19, a educatee at Baruch Higher, who was just ahead of them in line.
As the end of the performance day approached, Mr. Chowdhury agreed that he would not run out the clock — that he would leave some fourth dimension for the other two to sit. Once he sat down, he seemed lost to the world. Neither he nor Ms. Abramovic showed the slightest flicker when a swain outburst onto the stage and was dragged away past security guards.
"I think they lose all perception of time when they get upwardly at that place," Mr. Kurzyna remarked.
With 15 minutes left, though, Mr. Chowdhury rose, and Mr. Koopersmith quickly took his identify. "Five hours waiting for 20 minutes, and it was worth everything," Mr. Chowdhury said. "The minute you sit in the chair, yous enter her earth."
Ten minutes afterward, Mr. Koopersmith, anxious nearly the fourth dimension, yielded to Mr. Kurzyna.
Alyona Maggio, a stranger who had been watching the strangers looking at each other, asked Mr. Koopersmith if he had noticed the audition.
"Not when I was there," he said.
"Information technology was very brave of you," Ms. Maggio said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/nyregion/04about.html
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