What if one of the most commanding performance art events of the 21st century had never happened? What if a naysaying curator had quashed a performance that drew some 1,500 people, some of whom spent hours with the piece? These are the questions raised by an interview with performance art legend Marina Abramović on the Louis Theroux podcast.
On the occasion of preparations for her show Balkan Erotic Epic, the legendary performance artist spoke with the British documentarian, journalist, and author known for numerous BBC documentaries.
German curator Klaus Biesenbach, then chief curator at large at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, invited the artist to be the subject of the institution’s first performance art retrospective in 2010, with 50 works spanning her entire career, including re-performances of historic pieces that lived only in documentation. That was historic in itself, but Biesenbach’s proposed title gave her another idea.
The show would be called “The Artist Is Present,” the artist told Theroux, mimicking the convention of invitations to artists’ opening receptions, which often included the words “The artist will be present.”
“The curator, Klaus Bisenbach, said to me, ‘Okay, the show is going to be ‘The Artist Is Present,’ because you’re always in the work. When he said this, I knew what I was going to do.” She could easily have simply done the usual, she tells Theroux: be present at the opening, see all her old friends, have a nice dinner, and die at peace, knowing she had had a great show at a great museum.
“But I want to show the transformative power of performance,” she says. “I want to be there every single day, this amount of time, never moving, to see what would happen, just sitting on the chair with a table and a chair in front of me.”
Then she lowers the boom: Biesenbach, she says, was totally dismissive of her proposal.
“Klaus Biesenbach said to me, ‘You’re totally ridiculous. This is New York. Nobody has time to sit in this chair. It’s just going to be empty.’ The chair was never empty.”
Biesenbach, now director of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, did not immediately answer an email requesting comment.
Klaus Biesenbach.
Photo Hannes P Albert/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images
New Yorkers took their time with the piece, with one visitor even sitting for the entire day with the artist. Some visitors cried. Her former partner in art and life, the German artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen), famously joined her. Taiwanese American performance artist Tehching Hsieh, another legend of punishing durational performances, also showed up to pay tribute to his colleague.
“Every hour that the museum is open, she sits silently under klieg lights at a simple wood table in the museum’s atrium,” wrote Kristen Swenson in Art in America. “Museumgoers are invited to sit across from her. When I visited, her meditative quiet was genuinely transformative. Teenagers stopped texting; chatty groups paused to… look at art. More viewers will witness this performance than have seen Abramović to date—and their narrative accounts of it will, as always, be the work’s most vivid documentation.”
The artist restaged it in 2022 to benefit Direct Relief’s efforts in war-torn Ukraine.
