Marina Abramović, “Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful,” video (black and white, sound) (courtesy Pamela and Richard Kramlich, San Francisco)

Museum of Modern Art
West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through May 31 (closed Tuesdays; Fridays free from 4:00 to 8:00)
Admission: $20 (includes same-day film screening)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
online slideshow

With Tim Burton having already departed the museum and William Kentridge scheduled to leave May 17, the great triple play of March and April comes down to Yugoslavian-born performance artist Marina Abramović, whose emotionally and physically exhausting and exhilarating career retrospective continues at MoMA through the end of the month. “The Artist Is Present” chronologically follows Abramović’s forty-plus-year career through film, video, photographs, slide shows, audio, assorted ephemera, and, most excitingly, restagings of five of her performances using actors and models. Abramović puts herself in the center of her work, using her body to comment on politics, sexuality, gender, war, civil rights, and art itself. Establishing what she and longtime partner Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) called “Art Vital,” their time- and space-based actions required “no rehearsal, no predicted end, no repetition, extended vulnerability, taking risks, exposure to chance, and direct contact,” among other perameters they set to elicit “primary reactions” from the audience, who sometimes became part of the piece. For example, in “Rhythm O,” Abramović stood naked in front of people, inviting them to pick up an object on a table and use it against her. Her collaboration with Ulay from 1975 to 1988 included the two running into each other over and over (“Relation in Space”), locking mouths for more than ten minutes (“Breathing In / Breathing Out”), screaming at each other (“AAA-AAA”), and standing with a bow and arrow ready to fly between them (“Rest Energy”). Several of their dual performances are re-created at MoMA, including “Point of Contact,” with two well-dressed people facing each other, their pointer fingers extended almost, but not quite, touching; “Relation in Time,” in which two people with long hair sit back-to-back, their hair tied together in a knot; and “Imponderabilia,” with two naked people stand on either side of a narrow doorway, forcing visitors to slide sideways between them, the space so tight that physical contact must be made.

By the close of the exhibit, Marina Abramović will have performed “The Artist Is Present” for more than seven hundred hours (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The centerpiece of the show is “The Artist Is Present,” which takes place in the spacious Marron Atrium. Every day, beginning from the retrospective’s opening on March 14 and continuing through its close on May 31, Abramović sits silently in a chair, facing a visitor, staring at one another for as long as the person wants, only a bare wooden table between them. For minutes or hours, the two do not move a muscle, never taking their eyes off each other, creating a tense, powerful mood throughout the museum. (The piece can be viewed from several floors.) On May 1, Abramović decided to take away the table, lending yet more tension and power, as if the entire room were on the edge of explosion. In many ways, this new performance, based on Abramović and Ulay’s 1981-87 “Nightsea Crossing,” is a fitting microcosm of the survey as a whole, with Abramović herself inviting — or, perhaps more correctly, challenging — the viewer to participate in her art and, by extension, her life, eliminating the boundary between artist and audience.