In case you haven't heard, there's more to Marina Abramovic's MoMA retrospective, The Artist is Present than making genital contact. While the primary purpose of Museo/Muse is not to comment specifically on the opinions presented in the popular press, it must be noted as an interdiction of sorts that a pioneering feminist performance artist's retrospective deserves to be interpreted to the public in more fruitful terms than those crass lines in New York Magazine: "I don't remember seeing this many breasts in a museum gallery since..." and "I'm pretty sure that a naked dangling penis brushed lightly against me..." etc. It perhaps should come as no surprise that a critic who has made a career criticizing little beyond the calculator-crunched ratio of exhibited artists' genitals should be so tickled by Imponderabilia, in which the participating viewer walks a narrow gauntlet between an unclothed man and woman. It is precisely an Abramovic forte to complicate the perceived trope of the decontextualized nude's neutrality and universality with its erotics.
By a certain measure, retrospectives of such performance art have all the punch of seeing CBGB memorabilia at the John Varvatos store. i.e. the mechanical reproduction of a woman cutting a pentagram into her stomach does not even nick the surface of its aura. Ephemeral art can, it seems, often not be presented in a way that brings it significantly beyond the realm of a history exhibit, though the efforts of this show are valiant: A number of Abramovic's tamer pieces are recreated with performers, and, as in the case of Nude with Skeleton [top], to poignant effect. This sculpture is a take on the death-and-the-maiden type, but (perhaps owing to the desirous subjectivity of this female artist) with the muse of a male nude whose young body is entangled with the physical cipher of mortality. While these approximate recreations are valuable, the works that perhaps feel most successful in this new context are those whose form seems authentic. One such highlight, for example, is Balkan Erotic Epic, a projected video triptych-plus-one of staged enactments of sexually informed folklore from the artist's native Serbia; all in costume, women rub their breasts to bring rain, lift their skirts to the sky to stop rain [second], jam skulls into their naked bellies to mourn, and men fuck the earth to make the crops grow [third]. Typical of her inquiry, the universal nude is complicated by an aestheticized erotics.
So where do you go to see cutting-edge performance art? Exactly what they tell the tourists -- PS1. On Feb. 27, while Marina Abramovic signed books in the lobby, Sarvia Jasso hosted the Brooklyn is Burning edition of "Saturday Sessions" on the theme of gender. After Georgia Sagri's uninspiring hands-on-hips attempt at a coquettish mock of feminine allure, paleo-perforamnce artist Ann Liv Young took to the stage and insulted Sagri's lackluster effort until a verbal fight broke out. Sagri put up both middle fingers, which prompted Young to remove her dress and masturbate, both vaginally and anally, about three feet from from Sagri's face on top of the Christian Marclay records [bottom]. Violent confrontation within the diegetic space of an artwork of course owes, at least obliquely to the example of Abramovic, Chris Burden, and others, though its direction away from the self and towards a fellow artist seemed pregnant with potential for a new performative aesthetics of antagonism.
Just as Young put her dress back on and grabbed a plastic cake-lid of her own urine to show the audience, I left, thinking how Ruskin might not have made such a fuss about Whistler "flinging a pot of paint at the public," if he'd have lived to see this. Clearly unnerved, curator Klaus Biesenbach cut the power, leaving Young and the gratuituous transsexual finale act to fend for themselves in the dark for the rest of the show. Though one can hardly blame Biesenbach, acting as a responsible administrator, for the censorship of the act, the irony that it was delivered by the same hand that curated the Abramovic show was certainly not lost on the audience. And this fact raised a number of questions about the kinds of discursive formation engendered by Abramovic's inquiry and its potential for further institutional reception, if any.
