Review of Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2012) by Rodrigo Y — 17 Mar 2013

To be honest, I don't think I'd heard of Marina Abramovic before her famous 2010 MOMA show where she spent three months in a chair sitting across from museum patrons (some of whom lined up for hours for the privilege).

Or maybe I'd forgotten -- the early clips (too few!) of her seventies and eighties performance art seem extreme enough to have caught my attention when I was first introduced to fluxus (for example).

This documentary focuses pretty much entirely on the MOMA show with easy access to Abramovic ("always performing") and doesn't really capture what is interesting about her art. Or perhaps it is what it is? I'm not quite certain why people cry when sitting across from her unless it is simply empathy for her difficult challenge (it can't really be the power of her gaze alone, can it?).

Like many who reach the peaks of the art world, there is something of the business woman in Abramovic (which makes me less enamored of her) but the doco does succeed at peeking behind the scenes (if only a little bit) at what it takes to mount a major exhibition.