I test the limits of myself in order to transform myself, but I also take the energy from the audience and transform it. It goes back to them in a different way.… A powerful performance will transform everyone in the room.
—MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ
ONE WOMAN CAME all the way from Australia to sit before her and look in her eyes. Another young woman stood before her and slipped out of her dress. Later, in tears, she said she only wanted to meet Marina’s vulnerability with her own. Another quiet, burdened man sat before her in silence for an entire day, as others, waiting their turn, grew angry and restless. Altogether, Marina Abramović sat in silence on a wooden chair within a circle of light in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) for 632 hours. For eight hours a day, from March 14 through May 31, 2010, the tenaciously gentle artist openly welcomed anyone to sit in a single chair opposite her, to sit and look in silence into each other’s eyes for as long as each wanted. Such a fundamental inspiration: to give all our presence and attention in order to see and accept the heart within a stranger until the strangeness evaporates. Such a quiet giving: to seed that presence in the world.
As the days progressed, the gravity of the openness she’d convened grew stronger and lines formed outside the museum. Some would sit for a minute, some much longer. Every day, several would break open to their tears. With each day, the crowd deepened, thickened, and the place of true meeting between two beings in two chairs kept rippling into the crowd. This living exhibit, called The Artist Is Present, was part of a retrospective of Marina’s life’s work.
In her mid-seventies, Marina Abramović is a legendary performance artist whose canvas has been reality and whose paintings are events that have evoked the raw and complex connections that bond and tangle human beings together, no matter how we try to isolate ourselves. For more than four decades, she has bravely used her body and being as the living litmus by which to expose and score the ways we brutalize each other and care for each other. In these honest experiments, she has revealed the dangers and gifts of what it means to be in community. She has made visible the violence of our failures and the love inherent in our successes.
The Artist Is Present broke attendance records at MOMA, drawing more than half a million participants, with 1,400 people sitting in the chair. During the last month, she removed the table between the two chairs and everything became more direct, more immediate, more vulnerable. Sitting still for so long was extremely difficult. Choosing a chair without arms turned out to be a mistake. “This one detail made it hellish,” she said, “The shoulders sag, the arms swell, the pain starts to increase. Then the ribs are going into the organs. I had an incredible amount of physical pain and even some out-of-body experiences where the pain just vanishes, but always it comes back.”
Abramović was born in Belgrade in what was Yugoslavia in 1946, the daughter of strict, military heroes who had prominent positions in Tito’s postwar government. “When people ask me where I am from,” she says, “I never say Serbia. I always say I come from a country that no longer exists.” As happens throughout history, a war-torn land produces a global, timeless citizen whose voice belongs to no one but speaks for everyone.
As the days unfolded in the atrium at MOMA, you could see Marina’s face relax. You could see her heart take over her body. You could see her already deep eyes deepen to a place below her identity and given name. I recognize this place as the kiss of Eternity that almost took me when I had cancer, but which somehow buoyed me back into life with a rawness of heart by which I know everyone before we meet. Marina’s face seemed to open in the same way. As she let soul after soul pour their pain and love in the sudden, safe place between the two wooden chairs, this quiet, soft spot in the middle of the city began to feel holy.
Through her unmitigated presence, Marina Abramović drew the possibility and aliveness of everyone who sat before her into the open. Quickly, the exchange of aliveness began to spark and happen, like wind on water or sunlight spreading over sleeping plants. The aliveness began to arc between people who for the moment remembered they are alive. What else can we ask of each other?
Marina was honest in her stillness, completely bare and transparent, offering nothing extraneous, holding nothing back. She sat in complete stillness for more than six hundred hours, like a flower slowly opening around its eternal eye. Authentic beings confirm for me that the atom of community is more about complete presence than achievement, more about the exchange of aliveness than any ounce of genius worked into gold.
In Naples in 1974, Marina convened one of her most dangerous and telling events, Rhythm O. For six hours she stood passively, surrounded by seventy-two instruments she had gathered. Some objects could give pleasure, while others could inflict pain. They included a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, scissors, a scalpel, matches, lipstick, saws, nails, and even a gun with a single bullet in its chamber. Visitors were invited to do whatever they desired to her. This daring convening opened the impulsive darkness that each of us is capable of. Some people became vicious: marking, probing, scratching her, blindfolding her, dousing her with cold water, pinning slogans to her skin. One person tried to rape her, another stopped him. All the while, Marina completely received whatever was brought to her. After six hours, she moved for the first time and walked toward the audience, and everyone ran away. Later she confessed, “Because of this performance, I know where to draw the line so as not to put myself at such risk.” Her experiment magnified the quandary for us all: While being vulnerable and accepting is the key to all connection, how long do we stay open in the presence of the unawakened?
Now, all these years later, the artist seems to be saying, we need to stay open to everything longer than is comfortable or nothing lasting will happen. Repeatedly, this woman, born in a country that no longer exists, has offered her complete presence to exorcise the violence she was born into. In truth, this gentle, ferocious worker of reality appears before us as a female counterpart of Hephaestus, the ancient Greek blacksmith born of the gods but not a god—Hephaestus, the lame master craftsman who hammered and forged the tools and armor for the gods. And after a lifetime of probing and forging, Marina simply sat in the open, as an artist who paints with reality, to say without saying, Let’s go back to the beginning and sit in silence and look into each other’s eyes until the place from which we all spring shows itself and we can know each other again.
In each of those souls who sat with Marina during those seventy-nine days, a seed of true meeting was awakened. And no matter where they are or what they are doing now, together they opened a long moment of community. Through their mutual presence, they formed one organism of humanity. That awakening of mutual presence is the seed of our human kinship that can germinate anywhere.
In each generation, alone and together, we have this repeatable chance to stay possible. It is a birthright we often put down or tuck away, the chance to enliven ourselves to the fullest and thereby spark an exchange of aliveness that illuminates the gifts of humanity. Under all the proposals and reformations, it is the covenant of being fully present that lets us see where we are joined. It is as simple and brave as sitting in silence on two chairs facing each other—until the soft truth rises out of us, making our care useful. When we can stop and let our souls rest in our being, without hiding, we can find the one kinship living in each other’s eyes.
Such a fundamental inspiration: to give all our presence and attention in order to see and accept the heart within a stranger until the strangeness evaporates.