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ABSTRACT
In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited a retrospective titled Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present. Surrounded by photographs, artifacts, and re-performances of some of her notorious works, the “grandmother of performance art” performed her presence: For 7 days a week over three months, she sat still and expressionless at a simple wooden table as nearly 1,500 people sat down across from her to experience her presence—and cry. This essay examines the labor of presence at work in this performance-event and considers the affective economy within which presence circulates and is made to matter in the technological present.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my colleagues Emory Woodard and Kathleen Oswald for reading and commenting on early drafts of this argument. It is without doubt much improved for their generous attention. A special thank you to Heidi Rose, Shauna MacDonald, and Jared Bishop for the many thoughtful, passionate conversations about presence and performance without which none of this would have been possible. Finally, I am inestimably thankful to the Editor, Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, for his generous correspondence, and for the feedback I received from the anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 This quotation is taken from the documentary film, The Artist is Present.
2 Cotter reports that “close to 1,400 people” occupied the chair – including Bjork, Lou Reed, and James Franco – some “for only a minute or two, a few for an entire day.” A CNN story (Spodak) eventually put the number at “more than 1,500” and cited a MoMA spokesperson who claimed that more than a half million visitors attended the exhibition.
3 In the documentary film Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, Abramovic explains: “I imagined (it) more like a kind of film set” with “a huge square of light” which she likens to Lost in Translation “in some way.”
4 According to a New York Times article published on the final weekend of the performance, “thanks to the Internet many people saw all of this without being there. A daily live feed on MoMA’s Web site, moma.org, has had close to 800,000 hits. A Flickr site with head shots of every sitter has been accessed close to 600,000 times” (Cotter).
5 It is important to note that this emotionally moving moment is essentially nostalgic – even if the viewer of the YouTube video knows nothing more than what the video tells her about the past for which she is meant to pine. Ulay, Abramović’s lover and collaborator for many years, is essentially taking his place. Night Sea Crossing, which was performed 12 times between 1980 and 1987, involved the pair similarly sitting across from one another in “a state of stasis and non-interaction” for extended periods of time. In Nightsea Crossing Conjunction, the pair shared that table with a Tibetan Lama and an Aborigine man from Central Australia (see Stiles et al. 81–84). The Artist is Present exhibition also included the re-performance of Imponderabilia – one of the couple’s other collaborative works – as well as some of Abramović’s solo works (see Stiles et al. 73–81). As Rebecca Schneider notes, Abramović herself has become a champion of re-performance and documentation as a way to seize control of the history of performance. Schneider describes this as her “desire to control history from beyond the grave” (4). While there are important questions being raised around the issue of re-performance, re-presentation, and documentation/curation, I would argue they bear less upon the presence-work of particular (re)performances as affective labor and more upon how we think repetition within what Deleuze described in Difference and Repetition as the logic of representation. The connection between affect and repetition is discussed in the first chapter of Schneider’s book.
6 For photographs and the script of Rhythm 10 (1973) see Stiles et al. (12–13). The knife game is played by placing one hand on a table or other flat surface with fingers spread, then as quickly as possible stabbing a knife held in the other hand into the surface between the splayed fingers in a specific pattern. It is typically competitive: the “winner” is the one who completes the pattern quickest without stabbing herself.
7 With the formulation “aesthetic event” I am attempting to connect Hans Gumbrecht’s discussion of the epiphanic nature of encounters with art, which he refers to as “aesthetic experience,” to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of aesthetic encounters as “blocs of sensation.” While I do not claim these two accounts are commensurate, I do view them as complimentary and take up both in the course of the essay.
8 I confess that this is rather too curt a gloss of these various economies. In reflecting on how these bear on my argument about affective economies, I concluded that each probably deserves its own extended discussion. In the future, I hope that I and others might contribute to this gap in the argument.
9 Berger and Luckman summarize the principal of intentionality thus: “Consciousness is always intentional: it always intends or is directed toward objects” (20).
10 I am obliquely referencing Neal Stephenson’s novel, Reamde. In the novel, Richard Forthrast, the main character, creates a MMORPG that intentionally blurs the boundaries between the game’s economy and various licit and illicit economies external to it. Stephenson describes the powerful in the world of T’rain as gods. Both aspects of the novel animate some of the discussion that follows.
11 The distinction between leisure and labor is increasingly difficult to maintain in the context of gaming, especially as it becomes more widely embraced as an “e-sport.” A Reuters article projected that esports revenues will top $1 billion in 2019 (Russ). This peculiar blurring of the distinction between play and labor is only the latest episode in their ongoing confusion. See for example Victor Turner’s analysis of the liminal/liminoid in relation to work and play.
12 In gamer lingo, the sort of numbingly repetitive “play” required to advance in such games is called “grinding.” I think this term moves us away from the assumptions that game-play is always unproblematically just “fun” and forces our consideration of the sense in which it is often a form of labor.
13 While I am unable to point to a specific place in the book, Auslander’s Liveness inspired this observation about the historical specificity of presence-formations. I do not think Auslander’s problematic of “liveness” is reducible to that of “presence” (or vice versa) but there are certainly connections between them.
14 The editorial introduction to the collection in which Benjamin’s essay appears calls attention to the debt Benjamin’s framework owes to Vienna School art historian Alois Riegel. He is credited with developing the thesis that artworks bear the imprimatur of an “artistic volition” which drives the historical development of artistic style. This volition, or kunstwollen, should not be confused with the will of an individual artist and cannot be read off of the material organization of an artwork, according to Erwin Panofsky, but is better understood as a “formative will of culture” (66). It is in this sense a “metempirical” phenomenon the understanding of which, Panofsky argues, constitutes the project of art history (68).
15 Gumbrecht travels a much more phenomenological (Heideggerian) path in his account of non-hermeneutic “presentification” in aesthetic experiences, which makes me uneasy about yoking his too closely to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of art in What is Philosophy? Nevertheless, his emphasis on presence as opposed to interpretation of objects of experience resonates in this context. I will engage Gumbrecht’s work throughout what follows.
16 While the museum, her gallerists, and others involved in curating Abramović’s work have succeeded in creating an image of her as charistmatic and beautiful (Brunton), photographs from the exhibition of an ashen-faced, exhausted-looking Abramović circulated on Twitter and Instagram in the form of mock advertisements for Theraflu and Aspirina (a pain reliever sold in pharmacies in Serbia). These can be found in an image search with the terms “Marina” and “Theraflu.”
17 I have in mind Walter Ong’s construct of “pristine orality” in Orality and Literacy. But speculation about pre-historic humans and references to their surrogates, so-called “primitive,”pepper the writing of Ong and Marshal McLuhan and shore up the argument for media ecologies.
18 Like work and play, art and labor have traditionally been thought as fundamentally different (often adversarial) kinds of activities. Work is typically understood as techne, a kind of producing that has its end in something other than itself. I plant a crop not simply for the sake of planting it, but in order to reap its produce. Or to be less bucolic, I show up for a shift in order to get a paycheck. Performance, on the other hand, is prototypical of poiesis, a kind of producing which has its end in itself. Like other artistic activities, the point of creating what it creates is to bring itself into existence. The thesis of Paulo Virno’s A Grammar of Multitudes, however, is that in the post-Fordist world of the multitudes these easy distinctions no longer hold.