The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Marina Abramović · a performance at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the second-floor atrium, during the artist’s retrospective of the same name · 14 March to 31 May 2010, 79 days, through the museum’s opening hours · the artist seated silent and still on a wooden chair, a second chair facing her for any visitor, one at a time, a table between them at first and later taken away · the unit scored is the performance as performed and as recorded: it ended by design on 31 May 2010, and what stands now is only the record, the museum’s continuous video and live stream and Marco Anelli’s photograph of every sitter
Mode
Durational performance in a museum, open to the public as its second half: one performer, one sitter at a time, silence and gaze as the whole protocol
Mythos
The pilgrimage and the icon: the long wait, the approach to a still figure in a long robe, the brief audience and the leaving; the living devotional image; the mirror that does not answer
Phase
Performed from 14 March to 31 May 2010 within the artist’s retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art; ended by design; held now in video, stream and photographs
Presentation
Two chairs and, at first, a table on a lit square of floor in a high white atrium, watched from its edges and from the balconies above; the artist in a long plain dress; filmed throughout
Register
Grave, still and sometimes tender; small rises in many faces, and one summit on the first night
Scale
One performer, two chairs, seventy-nine days, a queue of strangers, one gaze at a time
Governing Proposition
For seventy-nine days a woman sat on a wooden chair in a museum atrium, silent and still, through the hours the museum was open. Facing her was a second chair, and anyone who had waited in the queue could sit in it, alone, for as long as they chose, and be looked at without a word. The museum gives the total time seated as 736 hours and 30 minutes. The wager of the work is that attention is a thing given and received in time, by one body to another, and that a public will wait for hours to receive it from a stranger in a room built for looking at objects. It ended when the exhibition ended, as it was meant to, and what remains is a record of faces.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In the spring of 2010 The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave Marina Abramović a retrospective under the title Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, from 14 March to 31 May. On the floor above, other performers re-performed her earlier works. In the second-floor atrium she performed a new one under the same title. For the whole run of the exhibition, during the museum’s opening hours, she sat on a wooden chair, silent and still. Facing her was a second chair. Visitors sat in it one at a time, for as long as they chose, and met her gaze. The museum gives the time she sat as 736 hours and 30 minutes, over seventy-nine days.
The parts are few. Two chairs, at first a table between them, a lit square of floor in a high white atrium, one performer, one sitter, a queue. Nearly all of them are required. Without the second chair there is a woman sitting in an atrium, a tableau and not an encounter. Without the silence the encounter becomes a conversation, which is another art. Without the queue the private exchange loses the public that makes it a spectacle and a pilgrimage at once, and without the duration the stillness is a pose and not an ordeal.
The subtraction bites twice. The table was taken away during the run, and the work stood better without it, with nothing between the chairs; the first set-up held a part the work did not need. And the length, 736 hours, is compelled by the claim that presence is sustained rather than staged, but the claim would hold at somewhat less, and the figure carries something of a record kept for its own sake. The retrospective around the sitting is its setting and not the work.
Movement II
The work is a chair that anyone may take. A visitor waited in the queue, sometimes for hours, then crossed the lit square, sat down, and was looked at by one person, without a word, for as long as the visitor could bear or wished. Then the visitor rose, and the chair was empty again, and the next person came. What the work brings into the open can be stated: a crowd will wait a long time for a few minutes of undivided attention from a stranger, and that discloses how scarce such attention has become. Sitter after sitter wept, and the photographs taken of each one make the need visible on face after face.
The form is the knowledge. Make it a video and the gaze is not returned; make it shorter and it is a pose; let her speak and it is a meeting; make the sitter a performer and the public is spectator again. What the work knows, that attention is given and received in time by one body to another, can only be known in this form: duration, silence, two chairs on equal footing, an open queue. When the table went, the form became more exactly itself. But the knowledge, once formed, is simple, and it is complete at the first sitting.
The elevation belongs to the sitter. For many who sat, by their accounts, the gaze produced a real transport, sometimes overwhelming. From the edge of the square, and in the record, the work is a long stillness, grave and sometimes tender, with many small rises in many faces and little height for the one who watches. The museum disclosed something about itself too: what its public came for that spring was a person doing nothing. And the disclosure is mixed with what it discloses, since the sitter came to see the artist, as the title says; the work does not separate a human need from a star’s aura, and the asymmetry, that she sees every face and each sitter sees one, it leaves unexamined.
Movement III
On the first night Ulay sat in the chair. Frank Uwe Laysiepen had been her partner and collaborator through the 1970s and 1980s, and in 1988 they had parted by walking the Great Wall of China from opposite ends. He sat; she opened her eyes and saw him; and she broke her own protocol, reaching across the table to take his hands. Both were in tears. The record carries the moment, and it reaches a viewer even at a screen. It is the work’s one summit, and it is the one place where a particular life, not a protocol, carries the archetype.
Elsewhere the archetype is carried by the design. The queue, the waiting, the approach to a still figure in a long robe, the brief audience and the leaving are the pattern of the pilgrimage and the icon, and the work is built on that pattern: the face held still to be gazed on is the devotional image made living. It builds the mirror too, a face returned by a face that does not answer. The confessional and the sphinx are brought by the viewer. She is the same for every sitter, by design, and the sitters are many and anonymous, so the particular thins out and the myth is held by the rule.
One law governs the work: everything is looked at. The sitter looks at her, the crowd at the edge of the square looks at both, the cameras look at all three, and the photograph returns each face to the world. The private gaze and the public machinery of queue, lights and stream obey it alike. Two things break it, the touch on the first night, moving and still a break, and the change of set when the table went. The range the law governs, from one face to a museum’s public, is real and not wide.
Movement IV
The form was hers before 2010. With Ulay, in Nightsea Crossing, from 1981 to 1987, she had sat in silence across a table from him, motionless, for whole days; and her endurance works of the 1970s had made the limit of the body her material. The turn at the museum is in three things: she sat alone, for the whole run of an exhibition, and the other chair was open to anyone. The last is the real departure. It made the audience the second performer, and it is why the work is scored as one with its sitters, who are its second half.
The stake was paid. In body it was months of sitting without rising through the museum’s hours, an endurance that cannot be faked; in standing it was the risk that the museum would turn performance into a celebrity attraction, which many critics said it did. The command is hers: the stillness, the economy of a set that reads from the balconies and from the edge of the square alike, the long plain dress that makes her an icon at a distance and a person close to, and a protocol simple enough to run itself through sitting after sitting. The range of the medium is narrow by design.
The work made a durational performance the central event of a major museum and carried performance from the margin into museum programming and into common knowledge. It was imitated and parodied widely, it fed into the method of her institute, and its format entered other media, as in the performance film made for Jay-Z’s Picasso Baby in 2013. Much of that reach is fame and the uptake of a format, and the means were the field’s since the 1970s. Those are the facts that hold it in Tier III: its departures enlarge a path she had already proved, its height belongs mostly to the sitters, and the orders it holds are few. On the gated axes of consequence it does not approach the bar.
Movement V
The performance ended on 31 May 2010, as it was meant to, and what made it, two bodies present to each other in time, cannot be carried by any record. What survives is unusually complete. The museum filmed the whole run and streamed it live. Marco Anelli photographed every sitter, and the portraits were published in 2012 as Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović. Matthew Akers’s documentary of the same year, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, draws on the record and is a separate work. The record shows the form legibly, the chairs, the gaze, the queue, the duration, and it does not transmit it.
The portraits are where the work repays return: a register of faces under one gaze, many of them weeping, which keeps yielding as a document of looking. The debate has not closed in sixteen years: presence or spectacle, communion or celebrity; whether a performance filmed in every minute is still a performance of presence; what a museum does to the art of the body when it schedules it; whether the sitters were the work or its audience. The work itself, once its protocol is known, yields less on return than its debate does, and the debate is young.
Beside it on this desk stands The Weather Project, at 7.7, the nearest of its kind, a temporary work in a museum’s great hall made for a public that became part of it and surviving as record; Infinity Mirrored Room: The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, at 7.6; and Fountain, at 8.0, the act as work in the same museum culture, which reorganised its field as this did not. A Hunger Artist, at 8.7, the endurance performer as public spectacle, stands a tier higher. For seventy-nine days a chair stood empty across from her, and people waited in line to sit in it.
Act III · The Twelve
The parts are few and nearly all are required. Take away the second chair and there is a woman sitting in an atrium, a tableau rather than an encounter. Take away the silence and the encounter becomes a conversation, which is another art. Take away the queue and the private exchange loses the public that makes it a spectacle and a pilgrimage at once; take away the duration and the stillness is a pose, not an ordeal. The test bites twice. The table went during the run and the work stood better without it, so the first set-up held a part it did not need. And the length, compelled by the claim that presence is sustained, would hold at somewhat less.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the work brings into the open can be stated, and it is a meaning, not a mood. A crowd that will queue for hours for a few minutes of being looked at by one person, without a word, discloses how scarce undivided attention has become; the weeping of sitter after sitter, photographed one by one, makes that visible on face after face. The museum disclosed something about itself as well: what its public came for was a person doing nothing. Held below 8 on two counts. The work cannot separate the disclosure of a human need from the staging of a star’s aura, since the sitter came to see the artist, and it does not try. And the asymmetry goes unexamined: she sees every face, each sitter sees one.
Score: 7.8 / 10
There is elevation, and it is reported more than shown. For a sitter the gaze could produce a real transport, by many accounts overwhelming. On the first night the record carries a moment that reaches even a viewer at a screen: two people who had parted in 1988 by walking the Great Wall from opposite ends, meeting across a table in silence, both in tears. That is one summit. Elsewhere the height belongs to the sitter, not the watcher. From the edge of the square, and in the record, the work is a long stillness, grave and sometimes tender, with many small rises in many faces. Frequency is high in that small register and height is rare, which holds the axis below the Universal Minimum.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The archetypes are summoned plainly and partly built. The queue, the waiting, the approach to a still figure in a long robe, the brief audience and the leaving are the structure of the pilgrimage and the icon, and the work is built on that pattern rather than alluding to it: the face held still to be gazed on is the devotional image made living. The mirror is built too, since the sitter’s face is met by a face that does not answer. The confessional and the sphinx are brought by the viewer. What holds the axis is that the particular thins out: she is the same for every sitter by design, the sitters are many and anonymous, and the archetype is carried by a protocol more than by a life.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is her own above all. With Ulay she had sat in silence across a table, motionless, for whole days in Nightsea Crossing, from 1981 to 1987, and her endurance works of the 1970s had set the body’s limit as the material. The turn in 2010 is in three things: alone, for the whole run of a museum’s exhibition, and open to any member of the public as the other half. The last is the real departure, making the audience the second performer. The stake was real in body, months of sitting without rising through the opening hours, and in standing, since the museum could turn performance into a celebrity attraction, as many critics said it did. But the form was proved by her own earlier work: a wager on her own path, enlarged.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Nearly everything. Make it a video and the gaze is not returned; make it shorter and it is a pose; let her speak and the encounter is a meeting; make the sitter a performer and the public is spectator again. What the work knows, that attention is given and received in time by one body to another, can only be known in this form: duration, silence, two chairs on equal footing, an open queue. The removal of the table proves it from inside, since with nothing between the chairs the form became more exactly itself. Held below the higher band because the form is in large part that of Nightsea Crossing, and because the knowledge is simple and complete at the first sitting.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence over promise, and sixteen years is not much. Return has produced a literature that has not closed: whether the work is presence or spectacle, communion or celebrity; whether a performance of which every minute was filmed and streamed is still a performance of presence; what the museum does to the art of the body when it collects and schedules it; whether the sitters were the work or its audience. The record repays return in one form above all, the photographs of the sitters, a register of faces under a single gaze that keeps yielding as a document of looking. Held below 8 because the work itself, once its protocol is known, yields less on return than its debate does, and the debate is young.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is performance and body art of the 2000s and 2010s, in Europe and New York. Intrinsic force: substantial, not reorganising. The work made a durational performance the central event of a major museum and made the public the performer’s partner, but its means had been hers and the field’s since the 1970s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it carried performance from the margin into museum programming and into common knowledge; it was imitated and parodied widely; it fed into the method of her institute; and its format entered other media, as in the performance film made for Jay-Z’s Picasso Baby in 2013. Reach is discounted, because much of it is fame and the uptake of a format, and fame is presence, not proof of a field reorganised.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, as a performance surviving as record. Form: the performance ended on 31 May 2010, by design, and what made it, two bodies present to each other in time, is exactly what a record cannot carry. The record shows the form legibly, the two chairs, the gaze, the queue, the duration, and does not transmit it. That is charged in proportion: less than a lost painting, since the work was always to end, but really, since the thing it knew is the thing lost. Presence: continuous and wide since, through the film, the portraits and the image of the two chairs, and given little weight. Fabric: the record is unusually complete and well kept, every sitter photographed and the run filmed. The span is sixteen years.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Read to the same anchors as every medium: command of the medium, here the body, the set and the protocol. Credited: the stillness held through the museum’s hours for some eleven weeks without rising, an endurance few performers could command and none could fake; the economy of the set, two chairs and a lit square in a high white atrium, so that the work reads from the balconies above and from the edge of the square alike; the dress, long and plain, making the figure an icon at a distance and a person close to; the protocol, simple enough to run itself through sitting after sitting. The one breach, her hands across the table on the first night, broke her own rule. The range is narrow by design, and the camera work of the record is not hers.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the private exchange of a gaze, and the public machinery of the queue, the lights, the cameras and the stream. They obey one law, that everything is looked at: the sitter looks at her, the crowd looks at both, the camera looks at all three, and the photograph returns each face to the world. Even the work’s tensions follow that law. Held below 8 by two breaks: the touch on the first night, where the protocol of stillness gave way, moving and still a break; and the change of set during the run. Narrowness is not coherence, and the range here, from one face to a museum’s public, is real but not wide.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The orders held are few and held in one act: consciousness and attention; the body and its endurance; the stranger and the encounter; the crowd and the institution; celebrity and the market, which the work stages as much as it holds. Love and its end enter once, through Ulay. Absent: the family, labour, the state, history, the natural order, and the sacred except as the shape of the queue. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form itself: one gaze touches every order the work contains, so they are integrated, but a sitting can hold no more than a sitting holds. The figure describes the form and stands above its floor.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.2, then Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 8.0 and The Inner Law at 7.9. A form whose knowledge, that attention is given and received in time by one body to another, could exist in no other shape, and became more exactly itself when the table was taken away; a work that made durational performance the central event of a major museum and carried it into common knowledge; a stillness held through the museum’s hours for seventy-nine days, in a set and protocol economical enough to run through sitting after sitting; and one law, that everything is looked at, governing the gaze and the machinery around it alike.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: consciousness, the body, the stranger, the crowd and the institution, with celebrity staged as much as held and love entering once; no family, no labour, no state, no history, no natural order. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.4: a height that belongs to the sitter and reaches the watcher once, on the first night. Then The Swerve at 7.5: the open chair is a real departure, placed on a path she had already proved. These hold the work below Tier IV: a simple form completely achieved, enlarged from her own earlier work, whose elevation is mostly reported, and which survives as a record of what it was.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 8.0, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, The Unconcealment at 7.8, The Imperishable at 7.7, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 and The Swerve at 7.5 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.4, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 92.1, an average of 7.675 that displays 7.7. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the work and its record: its structure, protocol and dates, the documented episodes, chiefly the first night, the photographs and the film. The day-to-day detail of the run is known less well, and where a judgment turns on it it is held more loosely. The work scored is the performance at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 14 March to 31 May 2010, during the museum’s opening hours, as performed and as recorded: the artist seated, silent and still; a second chair for the public, one sitter at a time; a table between them at first, taken away during the run; a lit square of floor in the second-floor atrium; the queue; the duration, which the museum gives as 736 hours and 30 minutes. It ended by design and now stands only as record: the museum’s continuous video and live stream, and Marco Anelli’s photograph of every sitter, published as Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramović (2012). The loss of the performance is weighed on survival in proportion to what it takes from the work, and on no other axis. The retrospective around it, with the re-performances of earlier works by other performers, is context; Matthew Akers’s documentary Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2012) is a separate work; neither is scored. Nightsea Crossing (1981 to 1987) and the endurance works of the 1970s are named as inheritance. No words are quoted but the title. Facts and figures that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the name of the atrium, the number of sitters, the attendance of the exhibition, the day the table was removed, the hours the stream ran, the colours of the dresses across the run, the number of showings of Nightsea Crossing, and whether the artist appeared in the film of 2013.