Just as Abramovic’s piece concerned duration, the photographs give the viewer a chance to experience the performance from Abramovic’s perspective. They reveal both dramatic and mundane moments, and speak to the humanity of such interactions, just as the performance itself did. The resultant photographs are mesmerizing and intense, putting a face to the world of art lovers while capturing what they shared during their contact with the artist.
The only reason I ever go to MoMA anymore is so that my son can see the helicopter and whatever motor vehicles are on display in the design collection, but if I get a chance to sneak away soon, I’m definitely making use of the MoMA’s new iPhone app: tours, a catalog of thousands of works, events calendar, etc.
Maybe it’s just an image that pops while I’m connected with Marina. Let’s say it’s an image of someone I love deeply, and then this creates the emotion, the tears just come out. Most of the time it’s tears of joy. You’re just being and thinking about somebody or something that’s important in your life. And then just acknowledging this person or situation and moving on into being present because yeah, the tears come, but I don’t want to cry for the entire sitting. I want to move on and continue to be with Marina, to be present.
At the behest of MoMA, photographer Marco Anelli has been taking photographs of all the people participating in Marina Abramović’s performance in the main atrium of the museum and posting them to Flickr. To review:
Abramović is seated in [the atrium] for the duration of the exhibition, performing her new work The Artist Is Present for seven hours, five days a week, and ten hours on Fridays. Visitors are invited to sit silently with the artist for a duration of their choosing.
The photographs are mesmerizing…face after face of intense concentration. A few of the participants even appear to be crying (this person and this one too) and several show up multiple times (the fellow pictured above sat across from Abramović at least half-a-dozen times). The photos are annotated with the duration of each seating. Most stay only a few minutes but this woman sat there for six and a half hours. This woman sat almost as long as was also dressed as the artist. (It would be neat to see graphs of the durations, both per day and as a distribution.)
Update: On the night of the opening exhibition, the third person to sit across from Abramović was her ex-boyfriend and collaborator of many years, Ulay (pictured here on Flickr). James Wescott reports on the scene:
When she looked up again, sitting opposite her was none other than Ulay. A rapturous silence descended on the atrium. Abramović immediately dissolved into tears, and for the first few seconds had trouble meeting Ulay’s calm gaze. She turned from superhero to little girl — smiling meekly; painfully vulnerable. When they did finally lock eyes, tears streaked down Abramović’s cheeks; after a few minutes, she violated the conditions of her own performance and reached across the table to take his hands. It was a moving reconciliation scene — as Abramović, of course, was well aware.
Here’s a description of one of the projects they did together in the 70s:
To create this “Death self,” the two performers devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other’s exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual’s ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.
Wescott also sat across from the artist:
I was immediately stunned. Not by the strength of her gaze, but the weakness of it. She offered a Mona Lisa half-smile and started to cry, but somehow this served to strengthen my gaze; I had to be the mountain.
When I finally sat down before Abramovic, the bright lights blocked out the crowd, the hall’s boisterous chatter seemed to recede into the background, and time became elastic. (I have no idea how long I was there.)
Amir Baradaran turned the exhibition into a venue for a performance of his own…he even made Abramović laugh. Joe Holmes got a photo of the photographer in action. (thx, yasna & patrick)
At certain times I thought that we were really in sync. Other times I didn’t. Other times I was totally hallucinating. She looked like a childhood friend I once had. Then she looked like a baby. […] I thought time was flying by. Then time stopped. I lost track of everything. No hunger. No itching. No pain. I couldn’t feel my hands.
I got a look at the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit at MoMA the other day and loved it. Seeing his work, especially his earlier on-the-street stuff, makes me want to drop everything and go be a photographer. If you’re into photography at all, this show is pretty much a must-see.
The acquisition of @ takes one more step. It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that “cannot be had” — because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747’s, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @ — as art objects befitting MoMA’s collection. The same criteria of quality, relevance, and overall excellence shared by all objects in MoMA’s collection also apply to these entities.
Showing at MoMA next month, a documentary based on the NY Times’ relentless and intrepid street photographer Bill Cunningham. From the press release:
The opening night feature of this year’s New Directors/New Films is the world premiere of Bill Cunningham New York (USA, 2010) on Wednesday, March 24, at 7:00 p.m. at MoMA. Director Richard Press’ documentary is a heartfelt and honest film about the inimitable New York Times photographer, who has for decades lovingly captured the unexpected trends, events, and people of Manhattan for the Styles section of the newspaper. The film shows Cunningham, an octogenarian, riding his Schwinn bicycle to cover benefits, galas, and fashion shows around Manhattan, and illustrates how his camera has captured the looks that have defined generations.
I couldn’t really find any other information online about this film. They should at least get a trailer up on YouTube or something.
For more than twenty-five years, he was the keenest observer of the global theater of human affairs — and one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century. MoMA’s retrospective, the first in the United States in three decades, surveys Cartier-Bresson’s entire career, with a presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books.
After MoMA, the exhibition will visit Chicago, SF, and Atlanta. Quite excited for this one.
The Printed Picture is an exhibition of physical specimens made using all the different ways that type and image can be printed on paper, metal, glass, etc, with a special emphasis on dozens of photography techniques, from albumen prints to dagguereotypes to color photography. On view at MoMA until June 1.
2. The rest of Eliasson’s show on the third floor. His art seems so conceptually and constructurally simple yet, I dunno, I just wanted to hang out in the gallery all day, like I was required to remain part of the experience. Left me wishing I’d made it to London to see The Weather Project.
Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.
In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design’s most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change.
I was surprised at how many of the show’s ideas and objects I’d seen or even featured on kottke.org already. But getting there first isn’t the point. The show was super-crowded and I didn’t have a lot of time to look around, but here are a couple of things that caught my eye.
Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.
In the past few weeks, I’ve seen several people mention the 50 Years of Helvetica exhibit at the MoMA along with some variation of “Woo! I might need to take a trip to New York to go see this!” You should know that this exhibit takes up just a small corner of the Architecture and Design Gallery on the 3rd floor…it’s essentially a case and a handful of posters and other specimens. If you’re in the museum already, definitely check it out, but you’ll be disappointed if you make a special expensive trip just to see the Helvetica stuff.
The Cooper Hewitt Design Museum has announced plans for expansion. I was up there this weekend checking out the Design Triennial and found the exhibition a bit small; a similar show at the expansive MoMA might have run to twice the size and would have included larger items. I hope they don’t do too much to the building though…in many rooms, the building is just as much of an attraction as the items on display.
Exhibit on Helvetica (the font, not the film) opens tomorow at the MoMA and will be available for a good long time (until March 31, 2008). “Widely considered the official typeface of the twentieth century, Helvetica communicates with simple, well-proportioned letterforms that convey an aesthetic clarity that is at once universal, neutral, and undeniably modern.”
A comparison: London’s Tate Modern versus the MoMA. The MoMA is a stuffy, inaccesible place, while the “Tate Modern is an enormously user-friendly place, physically comfortable and hospitable, with inexpensive places to eat and frequent opportunities to sit.”
MoMA just opened their show about Pixar last week and on Friday, we went to a presentation by John Lasseter, head creative guy at the company. Interesting talk, although I’d heard some of it in various places before, most notably in this interview with him on WNYC. Two quick highlights:
Lasseter showed colorscripts from Pixar’s films (which can be viewed in the exhibition). A colorscript is a storyboarding technique that Pixar developed to “visually describe the emotional content of an entire story through color and lighting”. They are compact enough that the entire story fits on a single sheet and if you’re familar enough with the films, you can follow along with the story pretty well. But mostly it’s just for illustrating the mood of the film. Very cool technique (that could certainly be adopted for web design and branding projects).
Near the end of the talk he showed a 2-3 minute clip of Cars, prefacing it with an announcement that it had never before been shown outside of Pixar.[1] Some of the CGI wasn’t completely finished, but it was certainly enough to get the gist. When the first preview trailer for Cars was released, I was skeptical; it just didn’t look like it was going to be that good. Based on the clip Lasseter showed and some of his other comments, I’m happy to report that I was wrong to be so skeptical and am very much looking forward to its release in 2006.
At 15 minutes long, the Q&A session at the end of his talk was too short. The MoMA audience is sufficiently interesting and Lasseter was so quick on his feet and willing to share his views that 30 to 40 minutes of Q&A would have been great.
[1] For you Pixar completists and AICN folks out there, the clip showed Lightning McQueen leaving a race track on the back of a flat-bed truck, bound for a big race in California. As the truck drives across the US, you see the criss-crossing expressways of the city stretch out into the long straight freeways of the American west, the roads literally cutting into the beautiful scenery. A cover of Tom Cochran’s Life is a Highway plays as the truck drives. The world of the movie features only cars, no humans…the cars are driving themselves.
A quick note about the Van Gogh show at the Met that’s closing at the end of the month: if you’re in NYC, go see it. Admittedly, I’m a fan of Van Gogh, but I thought this was one of the best museum exhibitions I’ve ever seen. The exhibition features drawings (as well as a few paintings) from his short 10-year career as an artist, and you can really see how much he progressed during that time and how much his drawings and paintings were related. I can’t wait to go back over to the MoMA and look at Starry Night and The Postman and view them not as paintings, but more as drawings done with paint.
At the risk (ha!) of missing it, I waited until this late in the game to check out Safe: Design Takes On Risk at the MoMA. Great show. Two of my favorite items:
Safe Bedside Table by James McAdam. If the need should arise in the middle of the night, the top of the table separates from the leg and can be worn on the arm as a shield while you use the leg to beat the crap out of a surprised burglar.
Suited for Subversion by Ralph Borland. Don this highly visable suit before heading out for a day of protesting. It’s padded to protect against police brutality, an optional wireless camera acts as a witness to the day’s events, and a speaker amplifies the wearer’s heatbeat, letting those around him know that’s he’s scared, anxious, exhilarated, or simply human.
Also, the MoMA around holiday time, not so crowded. (Well, relatively so. There were still a fair number of people there, just not so many as in the Build-A-Bear store on 5th Avenue.)
Coming soon to the MoMa: Safe: Design Takes on Risk “presents more than 300 contemporary products and prototypes designed to protect body and mind from dangerous or stressful circumstances, respond to emergencies, ensure clarity of information, and provide a sense of comfort and security”.
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