Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramović’s exhibition at the MOMA, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, was fantastic. Her central piece that she was performing at the time fallowed along with her theme of voyeurism, endurance, and time. The piece involved her sitting in a chair in the middle of a room at a desk with another chair across the table in which people were expected and invited to come sit at as everyone else in the museum watched around. This piece was surrounded by cameras and live webcams so that at anytime anywhere in the world people could see what was happening. The rest of the exhibit was just as fantastic combining videos of original performances with live reenactments of them along with other works of hers mostly video pieces.

One video in the exhibit seemed to utilize the way in which a video camera only gives you a small window to watch the action with. In this video a woman and a man would come running in from off camera and slam into each other and then walk back out of the frame and then repeat. This caused a large sense of anticipation and suspense using this simple flaw in a cameras eye.

Most of her use of new media was based on documenting her work for reuse. There were quite a few video pieces of which the intent was obviously always to be a video but for the most part she never strayed very far from using a camera as a way to document a series of events. There didn’t seem to be any work that was that integrated with any new means of technology.