Archive for March 25th, 2010

Art, damn it, art! watch (#7 in a series).

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

My checking of the NYT on weekends is somewhat iffy, so I missed this piece about the Marina Abramovic retrospective at MoMA until Lawrence mentioned it.

…a day spent watching people watch the show — naked performers re-enacting some of Ms. Abramovic’s most audacious pieces of the last 40 years; the artist herself in an epic endurance performance in the museum’s atrium; videos of Ms. Abramovic slicing a star into her stomach with a razor blade and standing for several minutes with an arrow in a drawn bow aimed at her heart — shows that it takes quite a bit to shake up most museumgoers these days.

More:

Probably the most talked-about part of the exhibition — generating headlines like “Squeezy Does It” in The New York Post — is a re-creation of a 1977 work in which Ms. Abramovic and her partner then, the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay, faced each other naked within the frame of a gallery doorway, forcing people who wanted to enter to squeeze between them.

And:

Henk Abma, a former Dutch Reformed Church pastor who said he had followed Ms. Abramovic’s work for 30 years, began his visit by spending half an hour sitting across from the artist herself, who is installed at a table in the museum’s atrium, where she will sit silently all day, every day, barely moving, for the entire run of the show. (The performance will add up to more than 700 hours of sitting if she can complete it.)

Here’s a link to MoMA’s webpage about the exhibition. I find it interesting that the NYT refers to the artist as “Abramovic” and MoMA refers to her as “Abramović”.

Obit watch: March 25, 2010.

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Robert Culp.

At the Movies“. I gave up on the show when Roper and his rotating cast of guest hosts left; there was no way I was going to watch the pulsating ball of suck that was The Bens. I’d heard that Phillips and Scott were a vast improvement, but I couldn’t bring myself to start watching it again. It didn’t help that the show was usually on in the early early morning here, and was frequently postponed due to sporting events.

I can’t say that I’ll miss it, but Ebert’s been hinting at a new television project: I do look forward to that.

Edited to add: Ebert’s latest blog post does more than hint.