Marina Abramovic signed a deal with architect Rem Koolhaus earlier this week to design and construct her Center for the Preservation of Performance Art in Hudson, New York. The Serbian art superstar will seek to raise $8 million to pay for the project, she revealed Tuesday night to a group of art collectors at a panel at Manhattan’s tony Core Club, and the museum will be devoted to performance art pieces of “six hours minimum.” Some of them will go on for days.
Abramovic purchased a cavernous former tennis center “only two hours” from the city four years ago, with the intent to turn it into a museum and theater. But other projects put its development on hold, most notably the artist’s 2010 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present,” in which she sat motionless for 700-plus hours. Now she’s ready to go forward, she told the collectors. She’s also meeting with Hudson’s town mayor, she added, to advocate for construction of a hotel for art-world types and fans who head north.
At the future museum devoted to marathon pieces, viewers will watch in specially constructed chairs complete with wheels, tables to dine upon, and lamps. If they fall asleep, “the attendant will roll you to the sleeping area” of the theater, she said, but sleepers will still be considered part of the performance. “When you wake up, raise your hand and you’ll be wheeled back,” she promised.
Hudson, New York, and the surrounding region southeast of the Catskills, is already something of a serious art-world hangout, with several expat galleries in town. It was the site of a New Art Dealers Alliance art fair last summer (not to mention the headquarters of the last century’s “Hudson River School” of painters and painting). Abramovic used the Hudson property to rehearse the performers who reenacted, at MoMA, historic performance pieces from throughout her career. Students at the completed center will be trained in the “Abramovic method” of viewing performance art; observing these pieces, she says, takes a certain mind-set and skills, just as the Stanislavski method teaches the mind-set and skills needed to act.
But attendees should not worry their time will all be spent on serious contemplation of art. “I am the best dirty joke teller ever,” she bragged.
➜ [vulture.com] Rem Koolhaas to Build Marina Abramovic’s New Museum of Performance Art
“You give space to the listener, he can go inside and live there”
Björk interviews Arvo Pärt for the BBC program ‘Modern Minimalists’
the biggest girl crush ever.
The German choreographer Sasha Waltz initiates intensive encounters between musicians, artists, and dancers in very specific locations making the architecture an important protagonist in the resulting performance.
These short films offer a glimpse at ‘Dialoges’ that took place between 1999 and 2009 in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Neues Museum in Berlin and the MAXXI National Museum of the XXI Century Arts in Rome.
When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.
Marina Abramovic’s Artist Manifesto At MOCA Gala 2011 (VIDEO)
I also wanted to see if I could purify my energy and how that purified energy could hang in the space and affect the audience in the space. This kind of idea really isn’t my idea, it comes from my connection with Tibetans. I have been in contact with very accomplished Lamas who have spent ten years in a cave without seeing anybody, just completely in a state of meditation. Once a day a meal is left for them and the Lama never sees the person, the food is just left in front of the cave. There are other Lamas as well, and the point is that when you are very close to them and you don’t speak the language or understand their words, but just being near them really changes your complete attitude. Something else is happening. They are really working on a very high frequency energy, because when you purify yourself, your energy pattern changes into a high frequency pattern then everything around you also alters. The more you are in that kind of state the more people you can affect. I had thought I would like to bring one of the Tibetan Lamas to New York, and that would be my work— to bring them. But this kind of replacement from one culture to another wouldn’t work, besides, why would they want to do it when they are happy in the middle of the Himalayas? So I thought what I could do is experiment and try to do it myself, if I can. And that was the idea for this show.
— marina abramovic, talking about House with an ocean view performance (via nature-is-a-haunted-house)
