The performance of the artist Marina Abramovi? in the MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, N.Y. as a mirror of zeitgeist

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Art - Installation / Action/Performance Art / Modern Art, grade: 1,0, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), course: Performing Arts and Spectacles in a Contemporary Multicultural World, language: English, abstract: A woman is sitting on a chair. 7 hours a day. Almost 3 months. What is this about? The description is confusing. The simplicity stumps the spectator, and meanwhile arouses the curiosity what could be behind that simple concept. 1.565 persons sat in front of Marina Abramovi?, getting an impression of the spectacle, and much more persons even just watched the whole scenario. But what is it exactly that catches our intention, that brought so many journalists and the media in motion to speak and write about it? Is it simply our curiousness or is there something more deep and secret to be seen. What is a body, even a body that is not moving, just sitting, possible to tell us? How is it transporting the things it want to say, or the mind behind the body intends to tell. And how can we understand the speech we are going to see? 'My work became through times more simple and thus more difficult. Three months keeping that mental status, face to face with the public, feels like opening your soul.' Marina Abramovi? Maybe it is that citation that sets an inkling of what is happening through this piece of performance. There is a human being, opening its soul in the middle of New York, a city with 8 million inhabitants, more than 20 different nations, 12 languages and a status that we can call multiethnic megacity, a symbol for a globalised world that opens its limits and seems to become one fast and continuous movement. The following paper tries to analyse the performance piece The Artist is Present by Marina Abramovi? in context to our contemporary multicultural world, its forces and debilities, considering to contemporary aims and changes as the meaning of time, presence, humanity and the sense of human being in a complex system regarding the performance art history and intentions.

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