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Overlooked & Underrated Docs & Features
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Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present
The website, like most film websites, tells you everything about "Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present", one may need or want to know – or more than one wants to know. (That's why I always watch films before reading about them.) So, after clarifying the film's subject, I simply offer my responses.
Presented on cable by HBO, first-time feature director Matthew Akers's film is a broad biographical outline of performance artist Marina Abramovic. The springboard for the production is a 40-year retrospective of Abramovic's work at The Museum of Modern Art, in 2010, in New York. The three-month exhibition included a new piece called "The Artist Is Present". During all open hours of every open day of the museum the artist sits silently still in a chair while museum attendees sit, one at a time, in a chair a few feet across from her.
I never heard of Marina Abramovic, and like so many documentaries I've seen, I know next-to-nothing about the film's world – performance art – other than a few clips of Laurie Anderson way back when. Most of these were stylized songs. I wouldn't dare say I now know about performance art, but I can say I know about Abramovic. Her performances, her life, and her thoughts about them evoked a lot of feelings and conditions in me: Fascination, compassion, gratitude, wonderment, horror, and fear. I was left with a desire to tell the world about this dedicated artist. But of all those feelings, the big one is gratitude for Marina Abramovic's courage and tenacity to express her provocative art, to share her fundamental humanity with the world.