The Artist Is Present from Marina Abramovic Institute on Vimeo.
Hugs are in order. On Sunday, the Marina Abramovic Institute’s Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a long-durational performance art center surpassed its goal. The campaign, which hoped to raise $600,000, ended up bringing in $661,454 from 4,765 contributors. Ms. Abramovic has promised to hug every person who has contributed.
The funds are to be used for the early design phase (by the architects Rem Koolhaus and Shohei Shigematsu) of a 29,000-square-foot former theater in Hudson, NY, that Ms. Abramovic hopes to turn into a center. Throughout the campaign, Twitter was flooded with updates from the Institute, with messages of support from donors, video links to Lady Gaga practicing the Abramovic Method in the buff, and Ms. Abramovic telling us, semi-dead pan, how many hours it takes a performance artists to change a lightbulb.
In a telephone conversation from Oslo, where she was arranging a group enactment of Munch’s “The Scream,†she talked briefly to Roslyn Sulcas.
Roslyn Sulcas: When did you first have this idea?
Marina Abramovic: When I did “The Artist is Present†at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, the people who sat in front of me were different races, cultures, from different social background. It was very intense experience, it’s not a painting or a sculpture, but an emotional event and all these people felt it. They understood the incredible power of long-durational work. After that, I had an incredible urge to leave behind something, all my knowledge of 40 years doing this work. But it’s a larger idea than just my work. How can we make a platform to change human consciousness?
Sulcas: So you think long-durational work can do this?
Abramovic: Yes, what we don’t have now in our intelligent, technological society is time. Long-durational work is not an original idea. Wagner was making 15-hour performances. You have very long duration in nature and science; there are plants that only bloom once every hundred years. But we have so many distractions today, it is very hard to focus on one thing. So with the Institute, you have to commit to six hours. You put away all your devices, you put on a lab coat, which is democratic and equal but also experimental. Then you go to different chambers for different experiences. Sound chambers, scientific chambers, a crystal cave, gazing chambers, anti-gravitation chambers. Then you will be wheeled into the main performance space, where I want to ask different artists and musicians, dancers and filmmakers to show their work, maybe long-durational that they cannot do elsewhere. And if you fall asleep, because it is long, you are put in the sleeping dock.
Afterwards, you see what you can do with this experience. You can apply it if you are a farmer or teacher or working in a bank.
