Over the course of a career that spans more than thirty-odd years, Marina Abramović has maintained an unwavering commitment to a form of performance that tests the psychological and physical extremes of the body. The word “commitment” indeed might be the singular most defining characteristic of her art, as well as her approach to the practice of being an artist. Among an early, important group of artists who moved away from the utilization of inert materials in favor of a direct employment of their own bodies (as tool, medium, performer, instigator, facilitator), Abramović’s recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, entitled The Artist is Present, is a much-deserved examination of the artist’s prolific, provocative, and, at times, unsettling body of work. Organized by Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, the exhibition traced three distinct phases of Abramović’s career: early solo pieces executed between 1968 and 1975; collaborations with her partner Ulay (b. Uwe Laysiepen); and more recent solo works starting in 1995 after the couple’s personal and professional separation (an event artistically enacted in The Great Wall Walk of 1988, in which they walked toward each other from opposite ends of China’s Great Wall). Through its chronological narrative, the exhibition did much to provide insight into the artist’s signature works, in which wounds are self-inflicted (Lips of Thomas, 1975), potentially dangerous situations with audiences are facilitated (Rhythm O, 1974), and the artist’s and/or the audience’s stamina is tested (The House with the Ocean View, 2002). Covering a series of tightly installed (if overly crowded) galleries, the exhibition included extensive archival materials, videos, photographs, slides, and installations. The artist’s work was presented in various formats as a means to deal with the central curatorial dilemma in relation to live performance: namely, how to communicate historically distant, ephemeral works that exist as documentary images (both still and moving) in the present time, while conveying the visceral impact of the original. In the case of Abramović’s work, this quandary poses a particular challenge given the degree to which it depends upon the magnetic and imposing figure of the artist herself, whose steely disposition in the face of extreme deprivation or harm—acquired through years of training—remains constant.

To these ends, the exhibition featured a central medium Abramović has recently pursued: “re-performance,” which operated as the leitmotif for the entire exhibition. Installed throughout the galleries was a series of re-enactments of past Abramović works performed by the artist or by a cast of surrogates hired for the exhibition. So while a video (transferred from 16mm film) plays Imponderabilia (1977), performed by Abramović and Ulay in Bologna’s Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna, nearby a re-performance of Imponderabilia (1977/2010) was staged live in the galleries. In it, two unclothed performers formed a narrow opening in a passageway leading from one room to the next through which visitors could choose to pass—or not, as they could opt to walk to the other side. In the piece’s first incarnation, the visitors’ choice was far more limited as they were reduced to which side to face as they squeezed through a much tighter space between the bodies of Abramović and Ulay. As the accompanying text noted, the original performance was not received by all with enthusiasm, as it was stopped by the police.

No such impromptu intervention ensued at MoMA (apart from the occasional instance of the audience groping performers, as reported in a front-page article in the New York Times during the show’s run). On the one hand, this might have been due to the degree of controlled sanction offered by MoMA (and the fact that visitors could opt out of the intimate physical experience). But on the other hand and at a deeper level, it may have been a result of the lack of transgressive energy relayed by the re-performances, which goes to the philosophical and theoretical conundrum that the exhibition presents, but does not resolve. Here, “re-” is the operative prefix that gets to the heart of the matter.

For Abramović, these restagings (by her or others) are a means of preserving live historical performances, which, in their reincarnation, simultaneously attain the status of new works. In his catalogue essay, Biesenbach alludes to her efforts in this regard, specifically mentioning her 2005 exhibition at the Guggenheim, in which the artist re-performed now classic performance works from the sixties and seventies (by such artists as Vito Acconci, Valie Export, and Bruce Nauman), as a turning point: “In recent years, Abramović has taken a more historical and retrospective strategy. In 2002 and 2003 the Whitechapel Gallery, London, organized two programs of re-performances of her own work, but it was Seven Easy Pieces, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2005, that presented Abramović as an agent of the history of performance in contemporary art” (Klaus Biesenbach, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010, 18). Further down, Biesenbach goes on to explain that “[The Artist is Present] focuses on work in which [Abramović] is visually present, either ‘live’ in the form of a re-performer in a re-enactment or as a photographic, filmic, audio or video representation.” His clause “visually present” skirts a troubling metaphysics of pure presence by allowing for putatively secondary forms (photographs, videos—or even re-performances) to operate singularly or collectively as legitimate, even equivalent, representations. Leaving aside the idea that the artist is “present” through surrogates (itself an odd calculation), the larger issue is that the question of how this presence was presented (not to make too much of a perfect Derridean pun) remains.

At MoMA, the artist was very much present: for the entire length of the exhibition’s showing, all day, every day, in her own re-performance of Night Sea Crossing (originally performed with Ulay between 1981 and 1987). Clad in a flowing robe-like dress in red, blue, or white, she sat on one side of a table (removed in May, apparently by her choosing) set up in the center of the vast second-floor atrium. Visitors were invited “to sit silently with the artist, one at a time” for a length of their choosing. By the end of the exhibition, as the wall text conveyed, the artist executed her “longest performance to date,” lasting a total of 716 hours and thirty minutes. Days and weeks were plotted graphically on the north wall of the exhibition space, marking the passing performance time. Typical of the artist’s more recent performances, the piece was a durational work that sought to transport artist and participants to a state of suspended time: participants here include the audience member sitting across from her (the longest one for seven hours, according to one guard); those waiting in a seemingly endless daily line for their turn to sit; to those hanging around the periphery of the performance area, sitting, watching, texting, and chatting. Isolated on a separate floor from the rest of the exhibition, The Artist is Present acquired the status of a feature film, reinforced by the technological accouterments accompanying it: enormous flood lights used on film sets to produce daylight surrounded the artist and her companion sitter; computers visibly mounted on walls instantly captured the events each day; a still photographer shot pictures; and a video crew faithfully recorded moments passing. Visitors themselves were prohibited from picture-taking, lest it interfere with (or potentially replace) the official recordings.

As a result, the artist’s presence so insistently underscored in this work and throughout the show (through artistic statements; the heavily accentuated biographical material used as framing device in the galleries and catalogue; Abramović’s audio voice-over playing in the reinstallation of The House with the Ocean View; and most readily, on a CD that comes with the catalogue, in which the artist speaks directly to the reader, taking one through it almost page by page) was seen in the exhibition’s center through a stage set that constituted a spectacle of incessant mediation. The ensuing paradox recalls Philip Auslander’s argument that the very concept of “liveness” only historically emerged with the advent of recording; in turn, the live event has increasingly incorporated the latter’s syntax, aspiring toward “the replication of the discourse of mediatization” (Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, New York: Routledge, 1999, 24). The result, as Auslander convincingly demonstrates, is not simply a neutral utilization of technology, but a more extreme transformation, in which “live performance now often incorporates mediatization such that the live event itself is a product of media technologies” (24). What this visitor witnessed upon repeated visits to MoMA was this condition spectacularly and unavoidably visualized. Behavior was inevitably modified (affirming the opposition to cameras in a courtroom), given the expectation that in public spaces (even semi-public ones like MoMA) the probing reach of a camera’s lens is never very far away: and here, it was everywhere apparent. In short, The Artist is Present (as an individual work and as an exhibition) undermined the possibility of singularity and ephemerality, yet failed at the same time to deal with performance’s dialectical relation to mediation on ideological grounds.

In this way, Abramović’s “restaging” of Nauman’s Body Pressure (1974) serves as a useful coda. Live on stage under the soaring rotunda of the Guggenheim, Abramović performed the exercises Nauman wrote and had printed on a poster for others (never himself) to execute, thereby “re-performing” a copy that had no original and is potentially destined to be forever repeated, not unlike the drones of a video loop that play on and on.