“I don’t understand Modern Art, but I know what I like when I see it…”
…….. famous retired fire captain.
* * *
WHEN NEW YORK CITY’S FAMED Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened a temporary exhibit on March 14, the admonishment “Don’t touch the art work!” was never more important. Despite the rule that everybody knows, some people who visit Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” just can’t help themselves.
The exhibit consists of 35 live, totally nude models who are positioned in various poses around the gallery. After just one month on the floor, they have reported numerous instances of being poked, groped and interfered with in several different ways. In some cases, the live models simply stand in a doorway in all their nakedness, facing one another as the visitors squeeze by when they move from one room to the next. In others, they are posed with inanimate objects, such as skeletons. And another is seemingly mounted on the wall several feet above the floor.
Not all of the models are on the floor at the same time, nor do they spend all day posed in their spot. The work in groups of eight and they are rotated in and out of the exhibit in one-hour shifts.
Whenever somebody commits the sin of “inappropriate touching,” the museum’s security force escorts them from the building. Manhattan Style relates: “To cope with this expected problem as well as other problems, the 38 models had been put through a special training camp at an unspecified place. For almost a week they undertook harsh tasks like bathing in icy cold water, counting grains of rice and walking in slow motion to name a few.”
One wise-guy placed a scallion a few inches away from this
artist’s head hoping to “put a little life” into the exhibit.
He was thrown out, too.
However, it wasn’t just the patrons who had to mind their manners. One of the performance artists had to be fired from the group because he would occasionally get a little excited over his surroundings and “grow” into his role a bit more than was preferred.
WPIX-TV ran this video report on a visit to the exhibit:
d
