Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Klaus Biesenbach

Marina Abramović

Jovana Stokic

Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade in the late 1960s, Marina Abramovic has been a pioneer of performance art, creating some of the most important works in the field. Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that documents approximately fifty of the artist's ephemeral, time- and media-based works from throughout her career. The book will also discuss a unique element of the Museum's retrospective, live performance: a new work created for the occasion, and performed by the artist herself; and recreations of Abramovic's works by other performers - the first such to be undertaken in a museum setting. The book spans over four decades of Abramovic's early interventions, and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances and collaborative performances made with the Dutch artist Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). Its essays examine Abramovic's ideas of time, duration, and the reperformance of performance art as a way to extend it into posterity. Marina Abramovic also includes a CD, an audio recording of the artist's own voice, guiding the reader through the publication. The artist is present not only in the exhibition but also in the experience of the book.

The Artist is Present

Bertie Ferdman

The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands performance art as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance, the book's chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art, and explore how this development is reflective of capitalist approaches to art and event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art-where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable-the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction. This Companion adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to present performance art's legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a comprehensive and multifocal overview of the emerging research trends and methodologies devoted to performance art.

Jovana Stokic

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