Upstairs from the child-friendly wonderland of the Museum of Modern Art’s Tim Burton exhibition, and from the placid, chapel-like room devoted to Monet’s water lilies, the new Marina Abramovic retrospective can be heard before it is seen, and it doesn’t sound inviting. The artist’s screams and moans roll out from the sixth-floor galleries in endless loops, a warning nearly as clear as the three signs advising that the show ahead “may be disturbing for some.”
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
A woman ponders a gallery entrance partly blocked by two naked performers.
For more than a generation, nudity, pain, grueling endurance tests and even bloodletting have been elements of a certain strain of performance art, one Ms. Abramovic helped pioneer. But they have never come together in New York quite as boldly or publicly as they have since the opening this week of the Modern’s new show.
Such visceral, unsettling art used to generate disgust, outrage and the occasional police visit. Yet a day spent watching people watch the show — naked performers re-enacting some of Ms. Abramovic’s most audacious pieces of the last 40 years; the artist herself in an epic endurance performance in the museum’s atrium; videos of Ms. Abramovic slicing a star into her stomach with a razor blade and standing for several minutes with an arrow in a drawn bow aimed at her heart — shows that it takes quite a bit to shake up most museumgoers these days.
“It’s — what shall I say? — yes, it’s crazy, but not as crazy as I thought it would be,” said Jens Buss, 30, a graphic designer visiting from Munich, who had come to see Tim Burton’s artwork but read about Ms. Abramovic and was intrigued. He stared into a large room where a highly illuminated naked woman was on display high on a wall, perched on a small bicycle seat with transparent blocks beneath her feet to support her, a re-creation of a 1997 work called “Luminosity.”
“I was kind of thinking, ‘You know, I would probably do that,’ ” Mr. Buss said. “I was wondering how much she’s getting paid to be up there.”
Throughout the day, a slightly sleepy Wednesday at the museum, the Abramovic galleries were nearly always crowded, with an audience that skewed young but that included the usual array of weekday art patrons: elderly couples, college groups, parents pushing strollers and even a few families with children, like the Frensleys from Nashville. Susanne Frensley, a high school art history teacher, was on vacation with her husband and two daughters and dropped by MoMA not knowing much about Ms. Abramovic’s work.
Standing with one daughter, Eliza, Ms. Frensley explained that, in an excess of caution, she had dispatched “Daddy” to go in to check out the show first before telling her daughters what to expect inside and asking them if they wanted to see it. Both did, though Eliza, 12, with a green shamrock sticker on her cheek for St. Patrick’s Day, was looking a little oppressed toward the exhibition’s end.
“A lot of it is interesting, but it made me feel awkward, I guess,” she said, adding that of all the difficult-to-take work, a grainy video showing a close-up of Ms. Abramovic’s face as she screamed was the most unsettling for her.
“I don’t know why,” Eliza said. “Maybe because you couldn’t see what was going on and couldn’t tell why she was screaming.” (The video shows the 1975 performance “Freeing the Voice,” in which Ms. Abramovic screamed until she lost her voice.)
Probably the most talked-about part of the exhibition — generating headlines like “Squeezy Does It” in The New York Post — is a re-creation of a 1977 work in which Ms. Abramovic and her partner then, the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay, faced each other naked within the frame of a gallery doorway, forcing people who wanted to enter to squeeze between them. Throughout the day at MoMA, some people did submit to the squeeze, with both men and women generally turning to face the female performer when there was a male-female pairing at the door.
But easily two-thirds of MoMA patrons moving from the first gallery into the second stared over at the flesh-flanked doorway — some people staring for an inordinately long time — and then decided to take the art-free route, through a plain doorway that required no bodily contact.
“I just can’t do it,” said Maria Gabriela Madrid, a fiction writer from San Antonio. “I feel like it’s too personal, too much of an invasion of their space.”
She was making her third visit to the show and had demurred every time when she was egged on by a good friend, Midge Dembitzer, a museum volunteer, to pass between the naked performers. (Ms. Dembitzer noted that while some people she spoke to talked of not wanting to bring their children to the show, one of her friends remarked that she was not bringing her husband: “Too many naked women.”)
By afternoon, the crowd had begun to take on a pronounced Kelly green hue, as some revelers from the nearby St. Patrick’s Day parade somehow found their way upstairs. The glittery plastic bowlers, balloon hats and shamrock-antennae headgear made for a strange juxtaposition with a big stomach-churning photograph of Ms. Abramovic scrubbing the blood from heaps of cow bones.
Rather than shock or disgust, though, the overall mood in the galleries tended to be one of great seriousness, occasionally verging on reverence.
Sefu Simms, 28, an aspiring performance artist, described being humbled in the presence of the work. Henk Abma, a former Dutch Reformed Church pastor who said he had followed Ms. Abramovic’s work for 30 years, began his visit by spending half an hour sitting across from the artist herself, who is installed at a table in the museum’s atrium, where she will sit silently all day, every day, barely moving, for the entire run of the show. (The performance will add up to more than 700 hours of sitting if she can complete it.)
But if there was an ideal patron for Ms. Abramovic — who has written of the importance of the “moment when the performance becomes life itself” — the one who came closest was probably Paco Blancas, 48, a New York makeup artist who spent seven uninterrupted hours sitting across from her last Saturday, during a preview of the show. He had returned to the exhibition’s galleries every day, creating a kind of personal performance piece (and becoming so familiar to the guards that they smile at him and say hello.)
“When you sit across from her, and look into her eyes, you feel the public but you don’t see them anymore,” he said. “It’s almost like you are alone with her in this big museum, which is like being a part of the art yourself.”
