Performance art darling exposed in retrospective doc

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DAVID SMOLER / FILMS WE LIKE Marina Abramovic and her gaze. (POSTMEDIA)

BACK in the '70s, when Saturday Night Live was a dynamic and truly funny form of social commentary, they would ridicule performance art without mercy.

One sketch, called Bad Art, simply featured Laraine Newman standing before a bank of stacked television sets arranged to form a face.

The lips repeated a single word, and the single eyeball blinked, as Newman explained why the piece was awful with endless pomposity.

It's hard not to flash back on these scraps of nostalgia when confronted with Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, the new documentary from Matthew Akers about a heretofore art-world darling, but real-world nobody.

Abramovic made art that eluded a lot of people when she started 40 years ago.

In one piece she pinned her naked body to a gallery wall and turned herself into Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. In another, she and her ex-lover Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) ran around a room in circles, bumping into each other, in an attempt to unmask the male and female energies of the universe.

It's all big, important, metaphysical stuff. But it's also easy to laugh at.

It all looks so goofy, and in short, that is the whole point.

Abramovic wants to make us feel awkward and aware of our bodies because it's the one thing we're oblivious to in our waking reality -- providing we're healthy.

She wants to make us feel the outer layer of ourselves as it mingles with the open air, and in turn, bring a bodily awareness to the intellect.

Her early work did this in a very physical way -- whether she invited her public to inflict pain, or whether she snuggled up with a skeleton.

Akers shows us some of the original work as it was recorded in its day, but for the most part, this getting-to-know-you session relies on the 2010 retrospective of Abramovic's work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Picking up the thread of narrative right before the show is slated to open, we watch the artist hire performers to restage her own works during the three-month engagement. She needs a selection of naked bodies to stand in doorways and hang on the wall. She finds a group of nubile participants, but we don't ever hear all that much from them personally.

This is very much Abramovic's film. She does most of the talking and she occupies the majority of the visual space with her sprawling presence.

At 65, the artist no longer strips to excite the artistic muse. Her whole performance at MoMA consisted of sitting in a wooden chair for three months. The Artist Is Present was the name of the piece, and it easily lived up to its title: Abramovic was physically present for every day of the installation.

What made the show fascinating for the masses was the capacity for personal connection with the creator. Opposite Abramovic sat an empty chair, just waiting for a member of the general public to take a seat, and stare into the dark brown abyss of Abramovic's gaze.

How much of this is acting, and how much of this is sincere is a question the viewer may ask herself, but there is no conclusive answer to the whole issue of authenticity because evaluating emotion without language is another function of the piece itself.

-- Postmedia News

Other Voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present.

We're given an intimate seat to this wildly democratic -- and creepily messianic -- spectacle.

-- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

An intelligent overview that makes a radical artist's work comprehensible to audiences with no previous awareness of her or her chosen path.

-- Robert Kohler, Variety

Fascinating documentary about Belgrade-born performance artist Marina Abramovic, her life and controversial performance pieces will engage even the most skeptical among us and trigger unexpected musings about some heavy subjects.

-- Doris Toumarkine, Film Journal International

Rare is the profile that captures so much oddness with so little judgment. You owe yourself a chance to be challenged.

-- Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

As entertaining as the doc is, it never really measures up to the fascination and sheer force of personality of its subject.

-- Kenji Fujishima, Slant magazine

-- Compiled by Shane Minkin

Movie Review

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

A documentary by Matthew Akers

Globe

14A

106 minutes

Three and a half stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 15, 2012 D6