Feb 26 -
towerofsleep: The artist Marina Abramovic has selected the architect Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA, to design her new performance art center in upstate New York. The deal, reported by Vulture.com on Wednesday, calls for the firm to transform a former tennis center in Hudson, N.Y., into the Center for the Preservation of Performance Art, a space devoted to pieces that may last several hours or even several days. Ms. Abramovic revealed the $8 million project on Tuesday night to a group of art collectors at a panel at Manhattan’s Core Club. Ms. Abramovic bought the site four years ago to turn it into a museum and theater, but other projects forced her to put it on hold. Because the museum will be devoted to marathon performance art, it will feature customized chairs complete with wheels, dining tables and lamps. People who fall asleep will be rolled into a special sleeping area — considered part of the performance – and rolled back when they awaken. Um, ugh? Also, this guy makes the following point: Maybe Abramovic and Koolhaus could take a smidgen of that $8mil and use it to build a supermarket within walking distance since according to the USDA over 50% of Hudson residents—people who live within a few blocks of the soon-to-be PERFORMANCE ART MUSEUM—don’t have access to affordable fucking groceries. Unless you consider microgreens and loaves of $8 artisanal bread affordable. I’m pretty conflicted about Marina. I totally sympathize with this piece of hagiography by Sarah Nicole Prickett, because in a lot of ways, Marina is just an incredible human being. But I have very mixed feelings about the way she’s trying to historicize her past career and establish the history of performance art. Does it really need a museum? I think a lot of people would say that this kind of thing is the opposite of what performance art needs. And then her much-brouhaha-ed stunt at the MOCA was really, seriously questionable. I’m with Yvonne Rainer on that one. I still don’t know what I think about The Artist Is Present. I would have liked to see the documentary at the Reel Artists Film Festival (today!), but I have to work and it sold out anyway. I in turn take issue with the grocery-store issue. I always take issue with this kind of empty, statistically self-righteous argument. There are a lot of funny assumptions going on these days about what communities need or deserve. It doesn’t make sense to me to say that, inherently, because this community doesn’t have a decent grocery store they shouldn’t have a performance art center. While I have my own criticisms about Abramovic’s recent careering, and have followed her career closely, I simply do not think she is interested in opening grocery stores. She is an experienced organizer and will have her performance art center, and maybe the grocery store complainer can get it together to open a grocery store next door and then the community can enjoy grocery stores and intriguing performance art. Extremists on either side of every socio-political spectrum truncate their influence by assuming scarcity, insisting on excluseive binary opposition and forsaking the position of having both, of simoltenaiety as a desirable option. And more often than not, the people are left with neither grocery stores nor performance art. Let them eat cake, and let them eat it too.
