on Tao Lin on Marina
Tao Lin posted this on his tumblr:
re marina abramović, if you write a ‘“legitimately” to me, 1000+ word’ essay re my ‘piece’ on the internet somewhere & post a link in the comments section of this post & email binky.tabby [at] gmail [dot] com your address i will mail you sfaa or bed*
And I figured, cool. This is the first time anyone’s asked me in a long time to do anything as random as that, and I wanted to explore what the experience would be like by actually following through. I’m intrigued by the idea that he was referring to, well, precisely me - for at the most general, the post is addressed to any English speaker coming across his post, I am such a ‘someone’. But more specifically, the request has only real hopes of being fulfilled by a more ‘special’ sort someone who runs across the post, and can be tempted forward out of a habitual hour or two, to write 1000 words. Is that me? Sure enough, why couldn’t it be? I can be someone exactly that spontaneous. I can also cheat - I don’t have to write 1000 new words exactly, as I have pre-thought thoughts on Tao (or you), plus some familiarity with Marina’s work, so the number of idea vacancies left between me and the full 1000 word count of essay has been somewhat limited by knowing I already have a few existing chains of thought to transcribe.
Also, Re: The original Marina essay, it feels OK to ramble in and out of my private life and/or thoughts, so that may account for the rest of my words when all that’s been real has been said. My only real worry is that it might make for tedious, unfocused reading, which strikes me as impolite. But hey, you were (I’m assuming only Tao will read this, so I will angle myself towards my main reader as such from now on) willing to possibly sit in front of a woman for a significant amount of time, and watch her not move very much. I think an honest ramble is to some extent no less the same thing - watching a stream of consciousness unfold; much in the same way a face that was once new, floating above a white dress you’ve also never seen before inevitably becomes boring enough a stretch of time later to make you sit up and leave - also similar would be overseeing my approach to the void of time before me that all my thoughts must fill, which you get a window into through the honesty of an unpasteurized ramble. Aren’t we re-creating Marina’s experiment here and now? You’re watching me go, like the way my actual face can’t stop itself from running once you turn it on by pointing with your eyes, and while you read / experience these words, you’re evaluating your use of time, and are actively engaged or open-minded until both of our times run out, where I clock in my word count and say goodbye, or you ended up reaching for a word-count tool, and verifying me, add me somewhere into your to-do list.
———-
About Marina, and you and Marina:
Much like you, I suppose, buzz about her exhibition reached me from afar, and it vaguely tickled my curiosity to go, but I missed my chance in the end. I forgive myself, because of my general lack of interest in the project, and also that I have a measured and extensively-considered opinion as to why none of this experiment even matters, except that it happened, and the people who went, went. Now I’m a casual participant in the contemporary art community, and don’t claim to be an expert. But this hankering for expertise is just a disease of our modern world, where you need a proxy opinion that sounds exactly like your own to attack people with whenever they question you. I instead claim my capitalist right as consumer, and go on to demand all that I can with my supply. I did pay at some point for my internet connection, and it put me in touch with the news that there’s an artist called Marina Abramovic who’s sitting at a certain address in New York City (which they listed), such that, if you wanted, you could go and sit opposite her, and ‘interact’.
I did in fact pay more heftily earlier for a retrospective book on her work from the Phaidon store in lower SoHo. I make it a point to buy randomly and expensively occasionally, because with my budget it’s too easy to be a cheapskate. So by absorbing her name by osmosis surrounded by all the MoMa buzz, I flipped through my first $50 book, and saw a lot about her intelligence and general style that I liked. Over all, I find her relentless submission to curiosity inspirational, and hoped I could be inspired by reading about it. In the book I have, performance instructions from selected pieces are printed beside a photograph from the actual performance, so all I needed to know was it was possible to do these things and that they happened - unlike admiring a painting, I didn’t get a sense I needed to be there. A few notable exceptions come to mind, like a ‘74 performance where she filled a table with random objects and invited the audience to use them on her, or do anything to her. The accompanying photograph was of her stripped naked to the waist, a thorny foot-long rose stuck to stay across her shoulder, a band-aid across a cut of some sort, Polaroid photos taken throughout the performance placed in her hand and raised for her to see, and her red eyes streaking tears.
Now, an older woman, she sits regally at MoMa and observes her fans, the scenesters and the merely curious sitting across from her. I thought after hearing a friend was going that it would be ‘random and maybe enlightening’ to go, but I read the conclusory piece about the performance piece in the NYT, so I guess that was that and I missed my chance. But after seeing pictures of people crying, and no one at all remarking that that’s just silly, I finished thinking through my inevitable reflections and said, yes, there’s the balance no one’s bringing to this. I read your own essay, and it was ironic, but missing the real bite of an exasperated onlooker. That would be me, I’m finally realizing, given that I crossed the 1000 word boundary, and didn’t shaft you by saying good morning and peacing out to wake and bake and shower. That said, I think I only have enough in me for one or two more paragraphs, in which I explain that Marina is of course faultless, but as usual, her crying fans missed the point of the performance piece.
Marina is this saintly personage in the art world, having martyred herself over the course of years of many intense performances, all in the name of self-discovery. Though if you read her interviews, you’d see she hasn’t personally arrived at abstracting herself that far from ordinary humanity - she’s still the same childish whimperer I guess we all are when it comes down it, this being an epiphany she arrived at reading her old journals in her grandmother’s house in Belgrade, circa Marina aged 9 or so. In the past, she has also been open to having other people perform her pieces, so I think she believes in the interchangeability of the performer across her performances, and so probably diminishes the importance of her life’s biography in the role of this performance. I think it’s a rare enough experience to sit opposite someone else and stare as they stare back for long enough to eventually start a resonance of the observation changing the observed. The quantum physics of human interaction. Other interesting digressions abound, like how agitated even our most intimate relationships are, and that calm consideration of the other person as they calmly consider you is often a horrifying prospect, or perhaps ecstatic…
For me, this is the real point of the experiment. Put two human beings face to face, and simply let the experience play itself out. I guess I just don’t see where the tears come in, especially since I sense that they’re tears for Marina only. Without too much criticism, I merely roll my eyes, much like I do on seeing videos of fainting Michael Jackson fans. And Marina floats on…
