I probably added Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present to my queue because it was in a list of amazing documentaries. I know very little about performance art except that it seems to date back to ancient times when prophets would use their body and lives to make a statement about society. If given the right circumstances, I can be open-minded and not dismissive of art that I do not understand. If you are able to do the same thing, then you will find Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present riveting.
It is generally compelling to watch a beautiful, original person do what they love to do whatever that task may be. Marina Abramovic may be called the grandma of performance art, but most of us are never as beautiful as she is now. Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present focuses on the titular character as she prepares for a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including a new performance piece, The Artist is Present, where she sits facing a seated museum visitor for any amount of time. We get to see how the work evolves as time passes. It is surprisingly emotionally resonant even for a home viewer to see her connect with each visitor. It may lack the sensationalism and shock value of her earlier work, but it is more mature, simple, understated and powerful for two people to simply sit silently across from one another and connect. Subsequent to the release of this film, Giovanni B. Caputo published an article about the powerful effects of interpersonal gazing at subjects.
Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present is also part autobiographical and part retrospective of her work. It examines her time with her long time lover and collaborator, Ulay. It is nice for a change for the female partner to surpass the career of the male partner. Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present also shows how people workshop with her for three days to learn how to be like her-in touch with naked, raw human emotion. Can that be taught?
Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present is a captivating tale of an artist whose vulnerability and her use of her body transcends art and becomes a universal ideal of how to overcome barriers in communicating with other human beings. Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present shows how her work focused on the fall of humanity, our eagerness to torture, to our desperate desire to return to Eden, to be naked and unashamed in our emotional connection to each other.