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Reflections on Curation and Recurating Across Multiple Mediums of Artistic Production: Based on Matthew Akers, Director (2012) Marina Abramović ‘The Artist is Present’ (104 mins) HBO Documentary Films & A Show of Force.

As I read through A844 material (currently on the theory and practice of curation), I came across a passage in Terry Smith (2012:198f.)[1]. He speaks here of an ‘emergent tendency’ called (by him) ‘recurating’. Here an ‘original performance is recurated with differences that make it not an antiquarian exercise bit a ‘contemporary exhibition. One recommended as relevant to current concerns’. He also calls this ‘double-play’ since the original is evoked whilst being superseded by new concerns. His example is the MoMA retrospective of Abramović’s work, and especially Night Sea Crossing, originally performed with her then husband and arch-combatant, Ulay.

Akers’ film is described by him (in an additional interview on the BFI film) as a recuration of the recuration represented by the MoMA show. We are in an endless spiral of reselection and re-synthesis here where each recuration evokes the one it historicises and reapplies to a new contemporaneity, in part defined by its transition between media, venue, audiences and re-examined ‘lives’. This makes this film a most rich resource for anyone wanting to reflect further on curation and the notion of contemporaneity, including contemporaneity’s composition in part from multiple pasts it reselects for examination.

This makes the film an inexhaustible mine of reflection of how ‘art’ defines itself in and against curation in an almost cyclical fashion as it gyres into the future. Art is the manipulation of bodywork in a frame that is itself framed and then reframed as it urges its relevance on a new contemporaneity. The beautiful thing about the film is the contemplation of art as presence. In the work Abramović sits on a chair for full days over 3 moths whilst visited by museum visitors, who sit as long as they like or dare and just gaze, receiving back a very active gaze from Abramović herself. It is a place where projection, introjection and mutual tensions and attachments within the dyad complete the work in part – although completed over again in the gaze of an omnipresent circling audience, some of which are in the queue to participate more fully. Abramović makes herself consciously into an enactment of the Mona Lisa in fact to show us what portraits might mean and what this self-portrait portends for the future of all participants who reflect and enact it.

Visitors break into tears, experience time differently (even one ten-year old), play the boundaries of participation – one visitor removes all her clothes to be escorted from the scene by security. It is about what art expresses, for whom and by whom. Each emotion is a performative act, such that it might be ‘acted’ AND is evaluated both as an emotional catharsis and a merely beautiful piece of acting. This kind of ambivalence is indeed, Westmacott, her biographer, says in an additional interview on the disc, at the heart of what this artist is and what ‘artistic presence’ (qua Belitung on Byzantine icons) is.

I can’t recommend the work enough. I will view it again and again I think.

All the best

Steve