Performance Artist Mimics Performance Artist At MoMA

This past Saturday performance artist Marina Abramovic met her match at MoMA, where she has set up her ongoing piece titled: "The Artist is Present." Ready to receive her visitors for the day, she was approached by a woman donning a similar look to her own; BombBlog reports that this guest "sat, to the bafflement of the museum staff and visitors, all day." Turns out this was Anya Liftig, a Brooklyn-based performance artist, and this was all part of her own piece, titled “The Anxiety of Influence."

This all comes on the heels of "The Other Artist is Present," a young man's piece in which he attempted to challenge Abramovic's stillness with words and other antics (he got tossed out of the museum by security). Liftig noted, "I felt the previous interventions were really aggressive and presumptuous. I wanted to operate within the piece as Marina had defined it to create something that was more ambiguous. I wanted to meet her on her terms and leave the interpretation of my action a little more open than the others." From what we can tell she mainly succeeded in pissing off other patrons, who had gotten up early to get a turn sitting across from the famous artist. [Via The Awl]

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By Jen Carlson in Arts & Entertainment on March 29, 2010 5:40 PM

Comments [rss]

ozik

I prefer my performance art with naked chicks.

katiebaker

Yawn

Mordicai

This is definitely a fair antiphon; The OTHER Artist is Present could be cute, but it is tough to not be a DICK. Anyhow; artistic involvement with performance art is fair game.

Also, if you feel the need to comment that it isn't art...you validate it as art.

Mr. Know-It-All

How do you figure that? If someone tells me he's going to read me a poem, and then reads me a grocery list, my impulse to comment that a grocery list isn't a poem does does not "validate it" as a poem.

Mordicai

Right, but if you go on the internet to discuss it in a forum debating its validity as art-- well, then it has successfully elicited an emotional response, controversy. I'm not saying that MAKES it art, but it certainly does add to the argument that it IS. Look-- we're discussing it here, right? Good enough for me.

goyogago

"i don't understand it, so it's not art"

or

"i understand it, but I don't like it, so it's not art"

you choose.

Mr. Know-It-All

The ART, on the other hand, is out sick.

Me

Ha. I went to high school with Anya Liftig. She was nice and very smart. Only a little weird. She apparently got way weirder.

Stephenson Billings

Sometimes I watch people when they're sleeping. It's fascinating to see some like that, barely moving, for hours.

Kevin Bracken

This is awesome. I saw The Artist is Present two Fridays ago and wondered when she'd meet her match. The last guy I saw staring at her looked like his head was going to explode. Her stare is really that powerful.

I would not be able to keep a straight face!