Top Five in Five

After going to see Miranda July's 11 Heavy Things Installation currently showing in Union Square, I thought to myself, "That was nice, but it wouldn't quite rank among the top five art exhibits I've seen in NYC in the last five years."  Which of course inspired me to reflect upon what the top five art works/exhibits that I've seen in NYC in the last five years would actually be.  Here they are, ranked in what I feel to be their order at the moment.

5) Ron Mueck at the Brooklyn Museum:  Mueck employs the mechanisms of movie special effects production to make incredibly life-like figurative sculptures.  Though intensely impressive from a technical angle, what really drew me into Mueck's work was how he played with scale to make me experience my own figure differently.  A huge sculpture of a woman lying in bed, for example, brought back vividly the feeling of being a child crawling into bed with my parents, simply because of how it's scale related to my own.

Ron Mueck (Australian, b. 1958). In Bed, 2005. Mixed media, 63 3/4 x 255 7/8 x 155 1/2 in. (161.9 x 649.9 x 395 cm). Private Collection

(Photo from BrooklynMuseum.org)

4) David Byrne's Playing the Building, presented by Creative Time: Byrne's building-as-musical-instrument was smartly conceived, a great way to experience the battery maritime building, and fun to play/watch.

3) David Hockney at Pace Wildenstein: Hockney may have come to prominence in southern California, but East Yorkshire sure seems to agree with him.  His large landscapes were lively and gorgeous in person, in a way that just can't be captured by a website.

2) Marina Abromovic's The Artist is Present at MoMA: Not only was it thrilling to have a chance to participate in an Abromovic piece, but the retrospective itself really fleshed out (sorry, couldn't help myself) my understanding of Abromovic's work.  I appreciated the chance to see others performing her earlier works, although I know that that aspect was actually detrimental for some.

1) Antony Gormley's Blind Light at Sean Kelly Galery: The only piece on this list that I went to go see multiple times, Blind Light offered a simple gesture, an interactive room-sized glass box filled with dense white-lit fog, that created a complex and indelible experience - exploring the human experience of vision and space - as well as an aesthetically beautiful object.

(Photo from oobject.com)
Now, this list may well deserve a place in the ranking of the top five most self-indulgent posts I've ever written, but still, if any of those works show up in your neck of the woods, check them out...

The Artist is Present: An Appropriatly Exhaustive Account of Staring at Marina Abromovic

When I learned that Marina Abromovic was doing a performance piece at MoMA, I knew I had to go see it - to go participate if at all possible.  Abromovic is one of the few performance artists whose work I've bothered to know and respect.  When I first learned about her in art school, I was particularly arrested by this image,  from Rhythm 0, a piece where she provided a table of various implements, then stood totally passive for six hours, allowing the audience to decorate, pose, and abuse her:

For her current piece at MoMA, Abromovic sits in a chair, and museum-goers take turns sitting across from her.  The edict is to be silent and still, simply gazing at one another, until the museum-goer decides to leave and the next takes their place.  Abromovic stays seated in this way from open to close, every day for months. Here's a link to where you can see a live feed of Marina Abromovic's performance, whenever MoMA is open.

I arrived on site (in the atrium on the second floor) at about 10:35AM - five minutes after MoMA opened. There was a line, but not a long one - about fifteen people.  However, with a piece like this, length means very little.  Rumors moved up and down the line of a previous visitor who had sat for seven hours.  How quickly the line would advance was going to depended upon how long visitors sat, and how many people dropped out after it became clear that this was not a speedy endeavor. 

Detailed account of the experience after the page break: