How do you top a museum exhibition in which you sit silently, staring at a steady steam of visitors for hours on end? If you’re Marina Abramović, by doing absolutely nothing, reports the Huffington Post.
In a follow up to 2010’s “The Artist is Present,” presented as part of a career retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Abramović will take over London’s Serpentine Gallery this summer. The legendarily provocative 67-year-old performance artist has dramatically stripped down her practice over the years, and her latest work promises to take that simplicity to the next level.
On the Serpentine website, the upcoming exhibition is described as a “new durational performance” that will take place in an unadorned gallery space. Visitors will check all of their belongings at the door, including cameras and cell phones (which means no museum selfies!). To create art, Abramović will only be able to utilize “herself, the audience and a selection of common objects that she will use in a constantly changing sequence of events.”
“There is not any work. It’s just me. And the public is my live material,” she explained in an interview with the BBC. “It is the most radical, the most pure I can do.”
If it all sounds a little underwhelming, Serpentine assures would-be visitors that they will be “participating in the delivery of an unprecedented moment in the history of performance art.”
Abramović will appear at the Serpentine for eight hours a day, six days a week, from June 11 to August 25.