Dancer Suffers Art Attack at MoMA

THE DAILY PIC: Maria Hassabi's dancers slow things to an old-time museum pace.

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THE DAILY PIC (#1508): This is a snap I recently shot of one “dancer” from an ongoing, all-day-every-day performance called Plastic, created by Maria Hassabi at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hassabi’s performers writhe ever so slowly across the floors and stairs of the museum, in what is billed as an exploration of “the tension between stillness and sustained movement” that addresses “the interface between artistic object and human subject.”

That sounds about right, I guess, but I’d add that the performers’ slo-mo “interface” has to be read as a comment on how sped-up the action of average visitors has become, at MoMA and most other museums. Hassabi’s dancers represent an old, slow ideal of museumgoing, where the spaces and the art forced a deceleration from the normal pace of life.

As in some strange Star Trek scene, those dancers are moving in the art-time of 1976 while the rest of us speed by at a 2016 tempo. It only took me a minute to whip out my iPhone and take today’s Pic, after all.

For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.


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