Abramović’s The Artist Is Present makes presence itself the artwork

Evidence

A signature work: large empty square room, gray walls, and gray polished concrete floors, two unvarnished wooden chairs, one woman seated. Via a performance that is also an installation that is foremost an encounter, the artist Marina Abramović offers her mere presence, ten hours a day, most days a week, for three months, a custom bedpan insuring against absence. Testimonials from spectators enthuse “a transforming experience—it’s luminous, it’s uplifting, it has many layers, but it always comes back to being present.” The Artist Is Present realizes its title exactly, and presence overflows the constraints of modality, medium, even venue. Presence itself is the work; relational aesthetics do not produce a contoured or commodified object so much as a happening that defies representation: medium redacted, charisma magnetizes. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 14

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete instance of presence-over-representation that the reader will use to recognize immediacy in works.
• SHARE: For a friend following contemporary art, the observation that Abramović’s bedpan ‘insures against absence’ reframes the piece’s whole staging.