ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to analyze THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, a seminal performance piece by an international artist, Marina Abramović. This piece was performed in 2010 in New York at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and was the sole new piece in a major retrospective of the artist’s work. It involved the artist, Marina Abramović, sitting at a table across from an empty chair that any visitor could sit in for as long as they like. THE ARTIST IS PRESENT was an epic undertaking at many levels. It involved 1,565 visitors voluntarily co-participating in the performance with Abramović. It lasted for 75 days or over 700 hours, from 9 March to 31 May 2010, from opening to closing time-7 hours each day, and was the longest durational performance ever staged in a museum. Not only did this work draw record crowds and break durational boundaries for both artist and museum, “it has become one of the most famous performance art pieces ever undertaken” (Linz 2015: 45).
