The artist is the message in Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present

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      It would be a gross understatement to say that performance-art pioneer Marina Abramović is a formidable subject for a film. Over the past four decades, she has pushed the human body to its limits and shocked viewers with her ordeals. She has invited audiences to use 72 objects against her (including a scalpel, a whip, and a gun). She has perched for hours and hours, naked on a bike seat, high on a gallery wall. And she has walked 2,500 kilometres of the Great Wall of China.

      So it comes as a bit of a surprise to find that filmmaker Matthew Akers wasn’t so much intimidated as skeptical about being able to make a documentary surrounding her major 2010 retrospective, The Artist Is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art. First of all, there was the stigma that surrounds performance art, and then the fleeting nature of the form itself.

      “You think of people doing weird things in the ’60s and ’70s—and I have a degree in art and even studied her collaborative work when I was young,” Akers tells the Georgia Straight from the San Francisco International Film Festival, where his new film, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present screens before it comes here to the DOXA Documentary Film Festival. “How do I make a film about something that’s ephemeral? So I was skeptical not just about performance art in general, but skeptical about whether I could pull it off.”

      When Akers found out about the unthinkable endurance test the artist was going to attempt at MoMA for her exhibit, things became even more worrying: she was going to sit, motionless, for the entirety of the museum’s opening hours from March 14 to May 31, 2010, holding silent visits with gallery visitors. “It was terrifying because it was not very filmic-sounding. It was stripped down and not theatrical.”

      What Akers never could have predicted was how transformative the experience of the show would be, not just for himself but for the thousands of New York visitors who would line up overnight for a chance to sit and gaze into Abramović’s eyes. The show was a massive phenomenon; it was Abramović’s most arduous physical and mental feat—there was doubt as to whether or not she could even complete it—and a major turning point for performing art, bringing it into the mainstream from the fringes. As the charismatic, raven-tressed artist tells Akers in the film in her seductive Yugoslavian accent: “Excuse me, I’m 63. I don’t want to be ‘alternative’ anymore.”

      The result of Akers’s work is a fascinating and often deeply moving film about a woman who has sacrificed her life for her art. It is one of two films at DOXA this year to give strong, stylistic takes on artists who have taken massive risks; the other, the riveting Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, follows the titular Chinese dissident who, at his peril, has made art out of everything from giving the finger at Tiananmen Square to tweeting pictures of his own beating at the hands of police.

      Akers says one of the keys to his success with his documentary was in gaining absolute access to his subject. When he received producer Jeff Dupre’s offer to shoot a film about Abramović’s retrospective, he had just finished two gruelling consecutive shoots: a 10-part documentary on aircraft carriers (Carrier) and a six-part series called Circus, both for PBS.

      “I had just spent a year trying to convince clowns and circus performers to let me into their trailers,” says Akers of the famously insular world. “I don’t know why I felt so brave, but I just said to her, ‘I need your total buy-in, your whole commitment, especially because we have no money and, just like for Circus and for Carrier, I give up my whole life and go all in. And within a week, she had given me the keys to her apartment and said, ‘I won’t restrict you.’ ”

      From there he had an all-access pass to Abramović’s personal and professional life: her sickbed at 6 a.m. two weeks before the MoMA opening; her first meeting with her ex-husband and beloved artistic collaborator, Ulay, whom she had not seen for more than two decades; and her curling up in agony on the floor after the hordes had left MoMA for the day. Akers supplements the footage with archival images of Abramović’s stunning historical work and interviews with curators. But he’s also interested in the way the movie switches to become about her audience: the dozens of people who silently open their souls to her in the gallery, many breaking down in tears.

      “I really don’t want people to think I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.…It became a tremendous friendship, but I also remained a skeptical documentarian the whole way through,” Akers notes of the woman he says instantly charms everyone she meets. “But I believe what she did at MoMA was a profound, wonderful piece and had a really large impact and people had a transformative experience. So, clearly, my opinion of performance art has shifted.” -

      DOXA presents Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present at 9:15 p.m. on Wednesday (May 9) at the Empire Granville 7 Cinemas.


      Watch the trailer for Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present.

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