Tired of the pointless expressions of ego that masquerade as modern (post-modern? post-post-modern?) art nowadays? You might have an unlikely ally in a woman who will sit naked on public display for a couple of days at the end of this month as a peculiar “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” protest against the vapidity of the art world.

Dr. Lisa Levy is a licensed psychologist who has decided to become a performance artist in order to give the art world what she feels is a well-justified kick in the shins. On January 30 and 31, for her show “The Artist Is Humbly Present,” she will sit, unclothed, on a toilet across from an empty seat, which spectators are welcome to inhabit.

Both the title of the piece and the piece itself are obvious callbacks to Marina Abramović‘s 736-hour show at the Museum of Modern Art, The Artist Is Present, which garnered a great deal of attention in 2010. In the show Abramović sat motionless and speechless in a large MoMA atrium with a table and an empty chair in front of her. She was wearing clothes throughout and was sitting on a regular wooden chair.
 

Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present
 
Levy’s quotations on the annoying art world are pretty priceless:
 

“Ego and pretense has seriously fucked with the quality of work being made in the art world.”

“(I’m) tired of the bullshit trendy art dialogue about how the art world is driven by rich people who want shiny work and don’t care about meaning as well.”

“I was really pissed and aggravated about the pretense, competition and the amount of bullshit in the art world.”

“I think ego interferes with art making, it makes the artist self-conscious. The most direct way to make the artwork is the least egoic way possible.”

 
Levy says that the show is “kind of a joke” before lapsing into the same kind of blather that actual big-deal artsy-fartsy types engage in: “I’m most excited about the experience,” said Levy. “I am really curious to see how the people will react. It’s a social experiment, like a lot of my work.”

Hmmm. Almost like you are doing something both pointless and extreme to shake up people’s assumptions, right?

If you want to go visit Levy’s MAD Magazine-style art protest, you’ll be able to do so at the Christopher Stout Gallery in New York City on January 30 and 31.
 
via Dazed/Abramović Photo: Marco Anelli

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Marina Abramović makes an Adidas commercial for the World Cup
Sex Magick: Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Erotic Epic (NSFW)

 
There’s work from Marina Abramović I like—like Balkan Baroque from 1997, where she sat in a pile of 1,500 cow bones for four days, scrubbing them with water and a wire brush in six-hour shifts. The piece was intended as an explicitly political commentary on the war in Yugoslavia. She initially planned to embody a representation of the Serbian state, but the Serbian government was none too keen. Then she planned on being Montenegro, but the Montenegrin government was similarly averse.

Eventually, Abramović ended up staging Balkan Baroque for Italian art exhibition, The Venice Biennale. She actually performed in the basement, and while the setting might have insulted another artist, Abramović found it ideal, partially since it contained the stench of rotting meat.

There is also Marina Abramović work I do not particularly care for, like watching Lady Gaga practice the Abramovic Method—“a series of exercises designed to heighten participants’ awareness of their physical and mental experience in the present moment.” I’m generally left cold by mysticism, and a naked Lady Gaga stumbling through lush upstate New York in a blindfold before eventually straddling a giant crystal set off all my New Age alarm bells.
 

 
Regardless, Abramović has produced some brilliant, affecting, and very interpersonal art, so I’m a little surprised to see her repeat one of her more famous pieces, “Work/Relation,” for a World Cup-themed Adidas commercial. “Work/Relation” is by no means my favorite of her performances—it’s a little too much of a TED Talk parable for my tastes, but it is a meditation on teamwork and the strength of solidarity. There’s an irony to seeing “Work/Relation” presented by a company famous for its sweatshop labor. That irony is only compounded when you remember the performance is in honor of a sporting event that was sanitized with shantytown demolitions.

I guess “solidarity” only counts when somebody’s watching?
 

 
Via Hyperallergic

 
To be a great artist, one must be ready to fail, is just some of the advice offered up by performance artist, Marina Abramović in this recent interview.

This idea of failure echoes Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Abramović seems to agree:

“I think a great artist has to be ready to fail, which not too many people do. Because when you have success in a certain way, then the public accept you in a certain way, and you start somehow involuntarily producing the same images, the same type of work, and you’re not risking.

“Real artists always change their territories, and they go to the length they’ve never been. And there, [in] this unknown territory, and then you can fail, you can risk, and that failure is what actually makes this extra, you know.

“Being ready to fail makes a great artist.”

Abramović goes on to discuss what does it mean to be an artist, how one know they are an artist and why everyone isn’t an artist.

As for performance art, it is about finding the right tool for expression, but the key element, she emphasizes, is how the artist occupies the space:

“The idea can be totally shit, the execution can be wrong, but it is just the way how he stands. That’s it. In the space. How you occupy physically the space, and what that standing does to everybody else looking at [that] person. That kind of charisma really makes the difference. It’s a certain energy you can recognize right away. And you can learn later on how to execute these ideas, and all the rest, but it is about energy you cannot learn: you have t have it—it’s just there, when you are born.”

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Sex Magick: Marina Abramović‘s Balkan Erotic Epic
 
With thanks to Christian Lund