Mystical Marina Abramovic

We've all read about it and seen the pictures. Naked people standing in doorways, a middle-aged woman with long dark hair sitting still in a chair for 7 hours straight, staring down anyone who dares to sit in the empty chair opposite. It's the MOMA retrospective of performance artist Marina Abramovic, entitled The Artist is Present. And she is very definitely present, in person and by proxy. I had dragged my feet about going to this show, figuring it might be more interesting just to read about it than to see it. But I was wrong and I'm glad I got there. I was prepared to be mentally jostled, to be pushed around and made uncomfortable simply for the fact of being uncomfortable. What I wasn't prepared for was the spirituality. The first thing I saw as I came up the stairs was the arena of the MOMA atrium. Next the sight of the artist - Marina Abramovic in her chair, starkly lit by hot photographers' floodlights and surrounded by a curious mob. The lights and the crowd contributed to a warm atmosphere and there she was in a great white wool cape over a long sleeved high-necked dress that spilled in a broad puddle around her feet. Her dark-featured face was slick and shiny, set in an impassive expression that gave no hint of inner activity. She reminded me of nothing so much as a polychrome, carved wooden virgin from the 12th or 13th century. And the more I saw, the more the image seemed to fit. As I continued through the show, the medieval quality of what she's been doing throughout her career is palpable; public displays of mortification of the flesh, incredible will under tortuous exercises in self-martyrdom. Watching her sit in her chair, lonely and alienated in the midst of hordes of strangers, placidly performing a ritual that few understood while maintaining an unearthly kind of poise and self-control - I've never had such a clear physical understanding of the medieval concept of someone who is not quite from this human sphere - a spiritual being. It made sense that her parents were war heroes (WWII) in her native Serbia and her great-uncle was a patriarch of the Orthodox Church - and later a saint. The intensity of a higher calling informs everything she does, as does the sense of human life as a trial. The naked stand-ins for Abramovic in recreations of earlier events are all young and beautiful, god-like virgins and young men ripe to people Bosch's nightmare vision of human sexuality and temptation. The two naked woman between whom I squeezed from one room to the next were clean and lovely, but their slight human odor in the warm gallery seemed intentional - a reminder of our baser material. The hardest reenactment to look at for me was the young girl splayed against a spotlit white wall ten feet above viewers' heads. Perched on a tiny bicycle seat with only small blocks to support her spread legs and feet, her arms held out and up, she was an obvious Christ - even without nails the pain and discomfort was all too easy to imagine. Films show Abramovic herself in some of her best known performances, including Balkan Baroque, where she spent hours scrubbing mountains of bloody cowbones (the bones were on display), and the frightening spectacle of her cutting of a star into her own belly. Impossible to watch but fascinating. The discomfort of viewers showed itself in all kinds of ways - giggles, grumbles, smart remarks, sober silence. It must have been the same for people watching those medieval flagellants in the 14th century - a profoundly unsettling experience. Contemporary art is a strange place and it's difficult to sort out the real from the merely exhibitionistic - this, for me, was real. My lasting image of the show will be the young woman who sat down across Abramovic just before I left. As though planned, she was a kind of mirror image, physically and metaphorically - young, soft-faced, dressed in dark, modern tshirt, jeans, sneakers - but her brown hair was in the exact same braid as Abramovic's, hung over the same left shoulder. Wearing a slight smile she might well have been staring beyond the present deep into the mystic, timeless presence of this strange disturbing artist.

NC Wyeth - The Gold Standard in Illustration

I was at Chadd's Ford this weekend, paying a visit to the Wyeths. That would be N. C. Wyeth, greatest of American illustrators, and his legacy - his work, his home and studio, and his family, including son Andrew and grandson Jamie. It was a beautiful day in a beautiful part of the country, and the house and studio, in essence untouched from when the family was in residence, were fascinating. N. C. Wyeth was a giant in many ways - big man, big ideas, big talent, an outsized imagination that willed living, breathing worlds of adventure and excitement onto a flat painted surface. His studio, full of props, paints, and mementos, is basically untouched since the day in 1945 when he was killed by a train, just down the road, as he sat in his car pointing out sights to a young grandchild. His long smock coat hangs to one side of his work area in front of the north-facing window wall. The right sleeve is conventionally worn, but the left sleeve is still caked with paint where he wiped his brushes as he worked. At the back of the studio is the extension, built later to accommodate the mural panels he painted for a Philadelphia Insurance company - when the building was renovated the murals, an allegorical series telling the story of William Penn, were returned to the Wyeth foundation, so one sits in place as he would have painted it. On his smaller easel is a painting of a scene in George Washington's life, blocked out and colored, but unfinished.

It was a thrill to see original paintings and drawings for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Black Arrow, and other Scribner's classics in the museum. Even more so, once I learned that it was the contract for Treasure Island in 1911 that allowed Wyeth to buy and build the property where he would raise his lively family of 5 children, all but one of whom became an artist of one kind or another. Later, having coffee in a modern wing, looking out on the slow-moving Brandywine River, we debated how well known N. C. Wyeth is to a general American audience - probably not enough. Andrew, his son, is far better known - he was a very accomplished if less expansive artist - and Norman Rockwell is certainly better known for his folksy covers, but N. C. Wyeth is the gold standard.

The New Rome

I've always rued the fact that the USA modeled itself on Rome - blood, conquest, fraticide, wars, macho shows of power - instead of on, say, the Minoans who, from the evidence, were nature-loving, friendly, equal rights types (until we decode their language and find out some horrible truth). But Rome it is, and right now there's a big exhibit on the subject at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Like most of the exhibits I've seen there it's well researched, carefully presented, and under-attended. I was impressed by the offerings: books owned by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, matching tortuous slave collars - one from the 1st century, one from the 18th, relics from Pompeii, including a huddled plaster body cast to give an all too human feel for the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 ce. I think the most intriguing classical reach was a silver tea service with a cream pitcher in the shape of an upside down Roman helmet.

The foundation story of the USA is interesting - much more David and Goliath than Romulus and Remus (thank God) but we'd be a whole different country without Rome - just as Rome would be nowhere without Greece and the Etruscans. The 'founding fathers' were for the most part educated, patrician men who identified with the ruling classes in the Roman Republic - like them they were landowners in an agricultural society, strong-willed men who prized character and rights for 'all men' - a category that rings hollow from our perspective as it left out women and people without property, not to mention, of course, slaves. When the new little republic created its icons in the late 18th century it looked to Rome: Busts of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin draped in togas, their faces serious and full of dignity in the strong, wizened Republican Roman model,  our great American eagle  -
yes a native species, but Rome used an eagle for its standard too.

The easiest and most obvious place to see the influence on Rome on American life and iconography is in architecture. As I walked out of the (modern) Constitution Center and headed home through the historical center of the city I passed endless examples of neo-classicism - the Second National Bank modeled on the Parthenon via Rome, an obelisk and a gravestone with draped figure in bas-relief, pediments and columns on the doors of colonial-era townhouses, Corinthian columns on Old Pine Street church and my local bank. You don't have to live in the 18th century to see Rome in your life - your bank probably has those columns too. Just as they did for the 'new' Republic, those columns, pediments, and sober forms speak of character, virtue, freedom from tyranny, and trust.