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Marina Abramović Scans Visitors' Brainwaves In A New Performance

A major retrospective of the artist’s work comes to The Garage in Moscow, complete with a new performance called Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze.

Last year the MoMA staged a celebrated retrospective of the work of Marina Abramović, the undisputed godmother of performance art. The centerpiece of the exhibition, which featured archival video and photographic documentation of performances from her 30 year career, as well as several live in-gallery “reperformances,” was a three month long performance by the artist herself, aptly titled The Artist is Present. In it, Abramović sat motionless in MoMA’s atrium day in and day out during the museum’s hours of operation, inviting visitors to sit across from her in silent meditation. The performance drew massive crowds and media attention, and captured the imagination of both the art world and the greater online community to become one of the most widely discussed exhibitions of 2010.

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The retrospective is now being re-staged at The Garage gallery in Moscow, introducing her expansive and emotionally charged body of work to the Russian public. Though the exhibition largely echoes the MoMA retrospective, it does feature the addition of several new works, including a re-interpretation of the famed The Artist is Present performance, which sees Abramović teaming up with Russian and American scientists to analytically deconstruct the reportedly mystical nature of the experience.

Abramović sitting across from exhibition curator and director of MoMA PS1 Klaus Bisenbach in the final sitting of her New York City performance.

Titled Measuring the Magic of Mutual Gaze, the experimental performance installation measures the brain activity of visitors who are either sitting across from Abramović when the artist is present (she is keeping limited gallery hours in this version) or opposite one another. The exercise privileges emotional, over physical, interaction, and elicited very strong reactions from New York visitors, many of whom became emotionally overwhelmed while participating in the piece or described the experience as “trance-like” or “transcendant.”

One New York sitter said that “It was kind of like being out of time. Just really interesting and filled with different emotions that change the longer you sit there.” These kinds of mystical statements about the effects of the performance were not uncommon and contributed greatly to the mythology that accompanies not only this piece, but Abramović’s greater body of work. It’s interesting to see her breaking the spell a bit, so to speak, by subjecting the process to scientific analysis.

According to The Garage, the data will be archived so that other scientists can study the “magic” that happens when two people share eye contact and the viewing public will be able to observe this activity, to see which areas of the brain are physically stimulated when participants are engaged with each other in thought. It was only a matter of time before Abramović started blurring the boundaries between science and art, she already dons a while lab coat for some of her performances, the progression seems only natural.

Don’t know about you, but we’d love to see someone like Jer Thorp or Aaron Koblin tackle this brainwave data in an interactive data visualization.

[via The Moscow Times]