Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present
Dir. Matthew Akers
Country: USA
Aus Rating: N/A
Running Time: 106mins
It’s a shame that the people who really need to see Matthew Akers’ transfixing debut documentary,
Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, won’t go near it. If the years and years of time spent by newspaper opinion columns bemoaning the “waste” of taxpayer funding for what they deem an artist’s silly folly had been used instead to create something that moves and deeply effects just one person in this world then we’d surely be better off for it. The woman at the centre of
The Artist is Present, Serbian born performance artist Marina Abramović, is a fascinating one and this documentary’s final 30 minutes is a testament to the power that her work has over people. As she sat gallantly in Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for some 736.5 hours, her work took on the stature of legend, so it’s sad to think there are far too many out there who, as one news reporter featured within says, see her as little more than “some Yugoslavian provocateur.”
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