Monday, June 23, 2014

Putting the con in conceptual …

… Bryan Appleyard — Marina Abramovic: Nothing Into Everything. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This is the heart of the matter. ­Abramovic has concluded that in the 21st century, art will not be made out of objects, but out of energy. “The future of art is about energy trans­mission, and that is what I am doing.”
By energy, she means the human energy that contemporary society crushes with its materiality and ­distraction. Her art has thus become explicitly therapeutic, an attempt, through long duration, to reinvent time — “We don’t have time any more, we have to create time in art” — and to make people fully aware of being in the present. This is why “nothing” is so important to her, and why she has nothing to say about the content of her show: the content is nothing. Like the mystics — indeed, like the ­scientists — she believes in nothing as the ultimate fullness.
I love it.

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