The Artist Is Present — Marina Abramović

Intro source: MoMA

Author

Performance and the radical body

Medium

Museum of Modern Art, New York

The work matters because it makes a minimal act carry enormous emotional and institutional intensity.

Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present — The Artist Is Present · Museum of Modern Art, New York

Highlights

Surprising facts & legends

Short but striking stories around the work — the things that make it come alive.

Interesting facts

The story around the work

Interesting facts & legends

Over the 79-day run at MoMA in 2010, roughly 1,500 people sat across from Abramović — and an estimated 750,000 visited the exhibition overall, making it one of the most attended solo shows in MoMA's history.
Abramović sat for up to seven hours a day without breaks — no food, no water, no bathroom trips during gallery hours — a feat of physical endurance she prepared for with months of isolation and fasting.
Many visitors wept. Not just a few — dozens per day. MoMA staff quietly placed a box of tissues near the table after the first week because so many people were crying without apparent cause.
Her ex-partner Ulay — from whom she had separated in 1988 after walking the Great Wall of China toward each other and saying goodbye — showed up unannounced one day and sat down in the chair. Abramović, who had kept her eyes closed until each visitor sat, opened them and immediately started crying. It's on film.
The documentary about the performance, directed by Matthew Akers and released in 2012, premiered at Sundance and went on to earn over $1.5 million at the box office — extraordinarily rare for a film about a single performance art piece.
Abramović originally proposed the performance to run three months with no table — just two chairs and her gaze — but MoMA insisted on the table for practical crowd-control reasons. She agreed, then later said the table felt like a barrier she had to learn to forget was there.

Source: MoMA

More details Open the extended reading, official sources, and visual context around the work

Historical context

The Artist Is Present inside its era

The performance took place at MoMA and became one of the best-known museum events of the early twenty-first century.

In 2010, at MoMA, Marina Abramović spent nearly three months sitting silently at a table and inviting visitors to meet her gaze one by one. The performance turned simple presence into an emotionally charged event and became one of the most discussed museum works of the twenty-first century. The location in Museum of Modern Art, New York matters too, because it frames the work not as an isolated icon but as part of a living institutional history.

Path to recognition

How the work became widely known

It is remembered as a rare case in which silence and stillness generated worldwide resonance.

Value

Why the work matters now

The work matters because it makes a minimal act carry enormous emotional and institutional intensity.

Connections and legacy

How to read the work more broadly

Marina Abramovic became one of the central figures of performance art, where meaning is generated through action, the body, endurance, and direct contact with the viewer.

Official sources