watching me sit here bolt upright and cry

[maudgonne]

I am totally fascinated by Marina Abramović's The Artist Is Present at MoMA. It's a performance art piece in which Abramović sits at a table in the middle of a gallery. She is silent, wearing some sort of long tunic dress that exposes only her face and hands. Her hair is braided and falls over one shoulder. Museum guests are invited to sit across

Comments

[shiratic]

i am fascinated that you'd go because i don't think i'd ever be able to. placeholder comment for more thoughts later.

[maudgonne]

I am very curious about why you couldn't/wouldn't! It's an experience I would love to have.

[shiratic]

so i wonder whether this is a quirk of mine, or whether it's more general to people, but i think my issue is two-fold. the first thing is that if someone is looking at me for an extended period, unless it's clearly with amusement/fondness or something, i tend to assume i've done something wrong/am in trouble/am about to get yelled at (i think my childhood is showing :)). even though i'd know intellectually that this was non-personal, i think i'd have a continually growing sense of panic being watched like that. the second thing is related, but slightly different - i think i'd have a sense that something was wrong, even if not caused by me, and the sense that i couldn't make it better would freak me out.

any of that make sense?

[maudgonne]

Hmm, yeah, it all makes sense. Your childhood might be showing a little, but I do think the comfort level with that kind of thing is just going to vary a lot. I don't relate to your particular aversion, but it doesn't seem strange to me.

Would you watch other people doing it?

[shiratic]

oh, interesting question!

i think the answer is yes, because at the one step remove i know longer experience the incipient worry that something bad is about to happen. i do wonder whether i wouldn't be fully convinced that people felt they could leave when they needed to, though.