David Blaine: Psycho killer or master illusionist?
Marina Abramovic’s MOMA experiment ‘The Artist is Present’ almost got the ax, literally
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
Matthew Akers’ documentary “Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present,” about the world’s best-known performance artist’s 730 hour-long staring contest at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2010, has won the Audience Prize for a feature film at a festival in Paris honoring US indie films.
However, as the first-ever week-long Champs-Elysées Film Festival came to a close and the documentary opened this week in New York, Andre Tartar wrote for New York Magazine’s Vulture blog the he “can’t help wonder just how much lustier the reception [for the film] might’ve been if Abramovic really had let magician David Blaine disembowel her with a fire axe.”
It turns out Blaine, the 39-year-old endurance artist who has drowned, buried and spun himself to near death, had originally suggested something even more bizarre than the uber-provocative Yugoslavian-born 65-year-old Abramovic had originally conceived of for her MOMA show — and from what we can see from a just-now released clip from HBO, it seems Abramovic almost went for the idea. Had Blaine been slightly more persuasive, the audience would have been witness to his doing a literal hatchet job on Abramovic.
“You know there are always those axes in the glass in case of emergency,” Blaine says on the video. “…She’s laying there, and the whole exhibition is over.”
This sounds like one big macabre gag — but it would seem it wasn’t, based on how seriously the two performers were discussing the possibility in the video clip. We’ll probably never really know whether they would have gone through with it, because it’s kind of hard to read a guy who nonchalantly munches on a wine glass while engaging in conversation with a woman who has more than willingly cut, asphyxiated, burned and tortured herself in the name of artistic expression.
