The Museum Visitor Experience at Marina Abramovic's "The Artist is Present" (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject Art - Installation / Action/Performance Art / Modern Art, grade: 1,8, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg (Kulturwissenschaften), course: Visitor Orientation and Research for Museums - Theoretical and Empirical Foundations, language: English, abstract: In order to analyse the visitors experience, the visitors experience and the learning of it is being explained by the example of the exhibition The Artist is Present by Marina Abramovic in the Museum of Modern Arts in New York, putting it in reference to the Contextual Model of Learning (2000/2004) by Falk and Dierking. The exhibition took place in the MoMA in New York from March 14th until May 31st 2010 and showed the career of Marina Abramovic with about fifty works spanning over four decades of her early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances, and collaborative performances made with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). In addition, Abramovic performed an original work, that marked the longest duration of time that she has performed a single solo piece. Underlining the title of the exhibition "The Artist is Present", for this performance Abramovic sat on a chair in the middle of one level of the MoMA, in front of a table and another chair. This performance for the show asked visitors to come sit with her and essentially become a part of the performance piece.

To see what the visitors experienced and learned at this exhibition, the personal experience at The Artist is Present, written by Fracis Prose in the article Marina Abramovic: When Art Makes Us Cry on the website of The New York Review will be analysed, as well as the things she has potentially learned during and after her visit at MoMA. Her statements about the visit to MoMA will be examined based on her personal, physical and sociocultural context in order to find out what she has ultimately learned during and after the visit to Abramovic's exhibition.