’700-HOUR SILENT OPERA REACHES FINALE AT MoMA,’ by Holland Carter in the N. Y. Times.

700-Hour Silent Opera Reaches Finale at MoMA

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: May 30, 2010

At 5 p.m. Monday the longest piece of performance art on record, and certainly the one with the largest audience, comes to an end. Since her retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art on March 14, the artist Marina Abramovic has been sitting, six days a week, seven hours a day in a plain chair, under bright klieg lights, in MoMA’s towering atrium. When she leaves that chair Monday for the last time, she will have clocked 700 hours of sitting.During that time her routine seldom varied. Every day she took her place just before the museum doors opened and left it after they closed. Her wardrobe was consistent: a sort of concert gown with a long train, in one of three colors (red, blue and white).

Always her hair, in a braided plait, was pulled forward over her left shoulder. Always her skin was an odd pasty white, as if the blood had drained away. Her pose rarely changed: her body slightly bent forward, she stared silently and intently straight ahead.

There was one variable, a big one: her audience.

Visitors to the museum were invited, first come first served, to sit in a chair facing her and silently return her gaze. The chair has rarely, if ever, been empty. Close to 1,400 people have occupied it, some for only a minute or two, a few for an entire day.

Sitting with Ms. Abramovic has been the hot event of the spring art season. Celebrities — Bjork, Marisa Tomei, Isabella Rossellini, Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright — did a stint. Young performance artists seized a moment in the limelight. One appeared in his own version of an Abramovic gown to propose marriage. Certain repeat sitters became mini-celebrities, though long-time waiters on line stared daggers at those who sat too long.

Thanks to the Internet many people saw all of this without being there. A daily live feed on MoMA’s Web site, moma.org, has had close to 800,000 hits. A Flickr site with head shots of every sitter has been accessed close to 600,000 times. Yet foot traffic has been heavy. By the museum’s estimate, half a million people have visited all or part of the Abramovic retrospective, “The Artist Is Present,” of which the atrium piece is a small part.

The rest of the show, installed on the museum’s sixth floor, is a problem. It is made up primarily of videos and photographs of the artist’s performances over nearly 40 years, beginning when she was a student in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where she was born in 1946.

Her solo work from the early 1970s was hair-raisingly nervy. She stabbed herself, took knockout drugs, played with fire. For one piece she stood silent in a gallery for six hours, having announced that visitors could do anything they wanted to her physically. At one point a man held a gun to her neck. Her eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t flinch.

In 1976 she started collaborating with the German artist Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay. Some of their performances were punishing athletic events, as they slammed their bodies together or into walls. Others were almost aggressively passive. For a piece called “Imponderabilia” they stood facing each other, nude, in a narrow doorway in a museum. Anyone wanting to go from one gallery to another had no choice but to squeeze awkwardly and intimately between them.

Ms. Abramovic restaged “Imponderabilia,” along with some other works, for the MoMA show using actors. And although the nudity caused a buzz, the restaging fell flat. Two elements that originally defined performance art as a medium, unpredictability and ephemerality, were missing. Without them you get misrepresented history and bad theater.

Evidently Ms. Abramovic doesn’t agree. In 2005, at the Guggenheim Museum, she restaged vintage performance pieces by other artists (Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys) with herself in the leading roles. She recently established the Marina Abramovic Institute for Preservation of Performance Art, to be housed in upstate New York.

In the near future she will be collaborating with the director Robert Wilson on a stage work based on her life. By the sound of it, this project will mark her furthest departure yet from old-school performance art and into the realm of closely scripted theater. What it will have, however, is her charismatic personal presence, and that means a lot. That presence is probably the most important ingredient missing from the restagings. It is what makes the atrium performance compelling. For better and worse, it has carried Ms. Abramovic’s career.

One of her lifelong heroes is the opera singer Maria Callas, to whom she can bear a striking physical resemblance. Callas was a disciplined, risk-oriented musician, made vulnerable by a voice that began to disintegrate early. Increasingly, as she aged, every performance became an ordeal, an invitation to failure. Her willingness to face failure became the prevailing drama of her life. It was a drama of survival, and her fans had a part in it: she needed them to need her, so they did.

That’s that classic diva dynamic. And what we’re seeing in the MoMA atrium is basically a 700-hour silent opera. Ms. Abramovic, with her extravagant costume, her bent shoulders and her mournful gaze, is the prima donna. Visitors are cast as rapt audience, commenting chorus, supporting soloists. Unpredictability is in the air: Will she make it through the day? Will she faint from pain? Will she cancel at the last minute?

When I dropped by last week, one sitter, a repeater, sat across from Ms. Abramovic with his hands clasped to his chest, like a tenor about to burst into song or a worshiper transported in prayer. Perfect. That Ms. Abramovic will be collaborating with Mr. Wilson, a once-radical creator of epic experimental works and now best known for his ritualistic productions of Puccini and Wagner, is also perfect.

Of restagings I remain an unbeliever. Of Ms. Abramovic’s recent overblown solo pieces, seen in video in the sixth-floor installation, I’m not a fan. But the atrium performance works because she is simply, persistently, uncomfortably there. As of 5 p.m., she won’t be, though. The klieg lights will dim. The audience will move on. Something big will be gone, and being gone will be part of the bigness.

’700-HOUR SILENT OPERA REACHES FINALE AT MoMA, ‘ by Holland Cotter in the N. Y. Times.

ART

700-Hour Silent Opera Reaches Finale at MoMA

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: May 30, 2010

Monday the longest piece of performance art on record, and certainly the one with the largest audience, comes to an end. Since her retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art on March 14, the artist Marina Abramovic has been sitting, six days a week, seven hours a day in a plain chair, under bright klieg lights, in MoMA’s towering atrium. When she leaves that chair Monday for the last time, she will have clocked 700 hours of sitting.

During that time her routine seldom varied. Every day she took her place just before the museum doors opened and left it after they closed. Her wardrobe was consistent: a sort of concert gown with a long train, in one of three colors (red, blue and white).

Always her hair, in a braided plait, was pulled forward over her left shoulder. Always her skin was an odd pasty white, as if the blood had drained away. Her pose rarely changed: her body slightly bent forward, she stared silently and intently straight ahead.

There was one variable, a big one: her audience.

Visitors to the museum were invited, first come first served, to sit in a chair facing her and silently return her gaze. The chair has rarely, if ever, been empty. Close to 1,400 people have occupied it, some for only a minute or two, a few for an entire day.

Sitting with Ms. Abramovic has been the hot event of the spring art season. Celebrities — Bjork, Marisa Tomei, Isabella Rossellini, Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright — did a stint. Young performance artists seized a moment in the limelight. One appeared in his own version of an Abramovic gown to propose marriage. Certain repeat sitters became mini-celebrities, though long-time waiters on line stared daggers at those who sat too long.

Thanks to the Internet many people saw all of this without being there. A daily live feed on MoMA’s Web site, moma.org, has had close to 800,000 hits. A Flickr site with head shots of every sitter has been accessed close to 600,000 times. Yet foot traffic has been heavy. By the museum’s estimate, half a million people have visited all or part of the Abramovic retrospective, “The Artist Is Present,” of which the atrium piece is a small part.

The rest of the show, installed on the museum’s sixth floor, is a problem. It is made up primarily of videos and photographs of the artist’s performances over nearly 40 years, beginning when she was a student in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where she was born in 1946.

Her solo work from the early 1970s was hair-raisingly nervy. She stabbed herself, took knockout drugs, played with fire. For one piece she stood silent in a gallery for six hours, having announced that visitors could do anything they wanted to her physically. At one point a man held a gun to her neck. Her eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t flinch.

In 1976 she started collaborating with the German artist Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay. Some of their performances were punishing athletic events, as they slammed their bodies together or into walls. Others were almost aggressively passive. For a piece called “Imponderabilia” they stood facing each other, nude, in a narrow doorway in a museum. Anyone wanting to go from one gallery to another had no choice but to squeeze awkwardly and intimately between them.

Ms. Abramovic restaged “Imponderabilia,” along with some other works, for the MoMA show using actors. And although the nudity caused a buzz, the restaging fell flat. Two elements that originally defined performance art as a medium, unpredictability and ephemerality, were missing. Without them you get misrepresented history and bad theater.

Evidently Ms. Abramovic doesn’t agree. In 2005, at the Guggenheim Museum, she restaged vintage performance pieces by other artists (Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys) with herself in the leading roles. She recently established the Marina Abramovic Institute for Preservation of Performance Art, to be housed in upstate New York.

In the near future she will be collaborating with the director Robert Wilson on a stage work based on her life. By the sound of it, this project will mark her furthest departure yet from old-school performance art and into the realm of closely scripted theater. What it will have, however, is her charismatic personal presence, and that means a lot. That presence is probably the most important ingredient missing from the restagings. It is what makes the atrium performance compelling. For better and worse, it has carried Ms. Abramovic’s career.

One of her lifelong heroes is the opera singer Maria Callas, to whom she can bear a striking physical resemblance. Callas was a disciplined, risk-oriented musician, made vulnerable by a voice that began to disintegrate early. Increasingly, as she aged, every performance became an ordeal, an invitation to failure. Her willingness to face failure became the prevailing drama of her life. It was a drama of survival, and her fans had a part in it: she needed them to need her, so they did.

That’s that classic diva dynamic. And what we’re seeing in the MoMA atrium is basically a 700-hour silent opera. Ms. Abramovic, with her extravagant costume, her bent shoulders and her mournful gaze, is the prima donna. Visitors are cast as rapt audience, commenting chorus, supporting soloists. Unpredictability is in the air: Will she make it through the day? Will she faint from pain? Will she cancel at the last minute?

When I dropped by last week, one sitter, a repeater, sat across from Ms. Abramovic with his hands clasped to his chest, like a tenor about to burst into song or a worshiper transported in prayer. Perfect. That Ms. Abramovic will be collaborating with Mr. Wilson, a once-radical creator of epic experimental works and now best known for his ritualistic productions of Puccini and Wagner, is also perfect.

Of restagings I remain an unbeliever. Of Ms. Abramovic’s recent overblown solo pieces, seen in video in the sixth-floor installation, I’m not a fan. But the atrium performance works because she is simply, persistently, uncomfortably there. As of 5 p.m., she won’t be, though. The klieg lights will dim. The audience will move on. Something big will be gone, and being gone will be part of the bigness.

‘THE FUTURE OF PERSONAL COMPUTING, PART I,’ by James Kwak at baselinescenario .com.

The Future of Personal Computing, Part 1

Posted: 30 May 2010 10:31 AM PDT

By James Kwak

This week, Apple passed Microsoft to become the most valuable technology company in the world (measured by the market value of its stock).* I’ve been wondering about Apple and, in particular, why “apps” — which at first glance struck me as a giant step backward in computing technology — have gotten so much buzz in the media. Then I bought an iPad, and while I understand apps a little better, I’m still perplexed. But since this isn’t a particularly technology-savvy audience, this is going to take some setting up. The background is here in Part 1; Part 2 will be coming shortly.

(Note that here I’m talking about personal computing, which is what people like you and I do on our own; enterprise computing is something very different that I’ve written about before, and still largely takes place on mainframe computers.)

A Little Background

Rather than recap the entire history of computing (hilarious synopsis here, hat tip Brad DeLong), I’ll start in the early 1990s. At this point, many people had personal computers, but for the most part they weren’t connected to anything except maybe a printer. (Actually, in the early 1980s my father brought home one of those primitive modems where you actually placed your phone receiver into a socket to communicate, so we could log into the mainframe at his university, but that was the exception.)

A personal computer has an operating system (Windows, OS X, Linux, etc.). This isn’t quite correct, but you can think of the OS as the software that manages  the physical parts of a computer: it runs the internal parts, like the CPU and the hard disk drive, and it controls the interface to the parts that you interact with, like the keyboard and the screen. There are also applications that run on a computer (Excel, PhotoShop, Half-Life, etc.). These applications don’t directly manage the physical parts of the computer; instead, they talk to the operating system, which in turn talks to the physical parts. They do this via the application programming interface, or API, that is published (made accessible) by the operating system.

For our purposes, there are two important features of this structure. First, each operating system has a different API, so you have to write programs differently for each OS. That doesn’t mean every line of code has to be different, but the way you call lower-level functions will differ across operating systems. On top of this, each OS developer (Microsoft, Apple, etc.) provides a different set of tools that you use to write programs for its OS. Software developers tend to become better at using one set of tools than another, and hence more likely to write programs for one OS than another.

Second, programs that can access the operating system’s API can do a lot of different things to your computer — this is what makes software powerful. At the same time, that means they can do damage to you.

So in the early to mid-1990s, we had self-contained personal computers (Windows or Mac) that ran programs that were written specifically for the operating systems they ran on. (A given program, like Excel, might exist in both Windows and Mac versions, but those were two completely different pieces of software that just looked the same on the outside.) Microsoft dominated this world for a couple of reasons, most importantly that many more programs were being written for Windows than for Mac. I believe this is partly because it was easier to write programs for Windows (Microsoft did a better job providing tools for developers), and partly because the Windows installed base was a lot bigger than the Mac installed base, so a new Windows application had a lot more potential buyers. The Windows installed base was bigger, in turn, because of Microsoft’s business model: it licensed Windows to any hardware manufacturer who wanted it, and therefore you had more diversity, more innovation, and lower price points for Windows PCs than for Macs. There were other factors as well, but those are the basics.

The Internet

Then Tim Berners-Lee gave us the Internet, and Marc Andreesen gave us the browser, and everything changed.

Ever since the mid-1990s, the Internet has played a bigger and bigger role in our daily computing. And so the most important application of all became the Internet browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Safari, Chrome). This is an application that has the ability to find, display, and interact with resources on the Internet. Like all applications, it talks to the operating system via its API. But it’s special in a few respects.

One is simply that many people spend more time in their browsers than in all their other applications put together.

Another is that the Internet is largely built around a few basic standards, like HTML (a language that web pages are written in). All browsers have to be able to interpret those standards. So if you build web pages using those standards, you know that all browsers will be able to access them; you don’t have to worry about what operating system your visitor’s computer is running.**

A third is that the browser can be designed in such a way as to minimize risk to the computer it is running on. Ordinarily, browsers do not have the ability to modify data on your filesystem. This is for security reasons; the goal is to prevent web sites from automatically launching attacks on your computer. Of course, web sites are constantly asking if you want to save files to your computer, and then you’re on your own. And there are technologies that can be added to a browser, like ActiveX, that give programs on web sites the ability to get at your hard drive. But in principle, it is harder for a program that lives on a web site and runs inside a browser to do damage than for a program that you install on your computer and that has direct access to the operating system via the API.

The result was the golden age of web-based computing. Around a decade ago, during the Internet boom, the idea became popular in the technology community that all computing would move “to the Web.” That is, instead of installing standalone applications that ran on directly on our computers and accessed the operating system’s API directly, the interesting software would live on web sites on the Internet, would conform to Internet standards, and would therefore run properly in any browser. This was supposed to have several benefits:

Computing would be safer, since our computers would be protected by our browsers.***

People wouldn’t have to worry about installing and updating software — just about keeping track of their bookmarks.

Programs would be easier to learn and use for ordinary people, since browsers offer a consistent and intuitive way of interacting with programs.

We wouldn’t have to worry about carrying our data around, backing it up, and syncing it between computers, because it would all be on the Internet.

Developers would only have to write each program once, because then it would automatically work on all browsers (assuming everyone conformed to standards) and hence on all operating systems.

As a corollary, the Age of Microsoft would come to an end, since one pillar of its dominance — the huge community of developers writing for Windows — would now be irrelevant.

To some degree, this has happened. I’m writing this post using Firefox at WordPress.com. The computers in my house have three different operating systems and I use three different browsers (Firefox, Safari, and Chrome), which I keep synchronized using XMarks. I spend the vast majority of my computer time in a browser, and not just for consuming information; besides the blog (WordPress), my email, tasks, calendar, and contacts all belong to Google, I try to do most of my lightweight work in Google Documents, I share photos using Flickr, etc. Much of the modern, interactive computing that people do (like Facebook) is done in a browser.

This is, roughly speaking, what Google is all about: a world where the OS and the browser don’t matter because they are just tools to get us onto the Internet, where we keep our data and do all our work. It’s why Google is writing two operating systems, Android and Chrome, that will both be free, and is developing a suite of Web-based “productivity” applications; they want to cripple Microsoft’s business model by giving away their versions of the two things that make Microsoft so profitable: Windows and Office.

Microsoft is still a big, profitable company, because PCs will be around for a long time, most companies use Windows, Office, and other Microsoft products for networking, email, etc., and those products can be very sticky, especially in a corporate environment. But the world is moving away from the 1990s model. Microsoft recognizes this, of course. This is why they fought so hard to crush Netscape in the 1990s — they wanted control of the browser. And it’s why they’ve spent so much money — Hotmail, MSN, .NET, Windows Live, Bing — trying to establish a presence on the Internet. But they just haven’t been very good at it.

So at a high level, this is the story of personal computing over the past fifteen years. But recently there has been a new plot twist, which will be subject of Part 2.

* Great quote by Steve Ballmer in the New York Times story: “Windows phone – boom! We have to deliver devices with our partners this Christmas.” Does he realize that he talks like Ari Gold on Entourage?

** This can be thought of as a kind of isolation layer. With Windows, software developers don’t need to worry about whether the customer has a Dell, HP, or Acer computer; as long as it has Windows, it will behave in a predictable way. With Internet standards, now you don’t need to worry about what OS the customer has, just what browser she has.

*** Yes, browsers have security flaws, so this isn’t a perfect system.