Naked or Nude? Museum of Modern Art: "The Artist is Present,"

Artist: Marina Abramovic

Exhibition features 38 live totally naked/nude performers intermixed with photographs and videos and other Art forms.

Did you see the Subway Ads for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)? Did you look at the Ad and turn away because it is an Ad and is in the subway and there is so much being put in front of your face when you just want to get to where you want to get to without having to absorb this event, movie, t.v. show concert or Bud or Pepsi or whatever appears from week to week.
If you are like me and want to shut my eyes because I haven't recovered fully from a too short night's sleep and I don't want to go where I am headed then you didn't respond to the Ad the way the MoMA would have wanted. But don't stop there!

Friday nights are free, compliments of Target Stores, their give back to the community through Art at MoMA and I recommend you see the current exhibit.

It is art taken to yet another new level, consistent with the world in which we live where reality and virtual reality mesh into indistinguishable sights and where there is so much stimulation to absorb that we don't interact anymore. We don't touch. We sit across wide tables and stare at one another or reach out to slap one another. We step over the remains, human remains thrown into a pile as in France in the Catacomb and we look not down at the dried out Tibia bones but up at the dancing woman, the man with consternation upon his face both reflective of how we avoid the horror in our world, that we have created albeit often inadvertently.
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The exhibit has been made possible by the Young museum activists and the viewers were young; the gray hairs or obviously died hair to mask the gray rather than make a statement on hair style were few and far between.

This is an exhibit that shows us how advanced our technological development has come that we can not readily discern the difference between real and not real. We are forced (for art's sake) to walk between two naked women and somehow viewer after viewer does this without physical contact with them and without looking into their faces, seeing their eyes, discerning their feelings towards one another. We become invisible in the process of walking between them because they somehow are invisable to us. How can this be? Two naked women standing almost touching us and we do not see them as we pass between them?


It is the incredible power of this artist that she has made us part of her statement, forced us to be even though we, with the power of foresight, might not want to be part of the problem.


What else can we ask from art than to be included into the work, to force us to see our reality differently yet as an united problem

This is an exhibit with power, with tremendous emotional impact. It has all the ingredients that art should, must have to live on.


Linda Zises

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