For such a worldly place, and one arguably the center of the art world, New York has had its share of voyeurs, gropers and alarmists lately. It all has to do with a couple of art shows that both involve the N-word: nudity. You would think pop culture, explicit commercials and even nude icons of art history had never existed.
The names to note are Marina Abramovic and Antony Gormley - she at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and he literally all over town.
What a way to earn a living: as a live work of art, often a naked one, in a major New York City museum. This has been happening at MoMA since March, and it will continue till the end of May - despite all fainting and groping that may occur.
It's all about people employed to re-enact the "performance art" that Yugoslav artist Marina Abramovic has presented over the last 40 years. Now 64, the artist herself is also involved in this sweeping retrospective show, "The Artist Is Present."
She's performing a new original piece that requires her to sit on view, still and silent, during museum hours. Visitors occasionally take a chair across from her at a small table.
By May 31, Abramovic will have sat for more than 700 hours - the longest duration of time she has ever performed a solo piece.
Her "body of work" typically began, well, with her body. Often naked, she � or her current stand-ins � sits, stands or lies down as part of a presentation. Her oeuvre also includes sound pieces, videos, photographs, solo and collaborative performances.
Dating back to 1977, one of Abramovic's collaborative piece involves a woman and a man, both naked, who stand in a museum doorway facing each other. Visitors may walk between them en route to more of the show. The NY Post headlined this as "Squeezy does it."
Reportedly, most of those going through face the woman. At least one visitor has touched one of the two, sliding his hand onto the man's ribs then back to touch his butt. And that wasn't all: the fondler then told the artist, "You feel good, man."
"This man is touching me," the artist reported to a guard. That visitor's longtime membership was revoked and he has been barred from returning to the museum.
It doesn't end there. Besides the gropers, visitors have taken forbidden photographs, commented on performers' bodies, and even exhibited stalker-like behavior, tracking the performers on Facebook. And, because the work is draining, there have been several performer faintings.
Despite some visitors' inappropriate behaviors, artists involved give MoMA guards good marks for vigilance.
The show's mission � "To demonstrate that it's possible to preserve an ephemeral medium through live re-creations of past work in a museum setting" � may or may not be realized in "The Artist Is Present." It's in the eye (and with luck, that's all) of the beholder.
Often assumed to be sophisticatedly blas� about art, New Yorkers and visitors to the city have been taken aback by Antony Gormley's sculpture. Maybe because it consists of 31 life-size figures of himself, naked. And these figures are situated around the city.
Those perched on rooftops are made of fiberglass and weigh in at about 70 pounds, while those in parks and on sidewalks are cast iron, about 1,400 pounds each. All similar in appearance, they began to show up in late March and will remain in place till mid-August. (Maybe by then, viewers will calm down; they may even grow blas�.)
These days, however, the elevated figures continue to generate calls to the police from people fearing they're suicidal "jumpers." (A Yale student's fatal leap from the Empire State Building on March 30 may have contributed to the alarms � despite the police department's pre-emptive public assurance that the sculptures aren't jumpers.)
Gormley, a 59-year old Brit based in London, did something like this in 2007, along the South Bank of the Thames. His Manhattan "Event Horizon" is his first public art project in New York.
He compares the insertion of his sculpture with insertion of acupuncture needles, saying that within a collective body, "seeing how the body as a whole reacts to the presence of this irritation is very much the point."
The process of making figures of his own body required Gormley's being covered with plastic wrap under wet plaster for an hour or two. The resulting plaster cast prefigured his 31 look-alikes.
