Marina Abramović

     Chloë Sevigny bums a dart from me. Loaded with metaphor and possibly bourbon, "cattle auctioneers" spit bids to the crowd, crack whips, and lasso towards Tron-esque light sculptures attached to the ceiling. Beck and Caetano Veloso and Devendra Banhart garble and coo and boogle into microphones. And this is all before the heirloom carrots are passed for seconds. It's that time of year again, folks, the annual MOCA gala, Los Angeles' epic performance piece in the form of a star-studded, Hollywood-style art event. Of course, the Museum of Contemporary Art is in Downtown L.A., but we'll forgive it for a second, because it's really a convergence of A-listers and art gods, the young and the guestlisted. It all makes for one of art's premiere events.
     Featuring the work of Marina Abramović, and titled An Artist's Life Manifesto, this year's gala will take place on Saturday, November 12th, and will feature a musical performance by Deborah Harry from Blondie. On the heels of last year's Doug Aitken performance (described above), Abramović promises to deliver a heartfelt performance along the lines of her recently mega-viewed Museum of Modern Art, New York exhibition in which she stared down thousands of museum-goers. We caught up with MOCA trustee (and accomplished collector) Maria Bell as she scooted around New York in a cab, her head full of auction thoughts of her own, and gala preparations. Sprightly and excitable, Bell is the co-chairperson of the board, and she is partly responsible for putting together the fancy feast and performative jollification.

What are you doing in New York?
Well, it’s the contemporary art auctions. So we have this blessing and curse with the MOCA gala that it’s the Saturday night after the contemporary sales, so that we can capture people who are from Europe for the sales in New York to continue on to L.A., but it also means that it’s like crazy week in the contemporary art world. So anyway, that’s why.

You must be totally insane with the Gala.
It’s pretty wild, it’s pretty wild. I saw Marina here this weekend and she was headed to Los Angeles; she’s there now, and she’s in the midst of casting, and it’s really a major undertaking. So it’s exciting.

Last year was so awesome. Doug’s show was quite a spectacle of sorts. Is it going to be a similar sort of spectacle this year?
It really is. The whole concept of the event is that we turn it over to an artist completely. To entice the artist of the caliber of Doug Aitken and Marina Abramović and Francesco Vezzoli, you really need to trust them and give them carte blanche. We have, again, turned the entire event over to an artist—this time Marina, who, as you know, is completely focused in performance, and it’s a true immersive experience. So everyone who comes to the event will be participating with her in this work of art, not unlike the way that people participated when they sat across the table from her at MoMA. It’s a very personal work of art, and you’ll feel that you’re a part of something that is really powerful.

She’s so fantastic. It’s really interesting, though, this being the year of Pacific Standard Time, and Los Angeles tooting our little horn, but the selection of the art and the performances this year is semi-New York-centric. Can you tell me a little about that?
Last year, we had The Artists’ Museum exhibition at the same time, and that was also celebrating the L.A. artist, and the last artist that we chose was the quintessential Los Angeles artist. I think what Doug did was very much about the experience of being an artist living in Venice, California: where he likes to eat, what informs him about being an artist in the West. I think you felt the influence of people like Ed Ruscha in the project. In this case, it was really time for it to be a woman, and less about the fact that she lives in New York. She’s a woman of Eastern European descent, she’s a woman of the world, and it’s more about the experience of being a woman and what it means as an artist. So that was really the thing that drew us to her. Also, she’s the living legend in the world of performance art. So, with someone with her stature, after having this exhibition at MoMA, with 600,000 visitors, to be able to have an experience where you’re in an intimate setting and participating in one of her works of art was really just extraordinary. So, despite the fact that it was the time of Pacific Standard Time, it was really much more about our own desire to do something that really related to being a woman. And that’s exactly what her project is.

It’s such a gigantic undertaking, and obviously you give the artist this complete creative direction, and I wonder about the process of her coming to you with ideas and how the museum carries that out.
Yeah, you know, as I’ve said sometimes with my co-chair Eli Broad, the two of us both knew, to allow an artist, to get a great artist to do this, you have to allow them really that creative freedom; so who am I judge or say, I would rather have this or that from someone of the stature of Marina Abramović. So really it is a total carte blanche situation, where she has the opportunity to do what she really wants to do. Her work is very personal, very much about her life, and in this case it’s very much about the life of a woman at this point in her life. And very interestingly, Debbie Harry, who she chose to collaborate with and have perform at the event, is exactly Marina’s age, they both live in SoHo, and they have that similar view of their life, of the world, and they’ve been through a lot, and I think it’s all about a life experience; so it’s really not New York/L.A., it’s really about just humanity.

The 2011 MOCA Gala Invitation photographed by Caroline Pham

We just did an issue about women. Not just young women, but strong and powerful women, and I’m wondering if it’s the time for women right now, if there’s a specific feeling in there.
I think that in the art world, in particular, women don’t get their proper due a lot of the time. I think that’s why there’s that fabulous show, that the [Centre] Pompidou did [elles@centrepompidou], which was all female artists. And now, you have the emergence of amazing female artists, but it’s still an interesting concept to think about: a woman’s role as an artist. And so, I think that’s what Marina makes you think about: you think about her life, and her experience, and it really applies to every woman, in a way. So, I think it’ll be really a powerful thing to share, and I think it will be controversial; I think there will be some people who will love this experience, and some people who will be a bit mystified by it. And I think that’s just part of the deal; if you’re going to participate in a piece of performance art, people walk away with a group of mixed reviews, and we kind of expect that, we expect that people will be powerfully affected one way or the other by what they experienced. And we’re willing to take that risk.

You say it’s going to be controversial. Do you feel like there’s something that she’s brought forth that’s really intense?
Her work is intense. As a friend said to me last night in New York, ‘Keep her away from the knives.’ She’s had some incredible, powerful, and sometimes even violent work that she’s done. But I think that they’re all very aggressive. After her major MoMA exhibition, where there was a lot of nudity and there were a lot of images that were disturbing, I think people have realized, who know anything about her, that that is a part of what she does, is that it’s not simply to shock you, it’s actually very much a celebration of the human body and the human spirit. And I think that is what people will experience on Saturday night. It would be very easy to get caught up in the idea that it’s just to shock, because of course, there will be things you’ve never seen at a Gala before. How will people respond to that? That’s the question mark. And so we’ll let it happen.

What Marina said to me just this weekend, she said, ‘Please please don’t tell people what to expect, because what I want is for them to experience it, and if they don’t, then the work is destroyed.’ With Doug, I could hint elements of the performance and things that might happen. With her, if you don’t come cold to it, and watch it unfold, and participate in it and walk away with what you got out of it, which is the artwork—your own personal experience is the artwork—then the artwork is lost. So, that’s why it’s really, really important this time that we have a code of silence about what she’s planning, and we allow people to truly experience it.

                                                                                 Debbie Harry

Can you tell me about working with Debbie Harry.
I met Debbie through Jeffrey Deitch, because they know one another. She’s an amazing performer and has an incredible history. And Debbie is someone that Marina really, really wanted to collaborate with on this project. She felt that, because they both have this extraordinary life experience, she felt a kinship with her, and I think that that was a big part of wanting to do this. So, I think it was really left in the hands of Marina, how that collaboration would work, and so I’m going to be seeing that unfold alongside everyone else.

Stepping away from the performance aspect a little bit, what makes the gala a successful one this year for you?
What’s really exciting to me is that this thing has developed into being something of a remarkable, talked about, legendary event. People still talk about Francesco Vezzoli and Lady Gaga and the Bolshoi and her playing that piano and the environment that created. And I think that’s the standard to which we want to make this event live up to each year, and really keep its strong identity. I think you’ll see that it does again this year. And for it to continue as a platform for artists to really express themselves in a very unique way, and take a group of people along with them on a journey into their work, that’s what it’s all about.

It’s such a celebrity-studded crowd, and an artist-studded crowd; it’s a really interesting group of people that get together to be a viewer kind of thing. Can you talk a little about the audience this year?
Yeah, it’s really the kind of destination. So some of the great collectors of the world, people like Steven and Alex Cohen are flying in for it, Peter Brant, collectors from New York City and Europe, and then there’s great artists who attend each year from all over the world. I think that a lot of it is the art world, but then we’re in Los Angeles, so you add in Los Angelinos, some of them who really support MOCA because of their civic duty, not as much because they’re big contemporary art lovers—some are and some aren’t. What’s exciting about that is that you get this cross-section of people to experience something and really see it in different ways. So that’s part of the work, is that it’s a diverse audience in that way, of different people from different places.

And because of the celebrity status of it, you take Marina’s work, which can reach 600,000 people in New York, but isn’t really mass culture—you can kind of disseminate it into a little bit more of the culture.
Many people in Los Angeles have read about her exhibition at MoMA, and heard about/read about her over the years, but never made it to MoMA to see it, and never experienced her work. I think until you do, it’s impossible to describe. So I think it will be amazing for people, especially those who really aren’t familiar with her work, to experience it.