'The Artist Is Present' and Camera-Ready

The urgency of live performance art is impossible to re-create in a photo still or via written word. But recorded video gets us closer, which is why the new HBO documentary Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present is so endlessly engrossing.

Matthew Akers' documentary isn't intended as an everything-but-the-kitchen sink biographical portrait of the pioneering Serbian performance artist – for that, I'd recommend Judith Thurman's March 2010 profile in The New Yorker. Instead, the film focuses on the lead up to Marina Abramovic's career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the first such show devoted to a performance artist.

Using archival footage from her 40-year-long career, The Artist Is Present offer glimpses of the punishing, often endurance-based installations Abramovic has mounted, some of which she co-conceived with Ulay, her former lover. (In 1988, after walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, they met in the middle and dissolved their relationship – certainly more dramatic stuff than your garden-variety breakup squabble over custody of the pets.)

For the retrospective, Abramovic trains 40 young artists to restage her most famous pieces; in a retreat in the Hudson River Valley, she urges them in her hypnotic accent: "Artist have to be warrior." Indeed: Her installations look, at least, like a stage for battle – battle of the body and the mind – to sit still; to share breath; to slap a lover and be slapped repeatedly, till a wondrous kind of rhythm emerges. The Abramovic we see out of performance is softer – girlish, even, in her sixties – but the exhibitionist-bent never wanes. In life, as in her art, Abramovic is frequently shot nude (then again, it's unclear if Abramovic sees a distinction between her life and her art). In any case, there's never any doubt she knows precisely when the camera is trained on her, and she commands it with an effortless-seeming charisma.

Included in the MOMA show is a single new piece, from which the film derives its title, "The Artist Is Present." In one chair, Abramovic sits for 7 1/2 hours a day for three months straight. In another chair, directly across from her, thousands of museumgoers cycle through and sit silently with her, locking eyes. How rare is that kind of stillness, that kind of prolonged concentration on another human, in our day to day lives? The reactions of the participants vary: Some smile, some sneer, some giggle, some hold a hand to their breast in a gesture of love, many leak tears. It's profoundly moving, even from the remove of one's living room.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present debuts on HBO tonight (7/2), 8pm; see TV listings for repeat airings.