Chrissie Iles

Seductive, fearless, and outrageous, Marina Abramovic has been redefining what art is for nearly forty years. Using her own body as a vehicle, pushing herself beyond her physical and mental limits - and at times risking her life in the process - she creates performances that challenge, shock, and move us. Through her and with her, boundaries are crossed, consciousness expanded, and art as we know it is reborn. She is, quite simply, one of the most compelling artists of our time.

Feature trailer for the documentary Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present. Known for her extreme performance-art installations, many involving nudity and punishing bodily deprivation, Marina Abramovi is one of the few artists of her generation still active in the field. A glamorous art-world icon, a lightning rod for controversy and a myth of her own making, she s tired of the alternative label after four decades of skepticism, and happy that the retrospective is the crowning achievement of her career, providing her the best opportunity to put performance art on the mainstream map. Performance art has never been a regular form of art, she says. 'It s always been alternative since I was born, so I want it to be a real form of art and respected before I die.' In addition to Abramovi herself, the film features interviews and scenes with collaborators, art commentators, friends and fans, including: art critic Arthur Danto; Chrissie Iles, curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Abramovi s gallerist, Sean Kelly; writer Tom McEvilley; illusionist David Blaine; and actor James Franco.

Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, discusses Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement. This exhibition brings together a group of new and rarely seen works by Paul McCarthy (b. 1945), one of the most important American artists of his generation. The installations, films, photographs, and drawings on view focus on a central element of McCarthy's practice: the way the body is destabilized through dislocations of architectural space. The disorientation that threads though all of the works shown here is at once formal, corporeal, and psychological. The screens, projectors, and rotating cameras of Spinning Room place the viewer at the center of hypnotic environment whereas the moving walls and doors of Bang Bang Room collapse our notion of stable architectural space. In Madhouse the walls and chair spinning at varying speeds conjure a similar state of physical and mental disorientation.