If you don’t know who Marina Abramovic is, you haven’t been paying nearly enough attention to James Franco. Franco (among many other famous art lovers) showed up to sing the famous performance artist’s praises in 2012’s The Artist Is Present, a documentary about Abramovic’s MOMA exhibit, “The Artist Is Present,” in which she sat in a chair and bravely kept sitting there while people gushed over it.
But all art is about evolution, and now the performance art world has a new luminary, Marina Abramopug, who, with the help of her human handler Hannah Ballou, bravely sat still in a park near an art gallery in London. It’s… it’s so beautiful. It’s really about nothing and everything all at once.
Ms. Abramopug’s handler and “senior personal assistant,” comedian and performance artist Hannah Ballou, describes her boss’s recent work as a huge success, with audience reaction ranging from “joy and hilarity to outrage and tears…so many tears.” Much like Abramovic’s assistants, Ballou is unpaid, but she claims that working for Abramopug is an absolute honor with its own rewards. “Sometimes she makes us collect her feces in little plastic bags,” Ballous says. “It’s a performance art thing. It’s totally worth it, though.” […]
What kinds of questions and emotions do you hope to provoke in your audience?
What is true presence? Where lies empathy? Whoosagooddog? [Vocativ]
I vigorously applaud and belly rub Ms. Abramopug and Ms. Ballou’s work. You can see lots more pictures of Marina Abramopug on her official Tumblr, but this has truly been eye opening. It just goes to show, performance art is sort of like driving a car or riding a skateboard. It’s much more impressive when a dog does it.