Twenty minutes after it opened to the public, there was already a line out the door and around the corner to see “Generator,” the new Marina Abramovic exhibition at the Sean Kelly Gallery on Thursday night.
Well, “see” is not exactly accurate, since the show has its visitors put on blindfolds. They don’t hear it either: to participate, they must put on noise-canceling headphones. The installation is more experiential, in line with the show that Ms. Abramovic opened this summer in London at the Serpentine Gallery, the first since her 2010 blockbuster retrospective “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA. At the Serpentine, for “512 Hours,” named for the amount of time Ms. Abramovic spent in the gallery, she led people around an empty space, whispering to them and occasionally handing them objects.
“Generator” is even more stark: It focuses on “nothingness.” Ms. Abramovic merely will drop in daily, unannounced, to participate.
“It took me 25 years to have the courage, the concentration and the knowledge to come to this, the idea that there would be art without any objects, solely an exchange between the performer and the public,” reads her artist statement on the wall of the gallery.
In practice, this means that visitors must give over their belongings, including cellphones, stashing them in lockers in the gallery. Then they don the blindfolds and headphones, and are led into the exhibition space by black-clad assistants, and left to fend for themselves.
“It’s a slow-motion experience,” an assistant told me before she walked me in, a guiding hand on my shoulder. You can stand, walk around or sit, she added, and raise a hand when you’re ready to leave, for someone to lead you out.
It took only a few moments in the space for me to encounter another figure, dressed, I could dimly see, in black, and smelling of good perfume. She took my left hand and held it for a few seconds. Was this Ms. Abramovic? I walked some paces and sat against a wall, where several people stumbled into me.
“We ask everyone to move slowly, and run into each other with grace,” another assistant said afterward. After what felt like 10 minutes but turned out to be closer to 20, I raised my hand. It was not total sensory deprivation — I could still hear the bustling party outside — but it was surprisingly meditative and relaxing.
“It was wonderful,” said Marianne Jacobsen, 54, after she went through. “I felt very safe. And then you bump into a wall and you don’t know – should I follow that?” She fumbled around for a while. “Then I bumped into someone else, and we just hugged.”
Ms. Jacobsen, a casting and production director for art and films from the West Village, who once worked with Ms. Abramovic to cast a piece in Norway, added that she understood the appeal of her work. “People respond to experience,” she said. “That experience you carry with you. It can’t be stolen,” or sold, like a traditional artwork. Although in this case, it can be published online: Visitors are invited to record their thoughts and experiences in written notes, which will then be shared on social media.
Only 68 people are allowed in the room at a time, a nod to Ms. Abramovic’s age – she turns 68 in November. “She’s kind of cool, because she doesn’t care if people know her age,” said Mr. Kelly, her longtime gallerist, who suggested the number as the capacity for the exhibit. The gallery has so far made no plans for the kind of crowds that enveloped “The Artist Is Present,” with people waiting hours to get in and sit opposite a motionless, wordless Ms. Abramovic, but Mr. Kelly said that he expects the exhibit, which runs through December 6, to be busier at the end than the start. “It builds,” he said.
The woman who grasped my hand, as it turned out, was not Ms. Abramovic. She was hidden away, sipping tea in a backstage office (though she did participate in a preview hour, interacting with friends like the musician Rufus Wainwright and the curator Klaus Biesenbach). In a brief interview, she explained that “Generator” was born out of “512 Hours,” when she became taken with the idea of removing herself and her art-star status from the work. “This is the thing: people want to see you, and then go home,” she said. “This is not about that.”
In “512 Hours,” she said in her accented English, “I was there every single day, but the last two weeks I understood, that I turn like a key into generator and the generator is working without me.” Moving among visitors with their eyes closed, she felt she could blend in. “I was just one of public,” she said. “It’s not about my experience, it’s about the experience of other people.”
That thinking removed the artwork from the realm of commodity, she continued. Unlike the London show, she will not be paid for the time she spends at “Generator.” But she does hope that visitors will spend hours, as some did at MoMA. “The more time you spend, the more benefit you have,” from the work, she said.
That goes for her, too. She plans to follow people’s comments online, but dropping in daily, to put on the blindfold and the headphones and stumble around her brightly-lit gallery, will be her own retreat. “To come here and just be for three hours in the space, it’s wonderful,” she said. “Nobody can reach you, nobody can find you, what you have better, ever? It’s like brain spa.”