For 736.5 hours in 2010, Marina Abramović made eye contact with three-quarters of a million people in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. For two hours in 2015, Carly Berlin ’18 and Tessa Westfall ’18 made eye contact with twenty people in the David Saul Smith Union at Bowdoin College.
Abramović is known as a pioneer of performance art, particularly in her use of the body as a medium. For forty-two years, she has dedicated herself to fostering temporary spaces designed for vulnerability and psychic connection with her audience. In 1974, Abramović performed “Rhythm 0,” in which she placed seventy-two items on a table—including a feather, a scalpel and a loaded gun—and sat passively while her audience wielded these objects on her body as they chose.
We tinkered with the idea of schlepping a table into the Union with a Bowdoin Log, a Canada Goose, and a loaded gun. But we couldn’t afford the jacket.
We decided to go with “The Artist is Present.” If Marina could make eye contact for three months straight with minimal bodily harm, heck, we could too.
Participants in our rendition were permitted to make eye contact with either of us for however long they wanted. They were allowed to speak or move freely, as long as their eyes remained locked with ours. We did not allow ourselves to respond; we wanted to recreate Abramović’s stoicism to allow participants their own experiences as projected through us, rather than as a shared experience with us. While one of us made eye contact, the other would record observations and keep time.
First, Tessa sat down with her future roommate, who she had pried away from his calculus problem set.
“You’re just making eye contact with people,” he said dismissively.
After an excessive amount of whining about how no one was going to show up, he decided to comply. Four and a half minutes of sustained eye contact later, he stood up, hugged Tessa.
“I feel much closer to you. I’m glad we did that,” he said.
Throughout the evening, we saw a slew of responses.
For some, holding eye contact was excruciating. One girl made two attempts: first clocking in at fifteen seconds, and then removing her jacket, only to make it for twelve.
“I’m finding out horrifying information about myself,” she said.
Most participants began by smiling and giggling uncomfortably. Some were able to breach that stage, their faces settling into a focused, though often tense, expression.
In Abramović’s performance, nobody was allowed to speak and many participants sat silently across from the artist and cried. The addition of speaking in our piece created a different dimension for exploration. Nobody cried, but we did hear a few confessions. Something about eye contact as a pause from all other activities seemed to make strangers eager to share intimate details of their lives.
“I’m secretly applying to the same internship as my best friend. I’m not telling her because I know I’ll get it and she won’t,” one participant said, while eating his seaweed snacks and blinking excessively. “Look, I’m confessing things to you.”
A complete stranger sat down and began describing a New York Times article she had read for a class. She shared her unease that a past hookup had been featured in it.
“Things like that have been happening a lot in my life recently,” she said. “This is the stillest I’ve sat all day.”
At least four people began with, “I guess I’ll tell you about my day.”
Some people had impressive stamina. We had to cut off one person after 15 minutes, though she probably could have gone all night. She did not stop talking about the tragedy of unreasonable peanut allergies, about her first-year floormate who returned at ungodly hours with mysterious golf clubs, about how she would “rather be happy than funny.” Unlike other participants, this girl said she was talking because she likes to talk, not because she was uncomfortable with the silence. We question this in retrospect.
Our second-longest lasting subject went for around seven minutes, and sat in complete silence.
“It was fine,” she said afterward.
For Tessa, it was decidedly not fine. As soon as the girl rounded the corner, Tessa had a conniption and needed to walk it off. The silent space felt emotional for Tessa, who was busy crafting an internal narrative of all the connection that was occurring in the space between them. As blank canvases, we committed ourselves to not revealing our personal responses so that the subjects could have his or her own space to experience. In practice, though, it was admittedly difficult when this participant articulated no significant reaction.
In Introduction to Psychology last semester we learned that people are hardwired to recognize faces in their surroundings. But when we look closely for an amount of time that feels unnatural, faces cease to be faces and become Picassos and aliens, all eyes and noses and skin. We become hyper-conscious of our own faces and movements while under the unwavering gaze of another.
We found ourselves wondering: what does all this say about a person? We never get someone that sits across from us silently and gives us their full attention. Something about this non-verbal, non-tactile interaction triggers something deeper. It allows for both introspection and connection; you can be deeply alone yet irrevocably engaged with another person at the same time. There’s nothing to hide behind. What emotional connection would happen if we did this all the time?
In a six-by-six foot study room on the third floor of Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, we made eye contact with each other for a predetermined four minutes. We willed it to be an emotionally significant moment for us. It was not. With the pressure off, we felt only calm.