For Marina Abramović’s Counting the Rice performance, the artist seats volunteer participants at a desk with a pencil, a sheet of paper, and a pile of rice and lentils. They’re tasked with separating the grains, keeping a tally of each. And they’ll do this for six hours.
The performance piece, a workshop by the Marina Abramović Institute, is an exercise in what has become known as the Abramović Method—in other words, the concentration, self-control, and willpower it takes to, say, sit without moving in MoMA’s atrium across the table from the day’s visitors or to stand passively while gallery viewers are instructed to use any of 72 objects (a rose, a feather, scissors, a scalpel, a gun, a bullet) on her in whatever way they choose.
When it comes to sitting for six hours, the seat in question takes on newfound importance. Designed by architect Daniel Libeskind with Italian furniture manufacturer Moroso, it’s an austere, sharp-cornered structure that folds around the seated participant like a piece of plywood origami—an iteration of a school desk in which the writing surface is connected to the chair.
Now Moroso will produce individual-size versions of the table in a limited edition of 30. With clean lines rendered in high-performance cement, they feel like works of art themselves—the intangible performance piece given physical form.
For more information, visit moroso.it.
