It’s been a year since MAO brought in such a big name - Anish Kapoor in 2021 was a major coup for the gallery, but this time, it’s Marina Abramovic’s time in the spotlight.

Abramovic is best known for her conceptual performance art, and she pioneered bringing the viewer in as part of the work itself. You may have heard of The Artist is Present from 2010 where she would sit at a table for hours, and visitors would come and look her in the eyes (in silence, always silence). I still remember seeing the clips of her and her ex, staring and crying.

The exhibition at MAO is no different. I booked my ticket and got an email that said to wear comfortable shoes, given I’ll be standing for almost an hour, and I suddenly thought ‘what have I gotten myself into?’ But as an art nerd, I can’t turn down an opportunity to be part of an Abramovic piece. I remember learning all about her at university; she’s an icon!

Now before I go into detail about this exhibition, I should warn you, dear reader, that I’m an absolute cynical nightmare when it comes to performance art. I don’t get it. I’m a traditional oil-on-canvas type gal, and the concept of performative art has always been lost on me. Having said that, I also have a very open mind and was looking forward to seeing how my old stomping ground had been transformed by the world-famous Abramovic.

I arrived just in time for my slot, and after popping my bag in the lockers, I went upstairs and waited with others in absolute silence. Everyone quietly smiled and looked at one another as if to say ‘what the hell is about to happen?’.

While we waited for one of the facilitators (trained by the Abramovic Institute) to collect us, I caught the eye of a young woman and she asked if I was scared. I said no, I was curious about what was about to happen and her response made me laugh; “it’s so spooky, it’s like a horror movie”. She wasn’t wrong! The guides ask you to come forward, whisper that it’s a silent experience and that they will be putting headphones on you. Then they take you by the hand and walk you so slowly [it was like walking with my toddler] to a rose-gold open box. They then instructed me to close my eyes, and so it began…

I had a bad night's sleep thanks to my children, and I was almost late for my time slot, so I wasn’t in the best meditative state when I arrived. Eyes closed, ears shut down, I had nothing to do but to wait to be collected for the next step. And so I waited, and I started thinking about all the things I needed to pick up from town before heading home. It was only a few minutes but I started to feel heat above my head - was it from that random grey stone I saw? Or was my mind playing tricks on me? Before I knew it the guide was back, holding my clammy hand, and off we went to the next stop - a white square on the floor, facing a white wall. Once again, I was told to close my eyes and I was back, thinking, overthinking, trying not to think. I did warn you I’m not the best at this stuff.

The third moment of reflection was my favourite - I was blindfolded (with my consent) and sat on a chair. Phew - a chance to rest on my laurels! I *think* I was here the longest out of all the spaces, but time means nothing when all your senses are removed from you. I was asked if I wanted to watch a film, which of course I did, and then taken to the very last room which had a bizarre airport security looking gate with crazy bright lights coming out of crystals - you’ll have to see it to know what I’m talking about.

So, you’re probably wondering what I actually think of the exhibition, and here goes. I don’t entirely understand it and I don’t think I ever will; I’m just not that way inclined. I don’t meditate or do quiet time and so these moments of reflection don’t work for me at all. Watching the film of Abramovic hovering hands over inanimate objects at the Pitt Rivers just made me giggle like a schoolgirl.

HOWEVER - did I enjoy the pageantry of it all? Yes. Did I relish in the fact that I was part of an Abramovic piece? Absolutely. Would I encourage friends and family to go? 100%.

It won’t be for everyone, and I didn’t come out of it a different person, or having learned anything about myself. But, as Abramovic herself had written on one wall ‘It’s not going to change your life, but this is an attempt to do something different’, and that it truly was. I am definitely grateful to have had one full hour of not looking at a screen, not listening to my children ask for more snacks, or being responsible for anything.

I have to give a shout out to the true MVPs of the show; the facilitators who you have to put your full trust in. They slowed my walking, led me to where I needed to be, and never complained about all the sweaty and clammy hands they were holding.

This is a major step for MAO, not only because it’s the first fully immersive experience-based exhibition for a while, but it’s also the first to be ticketed - it costs £7.50 / £10 - so it’s going to be interesting to see how well it does!

I am lying prone on a black mat in a corner of the Modern Art Oxford Gallery. Moments earlier an attendant, clad in black, took my hand and wordlessly guided me through a black archway, out of which bolts of quartz jut with an oddly soothing uniformity, lit from within. The passage feels both ceremonial and collaborative; a path the attendant and I have agreed upon together.

It is these kinds of agreements and expectations within the gallery setting that form the basis behind Marina Abramovic’s Gates and Portals, now showing at Modern Art Oxford. The exhibition draws on the significance of sites of passage as vehicles for transition and transcendence. On entering the first space, sparsely decorated with a regiment of bronze frames, you relinquish control to a facilitator who hands you a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. After donning these, you are guided to a spot beneath one of these frames, or to a square marked out by the wall, and are tacitly instructed to stand in complete stillness.

This stillness can only be broken when a facilitator returns to remove you from that spot, at a time and to a place of their choosing. The exhibit is made up of exercises designed to heighten your sense of vulnerability; as is written on the walls, ‘once you enter the space of performance, you must accept whatever happens’. The sensory deprivation continues in the following portion, where you are blindfolded and led to sit on a chair for an indeterminate time. It’s an intriguing concept that raises some genuinely interesting questions about what our preconceptions of the gallery space are; what we expect it to give us, how we move through it, how we relate to others within it.

I found several times that I had to correct my pace to match the slow footsteps of the facilitator guiding me, which made me consider what I’d lost in these environments by moving at my usual speed. Surrendering control of your movements over to an outside force does instil a meditative sense of presence; opening your eyes to observe other museum goers (you are led in in discrete groups), felt taboo somehow, like opening one’s eyes during prayer. There is interest to be found in the sense of a collective pact created by the space.

However, to describe it, as she has, as her ‘most radical [show] conceptually to date’ is a bold claim on which the work itself does not fully deliver. Bear in mind this is an artist who, from the start, has encouraged active audience engagement with her work, to the point, as in Rhythm Zero, of drawing blood. Gates and Portals, which stripped of its trappings isn’t a huge departure from extremely conventional meditation or mindfulness practices, feels bloodless in comparison. Her press release waxes rhapsodic about the exhibit’s Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist influences, but does not engage with them directly or meaningfully enough for them to amount to much more than set dressing.

In a Q&A event before the exhibition’s opening, Abramovic expressed her desire to distance herself from the culture of celebrity that has built up around her work. Excising herself completely from the space for the audience to act as witness to itself has the potential to be as powerful a commentary on the archetype of ‘the artist’ as her Artist is Present performance at the MoMA in 2010. However, even in her physical absence the space is indelibly stamped with her brand, making the whole endeavour seem faintly cynical. An entire room of the exhibition (indeed, the only one where your sense of sight is fully employed) is devoted to close up, extended shots of Abramovic laying her hands over various objects from the Pitt Rivers Museum, where she is also currently exhibiting. The attendants guiding you through the space are trained in the ‘Abramovic Method’; her pronouncements as to what you must expect from the exhibit are written on the walls. It comes off as prescriptive, and it’s difficult to feel any real sense of transcendence when you are constantly reminded that that transcendence carries the Abramovic trademark.

What truly punctures the exercise is that it hinges on something of a flimsy premise. The show’s press release opines that ‘normally visitors to museums never have any kind of demands made of them; they come, they see the work, they go…here the visitors are not silent witnesses, they’re a part of the show and they participate in the show’. The emphasis on the participatory energy of the audience rings hollow when so much of this exhibit is dedicated to the sacrificing of agency. In that same Q&A, Abramovic asserted that ‘the performance cannot exist without the audience’. She concedes, then, that there is power in the act of witnessing, and yet it is a power that Gates and Portals so often goes out of its way to occlude.

One might argue that this frustration is part of the experience; ‘impatience, anger and the joy of being bored’, as the programme puts it. But how generative is recognising that frustration, really? Though billed as radical, implying this kind of active surrender to be a superior, more enlightened form of artistic engagement feels oddly reactionary, a ‘phones, but too much’ style condemnation of its audience for having the audacity to desire outside stimuli. But it is not wrong to want to look at beautiful or visually arresting things, and I have emerged from more conventional exhibitions than this one with a far greater sense of transformation. Where Gates and Portals falters is in its failure to recognise that any artwork can be a gateway, if only one chooses to open it.