‘Presence’ as it is commonly understood entails the unmediated co-extensivity in time and place of what I perceive and myself – it promises a transparency to an observer of what ‘is’ at the very moment at which it takes place. But the event, the performance, through its very durationality (the fact that it enacts the body as always already escaping into the past) points to the fact that there is no ‘presence’ as this is commonly understood.
Adam Art Gallery release for lecture on Marina Abramović
