Tilda Swinton's live performance art at the Museum of Modern Art was a surprise to visitors today, but the museum has actually been working on staging "The Maybe" for seven years. (See update below—she's back on Monday, March 25.)
"The Maybe" was originally staged by Swinton in 1995, at the Serpentine Gallery in London, in collaboration with the artist Cornelia Parker. Swinton later staged it in Rome and Paris, without Parker.
MoMA Chief Curator at Large Klaus Biesenbach revealed to us that discussions for bringing "The Maybe" to the MoMA started when Swinton was working on another museum project. Back in 2005, she started filming her scenes for the MoMA-Creative Time film installation, Doug Aitken's sleepwalkers, which involved eight films projected on the MoMA's exterior walls (it premiered in 2007). Biesenbach said, "We were sitting in a trailer... and we talked about 'The Maybe,'" and he mentioned to her that the museum wanted to bring back "historic" performance art.
Biesenbach, of course, is the man behind the museum's blockbuster Marina Abramovic retrospective, which included a piece where Abramovic sat across from museum vistors for 736 hours and 30 minutes in the atrium.
"The Maybe" will appear randomly at the MoMA, in different locations, throughout the year. Update: She's there again, Monday, March 25—details here.
