NEW YORK — It’s
not the kind of performance that will win her another Academy Award, but Tilda
Swinton certainly has them buzzing at the Museum of Modern Art.
But keep it
down, please. She’s trying to sleep.
The “Moonrise
Kingdom star has been engaging in a different kind of performance art. She’s
presenting a one-person piece called “The Maybe,” in which she lies sleeping in
a glass box for the day. The first performance was over the weekend, and the
museum won’t say if there’s a schedule for when exactly it will come back for
six other performances.
On Monday, the
display drew a line of spectators that wound through a whole second-floor
gallery into a museum hallway.
Erwin
Aschenbrenner, a bemused German tourist, said it “just what you’d expect to see
at MoMA.”
The actress “is
so pale and not moving in there that she looks like she’s dead,” said Robbie
von Kampen, 20, a philosophy major at Bard College, north of New York City.
But after about
seven hours a day of the shuteye pose on a white mattress in the glass box —
with only a carafe of water and a glass to get her through — Swinton can
stretch and walk off into the Manhattan night. But only when spectators leave.
So what’s the
point?
“This makes me
think about myself, looking at her,” said Quinn Moreland, 20, also a Bard
student, majoring in art history.
“You don’t
usually get to stare at somebody like this; it makes me self-conscious,” she
explained.
Added von
Kampen, “Yeah, it’s socially unacceptable — it’s kinda creepy.”
No one, not
even museum curators, could say whether the thin, mostly immobile Swinton is
actually getting some sleep while people stare at her.
At least
Swinton was comfortable. She wore a pair of grubby sneakers, dark sporty slacks
and a checkered shirt. Her glasses lay on the mattress.
But no snacks
were in sight. And none could be offered in the closed chamber.
Swinton also
starred in a glass box in 1995 at London’s Serpentine Gallery — seven days,
eight hours a day — in an exhibition seen by 22,000 people.
The next year,
she repeated the spectacle at the Museo Barracco in Rome.