Going Over the Line

In Josephine Decker’s new film, Shirley (and in life generally), being a muse is a trap.

- By Lila Shapiro

A DECADE AGO, ON a warm night in May, a young woman took off her dress in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art. A murmur rose from the startled crowd. For an exhilarating moment, she stood there naked. In front of her, the renowned performance artist Marina Abramovic sat in a wooden chair, her head bowed, her white dress stretching all the way from her neck to the floor. Abramovic had been sitting in that chair for two and a half months. Thousands of visitors had taken turns sitting across from her, bathing in her gaze. But the young woman would never get a chance to take part in this singular ritual. As she began to sit, a phalanx of guards surrounded her, told her to put her dress back on, and led her away. Flustered and tearful, she tried to explain herself to a documentary crew outside the exhibition. “I would have obeyed the rule if I had known,” she said. “I just wanted to be as vulnerable with her as she makes herself to everyone else.”