“The modern world we live in is one of constant distraction, where taking the time to connect to ourselves and having the patience to do so is becoming more and more difficult.” So writes the celebrated performance artist Marina Abramović, voicing sentiments that could have been expressed since the beginning of the urban industrialized era. Abramović, whose work explores, among other concepts, the metaphysical relationship between a performer and her audience, has spent her career taking simple ideas to daunting extremes—most famously in “The Artist Is Present,” in which she spent more than seven hundred hours sitting at a table in MOMA, staring wordlessly at strangers, in the spring of 2010. Her next project takes place in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, where Abramović will team up with the acclaimed young pianist Igor Levit (along with the lighting designer Urs Schönebaum) to offer “Goldberg” (Dec. 7-19), an evening-length act of ritual devotion centered on J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
