Caught in the ambient glow of overhead light fixtures, two figures sit staring at each other across a table. One of the figures is dressed in a long, flowing red gown reminiscent of clerical wear. The other is weeping inconsolably. For a moment, the world is theatrically halted, slowed to the pulse of dual heartbeats. Looking away quickly from the reverie on display, one acknowledges the frame: the cameras and the awaiting queue to the shrine in the Museum of Modern Art's atrium, where Marina Abramovic is sitting for 716 hours and 30 minutes for her new durational work, The Artist is Present, as members of the public take turns courting her — and challenging her — with their gaze.

The already notorious performance is part of the first full-scale retrospective of a performance artist ever organized at MoMA, spanning four decades of Abramovic's prolific and demanding practice, from her early ‘70s conceptual and sometimes death-defying “Rhythm” works through her collaborations with former partner and lover Ulay to Seven Easy Pieces, her 2005 Guggenheim restaging of seminal performance works by Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, and herself. Interspersed throughout the exhibit are reproduced versions of Abramovic's key works, presented by a host of often naked people she has trained to perform her work.

The artist’s early works are presented through photo stills and video documentation, which are mesmeric, unsettling, and recall an age before reality shows became balefully depressing entertainment. The show exhibition finds its heart in these works, like Abramovic's experiment with the dual effects of catatonia and schizophrenia medications in Rhythm 2, 1974, as she doubles over in pain or grins helplessly at the camera, and Freeing the Voice, 1975, in which she screams out in anguish until her larynx falters — a piercing melodrama that lodges itself in the mind and the ear, providing the soundtrack for the exhibit as a whole.

The adjoining room is given over to her collaborative projects with Ulay, a partnership that gripped the art world for over a decade. Their iconic work, Rest Energy, 1980, in which Abramovic gripped a bow while Ulay drew back an arrow and held it taught, facing her heart, fills the room with tension. In Three, 1978, a snake slithers along the floor between the couple, a curious messenger. The last of these works is the documentation of their mythic performative 1988 journey. The Lovers, along the Great Wall of China. The pair had originally planned to meet in the middle and marry, though their relationship had collapsed by the time they performed it, so they met, hugged, and parted instead. It's a genuinely moving work and a must-see for anyone who has experienced the bitter sting of lost love.

Further rooms reveal the breadth of the solo work Abramovic produced following the end of her partnership with Ulay. The most engaging project is her 2005 video, Balkan Erotic Epic, 2005, in which the enactment of various chthonic gestures presents a mythic and folkloric connection between woman and nature — stopping rain by the baring of female genitalia, for instance, or dry-humping the ground to fertilize the soil. It provides, intentionally or not, a peculiar satiric release for what is, after all, a rather po-faced career: Abramovic ever playing the straight woman in a world of increasingly risible banality.

Unfortunately, this strong archival documentation is underminedelsewhere by her decision to restage key performances. A structure in the second room houses two bewildered–looking couples, the first with their hair entwined to restage Relation in Time, 1977, the second standing with index fingers almost touching in a recreation of Point of Contact, 1980. What is missing in these recapitulated works is precisely what the show’s title promised: the artist's presence. They appear, at best, as illustrative footnotes. At worst, they are an inexplicable sideshow that unravels the patina of history in archival footage and deadens the electricity palpably present in the videos. The least successful of these works is the restaging of Imponderabilia, 1977, in which the artist and Ulay originally stripped naked and stood facing each other in the entrance to a gallery, forcing visitors to squeeze between them. With a rotating cast of performers who necessarily lack the artists' chemistry, and without the need to actually move through the bodies (MoMA has provided an alternative portal to the next gallery), it falls flat.

MoMA’s exhibition and Abramovic’s new performance prompt the question: What happens when the artist is no longer with us? Restaging has become an institutional touchstone recently, and it’s brave of the museum to tackle that issue so directly. The cultishness, charisma, and idiosyncratic touch of Abramovic's work, though, is what makes it so vital. Its absence undoes these reproductions. "It's not enough to die," Samuel Beckett wrote. “You have also to be forgotten.” The most generous act, he suggests, is to leave coming generations the space and freedom to reconsider form.

For the uninitiated, MoMA’s retrospective is a much-needed document of an artist’s courageous and haptic relation to the world. The museum is going about its usual business, identifying and canonizing a historical moment, creating a new platform for discussion in the process. What comes next is the preserve of up-and-coming artists determinedly in and of the world — a type of engagement that performance art, with its intimate connection to the context of its times, has long encouraged. It appears to be time for those new generations to ditch the karaoke machine of culture and, with full acknowledgment of the artifacts of the past, grapple with the new century.