Marina Abramović has turned art into an endurance sport. For her participatory performance The Artist Is Present at the MoMA in New York in 2010, she sat in a chair six days a week, seven hours a day – for a total of more than 700 hours – without eating or drinking, waiting for a viewer to take a seat and make contact with her. In her diverse and extreme performances, she braved fire and cold, juggled knives and venomous snakes, walked more than 2,500 kilometres across the Great Wall of China and screamed until she lost her voice. In a career that spanned half a century, this performance art pioneer, born in Belgrade in 1946 and a graduate of the School of Fine Arts, sought the most extreme ways to push her limits.
To discover
- All the recipe ideas from the editors: download the Le Figaro Cuisine app
His fame has gone beyond avant-garde circles and, after the MoMA, the Royal Academy of Arts in London is now dedicating a major retrospective to him entitled After Life. The exhibition will highlight the breadth of his work – from photography to video, objects, installations and, of course, performances. In New York, where she has lived for years, Marina Abramović shows us a little pink book on which she has jotted down quotes that inspire her. These include an Andy Warhol aphorism: "Nobody looks at anything, it's too hard," and the title of an exhibition by Georgia O'Keeffe, To See Takes Time. "Time, effort, and attention are at the center of my work," she says. His works bear witness to this.
Madame Figaro. – What is the link between performance art and the dimension of time?
Marina Abramovic. – It's the same one that connects art and life. These two realities are revealed through actions that are located at both ends of the same axis. The action of art in life can manifest itself in an interventionist mode. The artistic gesture then interrupts a series of events, such as Nam June Paik cutting a tie, a graffiti artist who transforms a cityscape in one night, Gianni Motti disrupting a tennis match from a Roland-Garros stand. This type of gesture produces a short circuit in a given time dimension. It is therefore one event interrupted by another, which breaks a continuum. Otherwise, the action produced by the artist is positioned on an autonomous plane, i.e. it is not superimposed on any other external event and is sufficient in itself. It takes place, for example, in a closed space – a museum or a theatre – which can take on the contours of a world with its own times.
All your works are traversed by a very particular scansion of time. You seem to want to capture every moment in order to make it essential. How did you achieve this?
Each of my performances is a tribute to the smallest detail of existence. I celebrate the glory of the little things. My personality, however, is anything but minimalist. I'm very baroque. My job then is to remove elements, to reduce. I am inspired by the work of painters such as Nicolas de Staël or Josef Albers, who worked all their lives to lighten their canvases, renouncing thickness in favor of fluidity. In their drawings, they seek purity, always giving more presence to the white of the paper. When we're young, we tend to hoard, because we hide our insecurity behind abundance. As we move forward, we learn to visualize energy, to dose it and to channel it. I've become good at it. I want to get closer to minimal art, until the object disappears. When I'm in front of an audience, it's all about time. I have to stop them from looking at the watch. Time is that dimension that people perceive when they are bored. I have to make sure that they forget it and that they get lost in the moment that I create and in which time no longer exists.
Marina Abramovic in the video The Current, in 2017. Marina Abramovic
You've created a Marina Abramovic Institute that offers five-day workshops promising an "inner reset." Watches and phones are not allowed... Participants are not allowed to talk, read, or eat for five days. Tell us!
My method teaches mindfulness in an artistic form. I impart breathing and movement exercises that teach you to "be in the here and now". They help increase concentration, attention, and stamina. For example, I instruct them to walk backwards for four hours holding a mirror, so that they realize that reality is just a reflection. Another exercise is to perform tasks in slow motion for an entire day: drinking water, walking, taking a shower... even urinating. The following exercises are more focused on creativity.
My personality is anything but minimalist, I'm very baroque
Marina Abramović
What did you experience yourself on stage while being in states of extreme concentration?
That time is an illusion. I'll tell you something I've never told you: during my performance The Artist Is Present, in which I sat in a chair at MoMA, six days a week, seven hours a day, I had hallucinations, accompanied by an extraordinary energy. I had a very sexual dream, of a snake and a turtle making love. It was a kind of cosmic dance. At one point, the snake opened its mouth and devoured the turtle. I woke up sweating. Then I realized the obvious meaning of this dream.
That is?
The snake represented the cosmic energy that swallows the human perception of time, embodied by the tortoise. In an essay entitled Time Abolished, physicist David Bohm and Indian thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti explain that people must learn to broaden their horizons, starting from small, painstakingly executed tasks to gain a sense of the global good and rediscover compassion and love. One can only free oneself from human egocentric activity through a certain type of penetrating vision, which allows one to perceive that beyond thought there is only energy and form. No "me", no time.
Jungle Retreats
How did you yourself learn to enter this dimension of time where "the mind is silent and empty of thoughts," as you put it?
We're talking about a fifty-five-year career. I've done a lot of spiritual traveling. I stayed with the aborigines for five years in the Central Siberian desert; I have participated in many jungle retreats with Tibetan monks. I went to Brazil, looking for minerals and crystals. On this trip, I met spiritual healers, including medium João de Deus and Rudá Iandê, a shaman who uses indigenous plants and traditions to purify the body and mind. I'm like a guinea pig. I explore the limits of body and mind. For me, it's all about curiosity and vision. I have been dedicated to Tibetan Buddhism for almost thirty years, and it is always interesting for me to discover other ways of working in the field of spirituality.
How did you conceive your retrospective at the Royal Academy?
The first project, born in 2020, planned a chronological exhibition, but I decided to take the concept from scratch just after Covid. We decided to mix eras, create correlations of ideas, and mirror pieces from all decades. Each piece in the exhibition – twelve in all – expresses a theme. Several themes, including Absence of the Body and Limits of the Body, feature a work on physical endurance that I have been doing since my beginnings. The Communist Body, for example, will highlight the impact that life in the former Yugoslavia and communist ideals have had on my work. Visiting the Source of Nature talks about different cultures – Tibetan, Aboriginal, Shaman, Brazil – and describes my quest for transcendence. The exhibition is a journey. Performances will take place every day, several times a day.
Time is that dimension that people perceive when they are bored
Marina Abramović
Among the visitors to your performance The Artist is Presentwas your ex-partner, the German artist Ulay, whom you hadn't seen for twenty years. Viewers remember the intensity of your looks when he sat down in front of you...
I had given different instructions: the spectators could not touch me or talk to me. Everyone sat in front of me and communication came through the gaze, the vibrations. The last time Ulay and I saw each other was on the Great Wall of China. In 1988, for our last performance together, we walked from opposite ends of the Wall to meet in the middle. We traveled thousands of miles and, after three months of walking, we found ourselves... to separate us for good. We hugged and said goodbye. When he sat in front of me at MoMA, I was overwhelmed with emotion. The initial purpose of this performance was to create stillness, to slow down time and people. That's what happened.
When you go to visit an exhibition, what rhythm do you follow?
I never go from one painting to another, capturing photos. What's the point of all those images lost in a smartphone if they're taken compulsively, when we haven't even taken the time to analyze our emotions in front of a work? I force myself to stand for at least six minutes in front of a work. I'm waiting. Sometimes I try to redraw the essential features in a notebook, which helps me to communicate with the artist. Sometimes I find a gateway and move into another dimension, a universe. It's a magical, real time, a source of inspiration.
Seven Hours with Rothko
Who are the artists in front of whom you have experienced the strongest emotions?
I had a very strong experience in front of works of Sumerian civilization seen in the Louvre. An image of fish going up a river against the current had a particular resonance with me. I recognized myself in this illogical movement. Another time, I found myself in a chapel in Texas: a meditation space adorned with paintings by Mark Rothko. I stayed there for seven hours straight. It's hard for me to describe what happened inside me. I was crossed by its shades and gradations of colors. It reminded me of a retreat I had done with Sufi masters during the fall. They woke me up at four in the morning, and I had to spend seven hours picking leaves that had fallen from tree branches. It was absurd, but precisely because there was no logic, it became interesting. Through these exercises, one gains access to a state of consciousness that the rational part of the brain cannot comprehend. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin said, "Music is not the notes but what is between the notes." I always wonder what is at stake in this "in-between". I look for this space during my performances.
Are you ever scared before a performance?
Of course! I remember a performance in an Austrian gallery in 1975 in which I carved a five-pointed star on my stomach with a razor blade. The pain was like a wall that you had to cross to find an exit on the other side. In my autobiography Walk Through Walls, I talk about my quest as an artist to overcome limitations, whether physical or psychological.
You've also written two books...
The first is a beautiful book in which I tell through texts, drawings and photos, my passion for hotels all over the world, where I spend a lot of time because I am always traveling. The second is a visual autobiography that looks back at all periods of my life. I sent 25,000 photos to the publisher, and then we made a choice. I just celebrated my 76th birthday, and I'm still thinking that I'm just getting started. A lot of people are like, "Oh my God, this is the end of the journey," but I don't see it that way. I feel like I still don't know anything, or not enough, and I still look at the world through the eyes of children.
After Life, until January 1, 2024, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.