Marina Abramovic: An Interview

By David Ebony 5/5/09

If there’s anyone who can rightly be called an art-world diva, it’s Marina Abramović. A preeminent performance artist with a commanding presence on the international art scene for over 30 years, Abramović is known for intense duration-based works that demand extraordinary physical, mental and emotional strength. The Belgrade-born artist has also produced an imposing array of sculptures, installations, photos and video pieces. As Abramović approaches 64, she and her work (in many respects one and the same thing) are as vital and visible as ever. She was one of the five women artists featured in Chiara Clemente’s recent documentary, Our City Dreams. Last year, in Europe, Abramović showed a provocative new multi-screen video, Eight Lessons on Emptiness with a Happy End, and a related photo series, “The Family,” all shot in Laos. She is the curator of an extensive performance-art program at this summer’s Manchester International Festival [U.K., July 2-19]. Two of the biggest endeavors on her horizon are the Marina Abramović Institute in Hudson, N.Y., slated to open in 2012, and a career retrospective that will debut next year at New York’s Museum of Modern Art [Mar. 9-May 31, 2010] before embarking on a two-year international tour. On a recent visit to her office in Manhattan, I inquired about many of these projects and others.

View Slideshow Marina Abramovi´c: Portrait with Potatoes, 2008, chromogenic print, 48 inches square. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. All works © Abramovi´c/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.; The Family VII, 2008, chromogenic print, 881⁄2 by 707⁄8 inches. Works this article, unless otherwise noted, courtesy Guy Bärtschi Gallery, Geneva.;

DAVID EBONY: I would like to focus our conversation today on your recent experiences in Laos, the video and photos you produced there. But let’s begin with your upcoming MoMA show. Marina Abramović First I’d like to show you the model of the MoMA installation and tell you about some of the plans for the retrospective. I haven’t really shared them with anyone yet. The show’s titled “Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present,” and it opens one year from yesterday. I’m very excited about it.

DE: From the model, it looks like a very elaborate installation.

MARINA ABRAMOVIC: It’s going to be a radical display. It covers only my performance works. You know, basically I have made three groups of works: Artist Body works—these are my performances, and the focus of the MoMA show; Public Body works, including sculptures and interactive public installations, which aren’t so well known in the U.S.; and the Student Body works, about my teaching young artists to perform. It was Klaus Biesenbach [P.S.1 and MoMA curator] who decided to cover only the first group in the retrospective.

The show begins with the actual car, or van, that Ulay [Uwe Laysiepen, Abramović’s early collaborator and life-partner for 12 years] and I lived in, traveled in and worked out of for several years early in our careers. In another room there will be slide projections, or rather videos to replace the slide projections that everybody used a lot in the 1970s. To represent my early performances that were restaged at the Guggenheim in 2005 [see A.i.A., Feb. ’06], we’ll show the videos made at that time.

DE: Are all the performances going to be represented by documentary material?

MA: Actually, we are auditioning performers right now—we need to hire 17 in all—who will reenact some of my past performances every day in the museum galleries. For a few of the pieces, I need someone with some experience with Butoh. The question here is also time. I can’t expect performers to do these endurance tests all day long. There are some great challenges for the performers. Plus, there’s a commitment of three months. This part of the exhibition will end with Balkan Baroque [Abramović’s hours-long performance, in which she frantically scrubbed with a brush heaps of butchered cow bones, and which many saw as a response to the war and carnage in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia].

DE: That was the first of your performances I saw in person [at New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery in 1995]. It was really unforgettable.

MA: You know, I toured that performance for about four years, and for four years after I still smelled the bloody bones on me. Even if I didn’t really smell the bones, I thought I smelled them.

DE: Will you perform during the run of the show?

MA: Yes, every day. I’m planning that now. I’ll appear each day on a sort of shelflike platform, one of 10 attached almost like a series of steps on the main wall of the second-floor atrium. It will be a very simple arrangement, with just me on the platform and a few props and objects, maybe.

DE: Will you be living there, as you did in The House with the Ocean View [a 12-day performance at Sean Kelly in 2002]?

MA: No, they won’t allow me to. It’s against museum security and regulations. I’ll have to leave at closing time. It will be like a regular workday for me. I want to be humble and vulnerable in the work. I’ll start from the top down. I’ll be on each step for approximately one week. I’ll use some different objects. It will be about a kind of geographic and spiritual journey of an artist. I’m planning to have lounge chairs in front of the wall, like beach chairs, where the visitors can sit and watch. There will be telescopes, too. The idea is that you really can see the detail if you want, but you can also see the entire image. I will leave objects on the platforms as I go. I’m thinking of it basically as a luminous painting on the wall.

On one of the platforms, I’m thinking of wearing nothing but an enormous strap-on dildo. The idea is a personal one from when I first started to study art. I was full of hope, but a professor said you don’t have the balls to be an artist. I went home crying desperately, thinking I could never be an artist because I’m not a man. So I have this idea now to appear with a really grotesque, huge penis. But it won’t be used for the same kind of feminist statement as Lynda Benglis’s Artforum ad from the 1970s. And it’s not about porn images. It’s about the artist being self-sufficient, and using a kind of male-female equilibrium.

DE: I wonder if MoMA will let you do that!

MA: Well, it will be on one of the upper levels, so they’ll have to climb way up there or send a helicopter or something to get me. Another idea I have is based on the Hindu goddess Kali, and some ancient images of the goddess with six heads. But the work will also represent a kind of circle of life. We’ll see. The biggest problem now is finding the money for this, and for the 586 hours of recordings I’m planning.

DE: You still have some time.

MA: Yes, one year. But the catalogue materials are due the first of June. Arthur Danto is writing the essay, and I’ve been meeting with him several times a week to discuss the work. Another thing I want to do is record an Acoustiguide to the show. I’ve always been fascinated by those. I’ll explain the story of each of my works in English, French, Italian, German and Slavic. I’ll even try Chinese, although I don’t think I could do it very well. Plus, all the early videos have to be restored and upgraded, so we need funding for that. There’s so much to do. It’s just insane. I’m also working on a theater piece with Robert Wilson titled The Life and Death of Marina Abramović. It will premiere in 2011 and, hopefully, coincide with the other venues that the retrospective travels to after MoMA.

DE: Finding funding for a project like this must be extraordinarily difficult today.

MA: Yes, we are having an incredible economic crisis. But performance art really thrives during bad economic times. Performers always arrive when there’s nothing to sell. Joan Jonas and I are maybe the only ones left from the early days still performing. But performance has always been an alternative art form. Beginning in the ’80s, there was huge pressure on artists to make objects—to make paintings or sculptures. Maybe now things will be different. At the same time as my show, Tino Sehgal will be doing some performances at the Guggenheim Museum. And Klaus [Biesenbach] will be directing a performance workshop at that time. It will cover all of these questions: What are the conditions for performance art? How should documentation be made and presented? What is even considered an artwork?