33 Artists in 3 Acts (36 page)

The Artist Is Present

2010

SCENE 5

Marina Abramovi

“N
onverbal interaction is the highest form of communication,” declares Marina Abramovi
, an artist who sees her medium as “immaterial energy.” She is in her kitchen in Malden Bridge, upstate New York. The room occupies one prong of a house with a star-shaped floor plan and walls that are full of windows but free of art. The windows yield views of dense woods and a lap pool where, on summer mornings, she swims exactly twenty-one laps. “I have never been influenced by another artist,” she maintains in an urgent whisper with a Serbian accent. She finds forests, waterfalls, and volcanoes much more inspiring. “I like to go to the source, to all the places in nature that have a certain energy that you can absorb and translate into your own creativity as an artist.” Born in Belgrade, Abramovi
lived all over the world before settling in the city and countryside of New York.

Abramovi
’s milestone performance
The Artist Is Present
(2010) had her sitting all day, every day, for three months in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, engaging in silent one-to-one encounters with members of the public. To preserve her energy, she didn’t speak to anyone but museum staff after hours. Now that the speechless blockbuster is over, Abramovi
delights in mile-a-minute monologues that manage to answer many of the questions I would have asked if I could have got a word in. “Ideas can come anytime,
anywhere, while I am making this gazpacho or going to the bathroom,” she says as she chops tomatoes from her garden. “I am only interested in the ideas that become obsessive and make me feel uneasy. The ideas that I’m afraid of.”

At the moment, Abramovi
describes herself as “blank.” Indeed, the artist is physically and emotionally exhausted from
The Artist Is Present
. She sat still in a basic wooden chair for over 700 hours, giving “unconditional love to complete strangers,” as she puts it. After the first week, she started to experience severe pain. “Your shoulders drop, your legs swell, your ribs sink down into your organs,” she explains. Strategic breathing helped. So did out-of-body experiences. “When you have so much pain, you think you will lose consciousness. If you say to yourself, ‘So what, lose consciousness,’ the pain goes away.” During the performance, she claims that she could sometimes smell with the precision of a dog and felt she had “360-degree vision, like a blind man who can see with the body.”

Despite her discomfort, Abramovi
thrived on the energy of the audience, some half a million people over the course of the show. “If it was just for my own self-realization, I would never have had this energy,” she explains, “but if I do it for the public, I can bring a higher motivation.” Over 1,700 people sat down and stared into Abramovi
’s eyes; many of them were moved to weep. At least seventy-five people repeated the ritual more than a dozen times. Abramovi
’s concurrent retrospective, installed on the fifth floor of MoMA, was the first large-scale historical survey of the work of a performance artist in America. The exhibition of her forty-year oeuvre—much of it in the form of documentation, some of it reenacted by performers—enhanced the aura of the artist’s presence on site. Over the course of the show, the cult of Abramovi
swelled. “This larger-than-life thing is a dangerous state,” she observes. “Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.” The artist seeks to follow the lessons of Tibetan monks in order to stay humble. Yet it’s complicated when the artist herself is the raw material of the work.

Abramovi
distinguishes between her “high” performing self and her “low” private self. As she pours her “signature gazpacho” into two
white bowls, she trots out her definition of performance art: it is “a construction in which the artist steps from the low self to the high self in front of the public, or from the ordinary self to a different kind of zone and higher state of mind.” She concedes that her low self is “full of contradictions” and “things that you are ashamed of,” such as beautiful clothes. “I love fashion,” she confesses. “In the 1970s, that made you a bad artist.” A love of cars or strip bars tended not to have a commensurate effect. Artistic credibility has long been subject to both subtle and flagrant forms of male bias.