Pain, Power, Performance: Inside The World Of Marina Abramovic
Perhaps you’ve heard the following story: a woman sits motionless in a room with a table of dangerous objects and challenges her audience to do whatever they like to her. They do, and she remains completely still. It was a terrifying glance into the human psyche. That woman was Marina Abramović, and her career as an artist is a truly remarkable one.
Rhythm 0
Abramović is known as “the grandmother of performance art.” Her exhibits tend to represent tremendous tests of grit and endurance. Take her most famous one, Rhythm 0, the piece where she sat in front of a table.
On said table were items including a whip, scissors, a gun, and a rose. She told the assembled audience could do whatever they wanted to her with those objects: the results were deeply unsettling.
Violated
Abramović later said that she learned, “If you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.” Knowing they could hurt her without consequences, some people became violent and aggressive towards her.
She later recounted, “I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly six hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”
Dedication
The performance piece was regarded as a success, despite the horrors inflicted on Abramović. It had helped to demonstrate an unpleasant truth about human nature, and Abramović’s utter, terrifying dedication was all part of the piece.
Art critic Thomas McEvilley claimed of the event, “She was so committed to the piece that she would not have resisted rape or murder.” It goes without saying that for most people, this kind of act would be completely unthinkable.
Abramović’s past
What sort of woman would dedicate herself to art so completely? Abramović’s past might hold the key. She was born in Serbia, which was then part of Yugoslavia, and her parents were both considered heroes of World War II.
Abramović’s parents became government workers and the budding artist was sent to live with her very religious grandparents until she was six. But once her parents began raising her, things weren’t easy.
Harsh parents
Abramović’s parents were very strict, and she remained in their household until she was 29 years old. Abramović said it was an abusive relationship, claiming her mother would beat her for “showing off” and not allow her much freedom.
She wasn’t allowed to leave the house after 10:00 p.m., so many of her most famous early performance pieces were completed before that deadline. Such rules made living her everyday life difficult.
Sacrifice
“Both my parents were war heroes in Serbia, and my entire childhood I was taught that I had to sacrifice my private life and everything else for the cause,” Abramović told the Harvard Business Review in 2016.
She went on, “Why are you here on this planet? What is your function? What is your responsibility? That’s how I was brought up, and that’s what I’ve been doing.”
Amsterdam
After leaving her parents, Abramović went to Amsterdam. It was the 1970s and hippie culture was in full swing there. “I got very lost in the beginning because restrictions didn't mean anything there,” Abramović told The Independent in 2014.
But the experience of being in a new, less restrictive environment taught her “that you can do anything if you set your mind to it. That is something that I apply now to performance art.”
Rhythm 10
Abramović executed her first performance piece, Rhythm 10, in 1973; it was an event that laid the foundations for what was to come. She had 20 knives with her, and she used them to play the Russian game where a person stabs between their fingers.
She used a tape recorder to record herself doing this, and then she would play back the tape — including her groans of pain whenever the knife slipped — and try again.
The idea of death
Abramović wrote about the creation of Rhythm 10 in her 2016 memoir Walk Through Walls. “The idea of death terrifies me. When there is turbulence on an airplane, I shake with fear. I start composing my last will and testament. But when it comes to my work, I cast caution to the winds.”
She went on, “That thing that each of us loves with, that you are your own little self privately — once you step into the performance space, you are acting from a higher self, and it’s not you anymore. It’s not the ‘you’ that you know. It’s something else.”
Some kind of magic
And she also spoke about it to the Royal Academy of Arts in August 2023. “One important thing about that piece was that it was the first time I was with my body in front of an audience,” she said
“That experience of energy, of some kind of magic that I never could have in my studio painting — it was like, wow, something happened there. It created a space which was so together: the public and me, united in one thing.”
The soul
She went on, “Nobody was breathing until the performance finished. I knew then that this was my tool, the body was my tool. Until that time, I was incredibly timid, I was introverted.”
“But once I had done this performance, something clicked. It was not ‘poor’ Marina, it was really ‘highest self’ Marina... You really start to understand the soul, as when you write or create or perform, you really do it from the highest self.”
Rhythm 5
Abramović went even further, and suffered even greater physical pain, with her next performance piece. This one was titled Rhythm 5 — all her early works shared the same naming convention — and it was extremely dangerous
Abramović set a star on fire, the shape representing the symbol of her Communist childhood, and jumped into it in front of an audience. This time the audience literally had to save her when she lost consciousness inside the burning symbol.
The subject
“I was supposed to stay there, till it burned down, but as I was lying there the fire took up all the oxygen and I passed out,” Abramović said in the 2010 book The Artist is Present.
“Nobody knew what was happening til a doctor in the audience noticed it and pulled me out. This was when I realized that the subject of my work should be the limits of the body.”
Scandalous
Rhythm 5 was very controversial among Abramović’s countrymen. “The things that I was doing were against my own family. They were questioned at the Communist Party’s meeting: how can a general’s daughter be allowed to burn the Communist star in the square?” she told the Royal Academy of Arts.
“The newspapers said my work was “scandalous,” that I should be put in a mental hospital, that this is not art. My professor was ashamed even to see me. I was a complete disgrace. I don’t know why I had this incredibly strong vision, that I knew I was on the right path. There was something in me, my fire, total intuition, that I had to do this.”
Rhythm 2
Then came Rhythm 2, another horrifying endurance test. Abramović took a drug meant for people with catatonia and it induced involuntary twitching and seizures. Then, as soon as that drug wore off, she took another type.
The second one was for patients with schizophrenia and it caused her to lose mental control; later on, she had no absolutely no recollection of what had been happening. The whole thing sounded like a completely terrifying experience, but typically Abramović didn’t stop there.
Rhythm 4
Abramović continued to push the absolute limits of what her body could endure. For her next piece, Rhythm 4, she knelt naked in a room with an industrial fan and attempted to breathe in as much of its airflow air as she could.
She had ordered that no-one should help her if she fell unconscious and even tried to take steps to ensure no-one should be able to tell if she did. But her cameraman defied her instructions when she did lose consciousness and summoned medical assistance
Ready to die
Abramović was seemingly perfectly happy to die for her art, which needless to say made people very uncomfortable. Her last Rhythm performance was the aforementioned Rhythm 0, and it very much could have ended in her demise.
“My performance Rhythm 0 was a piece I was ready to die for,” she wrote during a Reddit AMA in 2013. “But I was not the one who used the gun. It was up to the audience if they used…[it] or not. Pain is very important to understand. All human beings have a fear of pain. The only way to get rid of pain is to confront the pain, and this is what I have been doing in performance.”
The Lips of Thomas
Self-mutilation followed after that. In 1975 Abramović performed a piece called The Lips of Thomas, where she carved a Communist star into her body and whipped herself. And not just once — she did it multiple times.
Abramović spoke to the website High Profiles about this piece in 2014. “It’s very autobiographical — you have Communism and Orthodoxy perfectly combined, but with a twist,” she said. “You have the cross, the star, the whipping — especially the whipping: I whip myself to the point where I don’t feel pain any more.”
Conquering pain
Abramović continued, “So, you can take all these elements and transcend them in your spirit. It’s very much like, I don’t know, rituals in the Amazon: they’re unbelievably painful — they cut their bodies, they do these terrible things — and why do they do this?”
“Because in this way you actually conquer the pain, you go through it into another reality — and to conquer pain is to get free of pain. So, this whole piece is about getting free of pain — this is how I see it.”
Ulay
And then in 1976 Abramović met a man named Uwe Laysiepen. He was also a performance artist, and he went by the name Ulay. The collaboration between the two of them, which also resulted in a romantic relationship, would be a fruitful one.
They performed pieces together including Relation in Space, where they ran into each other over and over, and Relation in Time, where they sat together back to back with their ponytails tied to each other.
New pieces
One of their collaborations was another respiration work: Breathing In/Breathing Out. Abramović and Ulay connected their mouths and breathed each other’s exhalations for 19 minutes, using up all the oxygen in their shared air and getting excessive carbon dioxide inside their lungs.
Another one was Rest Energy, where the duo balanced on opposite sides of a bow and arrow. Ulay had the bow drawn and pointed right at Abramović’s heart, and she held it in position. It was a dangerous but very powerful piece.
Very human
The Abramović-Ulay relationship didn’t last, but even their breakup was an art piece. It was called Lovers, and it involved both of them starting at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and meeting in the middle.
Abramović said after that piece, “We needed a certain form of ending, after this huge distance walking towards each other. It is very human. It is in a way more dramatic, more like a film ending... Because in the end, you are really alone, whatever you do.”
Unwanted
In 2014 Abramović talked about Ulay, the work and the breakup to The Independent. “Firstly, it is a big love story. We were born on the same day, and we met on our birthday.”
But splitting up with him, especially after doing something as drastic as walking the Great Wall of China, had taken its toll on her. She admitted had been, “Oh God! I was 40. I wrote in my diary. I was 40. I was fat, ugly and unwanted.”
Balkan Baroque
Another famous piece of Abramović’s is an anti-war piece called Balkan Baroque. She performed this one in 1997 after a war had started in Bosnia. And it was all about bones.
For four days Abramović sat and scrubbed a pile of cow bones. It was disgusting work — some of the bones even had worms in them — but she kept going. As she did so, interviews with her mother, her father, and a rat-catcher played.
War
Abramović spoke about that piece to New York’s Museum of Modern Art for her later The Artist is Present exhibition. “I remember so many artists immediately react and make the work and protests on the horrors of that war,” she said. “And I remember that I could not do anything. It was too close to me.”
“The whole idea that by washing bones and trying to scrub the blood, is impossible. You can't wash the blood from your hands as you can't wash the shame from the war. But also it was important to transcend it, that can be used, this image, for any war, anywhere in the world.
Seven Easy Pieces
In 2005 Abramović put together a work titled Seven Easy Pieces, dedicated to her late friend Susan Sontag, at the Guggenheim Museum. This consisted of five pieces originally performed by other artists, one reprise of The Lips of Thomas, and one new work called Entering the Other Side.
Originally Abramović had planned to recreate Rhythm 0, but she changed her mind. It certainly would have been interesting to see what people did the second time around — but perhaps it’s best that she didn’t!
Loaded gun
The Guggenheim’s curator of contemporary art, Nancy Spector, spoke to The New York Times that year about the need to stop Rhythm 0 being repeated. “The risks really outweighed anything else,” she said, “and then it really came down to the legal questions.”
“We just couldn't find a way to have a loaded gun in the museum. And [Abramović], being who she is, could not do something halfway. She really did want to perform a work that had that level of toughness that really confronted her audience and gave them a sense of this side of her work.”
History
Abramović told The New York Times that she was performing other artists’ pieces in order to keep the memories alive. “There’s nobody to keep the history straight,” she said. “I felt almost, like, obliged. I felt like I have this function to do it.”
She also pointed out that since there were no copyright protections on performance art, “anybody can take anything, and we can’t do a thing about it.” So she made a point of asking for permission before recreating the works of the other artists.
The Artist Is Present
Then in 2010 came The Artist Is Present, a performance piece that had its roots in the same things as Rhythm 0 but was much less violent. Abramović simply sat silently in the Museum of Modern Art and people would sit next to her.
She wouldn’t interact with them, just continue to sit silent and motionless while she made eye contact. People queued up in a massive line just to have the experience of interacting with Abramović in that way.
Surprising visitor
Multiple famous people showed up to sit with Abramović at the exhibition, including James Franco, Bjork, Isabella Rossellini, and Alan Rickman. Lady Gaga also showed up, but reportedly didn’t sit in silence.
Yet perhaps the most shocking person to attend the exhibit was Ulay. Abramović was so touched by his appearance that she broke the rules of her own performance piece and reached over to take his hands, crying.
Trained for a year
The Artist Is Present was a 736-hour endurance test for Abramović: once again she had pushed her own body to the limits. “Before The Artist is Present, I trained for a year — it was like going on the space programme!” she told the website High Profiles in 2014.
“First of all, I knew I would be motionless for long periods of time, which is extremely difficult because it is unnatural for the body. I had swollen legs, I had terrible back pain, you name it. And, second thing, I trained not to have lunch, and to drink only by night so that I don’t need to pee [in the day].”
Mental limits
She went on, “I had a hole made [in the chair I sat on,] thinking that I’m going to pee; but I never used it, because actually my mind control is amazing. You know, this kind of work, and long-durational work in general, needs very much determination and willpower to do it.”
“I think I all my life trained for this kind of work. I spent a year with Aborigines in central Australia, I went to deserts, I have for more than 25 years worked with Tibetans in different retreats, all to understand how the mind works and to learn to control it. My early research was really into the physical limits of the body, and now it is into the mental.”
Stronger now
“I think I am much stronger now,” Abramović said. “People say, ‘She’s become soft!’ but, I tell you, running into a wall for an hour is much less difficult than sitting motionless for three months.” This was a reference to her 1977 piece Expanding in Space.
“You see, it’s not enough to sit on the chair physically; you have to be in the present with your mind at the same time, so that your entire concentration covers the person who is sitting in front of you,” she explained.
512 Hours
In 2014 Abramović created a new piece, titled 512 Hours. That was the amount of time she spent interacting with people in empty rooms at the Serpentine Gallery in London
Phones and watches — anything that marked the passage of time — had to be left outside. The objective for visitors was to be present in the silence and allow Abramović to maneuver them around.
More endurance
A great many people attended 512 Hours, a sign of how beloved Abramović has become in the art world. It was also a chance to observe how she dealt with another feat of endurance: she was performing eight hours a day for 64 days.
By this point in time Abramović was 67 years old: arguably not the sort of age where people should be doing that kind of high-stamina work. And yet, of course, she persevered.
Stamina
The Guardian wrote an in-depth review of Abramović’s latest performance piece. “The ultimate value of 512 Hours depends upon each visitor; that is both the challenge and the artist's get-out clause.”
“Of course there are various experiences along the way — witnessing Abramovic's stupendous stamina up close; seeing your fellow beings turning inwards, or outwards, in unconscious response or its opposite, hot self-consciousness; doing it yourself in a pristine white gallery, participating in a cult event — but in essence, this is just an elaborate exercise in mindfulness.”
Exhibition
In 2023 Abramović exhibited some of her past works at the Royal Academy of Art. The exhibition was originally planned to have opened in 2020, but COVID-19 delayed it. Abramović didn’t mind, though.
“I am so happy this happened, because in 2020 the show would have been something completely different from what it will be in 2023,” she told the Royal Academy. “Those three years gave me so much time to reflect, and basically to change everything — this is quite literally not the same show.”
Selves
In the same interview, Abramović went into depth about her work and the sheer amount of power it took to create such things. “You really start to understand the soul, as when you write or create or perform, you really do it from the highest self,” she said.
“But that energy takes such concentration,” she went on. “You can’t maintain it for a long time. And then you go back afterwards to your, you know, little self.” It was hard to imagine anything about her being “little!
Selves
In the same interview, Abramović went into depth about her work and the sheer amount of power it took to create such things. “You really start to understand the soul, as when you write or create or perform, you really do it from the highest self,” she said.
“But that energy takes such concentration,” she went on. “You can’t maintain it for a long time. And then you go back afterwards to your, you know, little self.” It was hard to imagine anything about her being “little!
Tests of character
And what about the endurance? “If there’s something I would like to do, I don’t do it,” Abramović said. “I only do something if I’m afraid of it, because that’s the whole point. If we always tend to do things that we like, then we are creating the same pattern, making the same mistakes again, and we never get out into unknown territory.”
“I remember when I first had the first idea for The Artist is Present, I said to myself, “Oh my God, I’m crazy. How can I do this for three months?” But then I became obsessed. And it was so hard. It was supernatural to do this — to sit in front of thousands of different people, eight hours a day for three months. There were days when I thought I could not continue. But I did it.” Those four words could sum up her entire career.