![]() “When people have that kind of attention, and you’re there for them, they open to you,” she explains. Many who queued to sit with Abramović wept before her sorrowful pale face. I could never make this kind of work when I was 20 or 30, even 40: I didn’t have the determination, willpower or concentration. “But eight hours, and 10 hours on Fridays, never leaving for the bathroom? It is hell on Earth. “People think that sitting on a chair, ‘Oh, it’s so easy,’” Abramović tells me. Every day for almost three months, she sat, silent and immobile, in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, gazing back at each of the 1,545 visitors (including Lou Reed, Alan Rickman and Bjork) who took it in turns to sit opposite her. Perhaps she will end up doing something like her most famous performance, The Artist Is Present (2010), which she still considers the fulcrum of her career. There will be new work, too – although rumours that she’s going to zap herself with one million volts of electricity are, she says, “fake news”. “The pressure is very big,” she tells me. Abramović will be the first ever woman to take over Burlington House. More and more, I became interested in my mind.” Next year, several of her “greatest hits” will be re-performed (by younger artists) at the Royal Academy. “In the beginning,” Abramović explains, “I was interested in the limits of the body. And, in many ways, she achieved that.”Īfter Ulay, her performances, though still intense, became less obviously bellicose. Yet,” she adds, with a hollow laugh, “that cold, strict military control was really to make me a warrior. ![]() “Basically, I was never good enough for her. Abramović grew up in Belgrade in comfortable, bourgeois circumstances, but her mother frequently beat her. Mostly, the work occupied my mind.” She had a strained relationship with her own mother, Danica, who, like Abramović’s handsome, unfaithful father, Vojin, fought the Nazis as a Yugoslav Partisan under Tito, and was rewarded, after the war, with a position in his Communist government. “I’m not really the mother material,” Abramović tells me wryly. They travelled around Europe in an old black Citroën police van performing scores of astonishing new pieces, distilling the complex, timeless dynamics of male-female relationships when they weren’t performing, they survived by, for instance, working on a farm in Sardinia’s mountains, milking goats and sheep in exchange for food.Īlthough Abramović and Ulay (who died two years ago) subsequently split up – by walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China before meeting in the middle to say one last, epic goodbye – and fought each other over royalties (in 2016, a Dutch court ordered her to hand over more than £218,000), she still looks back fondly on those years of “living in the van, with nothing”. I hate indifference.”įor 12 years until 1988, Abramović collaborated with her lover Frank Uwe Laysiepen, the German artist known only as “Ulay”, whom she met in Amsterdam in 1975. “If you good work, you have two possibilities: they love you or they hate you. In the “old days”, as she puts it, her performances were dismissed by critics as exhibitionist bacchanals. Not that her hardcore approach to making art won her much sympathy when she was starting out. The discipline she exercised is fascinating.”Īh, discipline: now that is something which Abramović knows a lot about. “I was very honoured,” she says in heavily accented English, adopting the magnanimous tone of a head of state accepting praise from a foreign dignitary – albeit one surrounded by boxes in a back office at Modern Art Oxford, where her new exhibition, Gates and Portals, opens today. Still, when I put the ostensibly preposterous comparison to Abramović herself, she doesn’t bat an eyelid. I’m no royal historian, but I don’t think our late Queen ever did anything quite like that. Deprived of oxygen in the middle of the inferno, she passed out, and had to be saved by an onlooker. Once, she lay down in the middle of a five-pointed wooden star that she’d set alight. In one, she stabbed manically at the spaces in between her spread fingers with a knife, frequently nicking her own flesh in another, she brushed her hair with such frantic force that clumps of it came out. Hang on, what? As in, the same Marina Abramović whose early performances from the 1970s were intense, violent affairs, in which she (or, at her invitation, members of her audience) inflicted pain upon her often-naked body? By executing her duties with such consistency for so long, Her late Majesty was, the paper suggested, “a Marina Abramović for the ages”. In one of the more surprising tributes to Queen Elizabeth II, The Art Newspaper compared her to a 75-year-old Serbian performance artist.
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