The crowd gathers, expectant and unsure, a nervous energy pulsing through it. On display at the Royal Academy of Arts in London: a man and woman, as motionless as a pair of Greek statues. They stand inside a narrow white passageway between two galleries, their backs to the wall, only a foot or so separating them. It takes a beat to process that they are naked. He wears but a couple studs in his left ear, his left arm tattooed. She’s middle-aged, about a foot shorter. Some of the assembled on this Sunday morning in October already know the choice that awaits them; others are only now just learning.
To the left of the passageway, a monitor broadcasts black-and-white footage from the first time this show, Imponderabilia, was staged. In June 1977, Marina Abramović, the celebrated performance artist, and her then-partner, Ulay, assumed a similar pose, forcing anyone entering the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, Italy, to squeeze between their naked bodies. For three hours the couple stared, trancelike, into each other’s eyes, untold strangers wedging between them, before police intervened, declaring the show obscene.
Unlike the original, the reenactment at the Royal Academy, part of a larger retrospective of Abramović’s work, comes with an out: visitors can bypass the naked couple using a side door. For a few minutes after I arrive, the crowd circles, observing the spectacle. Then one vest-wearing older gentleman, with all the navigational precision of a wino, finally pushes through, his fleshy midsection striking their genitals with unnerving force. It’s not a crime, exactly, but my body tenses. At best, he’s guilty of deplorable spatial judgment; at worst, he’s a symbol of the self-absorption and excess that defined a generation. Then the onslaught begins, as men and women of all ages follow suit: a series of intimate fender benders, awkward rebirths. What happens when our social armor, normally ironclad, has been stripped away? Finally, the realization strikes: the performance is as much about the naked duo enduring this onslaught of human obliviousness as anything else. Not once do they break character.
For more than five decades, Abramović, 76, born in Belgrade, has made a career engineering such feats of artistic endurance. Championed as the godmother of performance art, she has, in recent years, attained a measure of cultural celebrity, collaborating with the likes of Jay-Z and Lady Gaga. One regards her early-stage commitment with head-shaking awe. In 1974, in Studio Morra in Naples, she laid out 72 objects on a table—a gun, a saw, an axe, and matches among them—and invited museumgoers to do with them as they wished: I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility. Among other degradations, she was stripped naked from the waist up, the loaded gun at one point held to her clavicle. After six hours, when Rhythm 0, as she called the performance, finally ended, the visitors fled, and Abramović was left bloodied: razor blades had been used to cut her throat, and the stress she endured reportedly turned one patch of her hair permanently white.
Now, in London, she’s enjoying a late-stage consideration of her legacy. The exhibition at the Royal Academy, which runs through January 1, has been celebrated as one of the first solo shows the museum has mounted for a woman. Just across the Thames, in early October, the Southbank Centre hosted the Marina Abramović Takeover, in which artists selected by her and her eponymous institute staged a series of performances. And in early November, the English National Opera will feature the 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, an opera by Abramović; she will appear on stage alongside Willem Dafoe.
How does one mount an exhibition dedicated to performance art, a decidedly ephemeral medium? For starters, with ample photos and video: Abramović’s Studio Morra performance was beamed onto the wall at the Royal Academy as a succession of black-and-white snapshots, showing replicas of the 72 original objects used in 1974. A pile of fake bones recalls her 1997 Golden Lion–winning performance at the Venice Biennale, Balkan Baroque, in which she spent six hours a day, for four days, scrubbing 1,500 maggot-infested cow bones in a putrid basement: a ritualized attempt to cleanse herself of the bloodshed wrought during the Bosnian War.
In some cases, the video packs unexpected power: a clip of Abramović and Ulay facing each other, Abramović pulling back on the handle of a loaded bow, Ulay pulling back on the arrow, any disruption to their precarious balance potentially sending the sharpened tip into her heart: a tidy depiction of a woman’s vulnerability. Abramović and Ulay—full name Frank Uwe Laysiepen, a German artist who died of cancer in 2020—had planned to marry in a performative ceremony, each walking from an opposite end of the Great Wall of China and meeting in the middle. By the time they received the necessary permissions, in 1988, their relationship had unraveled, however, and their three-month journey instead marked their formal breakup.
Post-Ulay, Abramović became obsessed with energy; energy embedded in the stones of the Great Wall, and in the green quartz, snowflake obsidian, and brown agate used in part to design the curved pillows and benches in the exhibition. As instructed, I pressed up against them; my chi remained unmoved. In this nod to New Age self-betterment, one finds none of the daring of her early work, when her performances were outlined in clipped, almost poetic recipes of masochistic bravado. Consider, by contrast, these instructions from a 1975 exhibition called Thomas Lips, staged in an Austrian gallery:
I slowly eat 1 kilo of honey with a silver spoon. / I slowly drink 1 liter of wine out of a crystal glass. / I break the glass with my right hand. / I cut a five-pointed star on my stomach with a razor blade. / I violently whip myself until I no longer feel any pain. / I lay down on a cross made of ice blocks. / The heat of a suspended heater pointed at my stomach causes the cut star to bleed. / The rest of my body begins to freeze. / I remain on the ice cross for 30 minutes until the public interrupts the piece by removing the ice blocks from underneath me.
At the Royal Academy, several original performances—none requiring bloodletting—are re-created by artists who have been trained by Abramović’s institute. Her method has been influenced by her travels—she’s convened with shamans in Brazil, aborigines in Australia (she lived with Ulay in the outback), and Buddhist monks (she once met the Dalai Lama). And it centers around five days of fasting and no talking, as well as a variety of meditative tasks: three hours of opening and closing a door as slowly as possible; three hours of walking backwards holding a mirror as a guide; one hour of writing one’s name. Most notably, her protégés are restaging House with a View, which she first performed in 2002 at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, when she lived in three small rooms—elevated cubes containing the bare necessities: bed, table, shower, toilet—for 12 days without speaking, her only sustenance being water. The cubes have been rebuilt at the Academy, down to the three sets of ladders that run to the floor, the rungs in the form of upturned butcher knives. But somehow the reenactments, stripped from the original post–September 11 context, seem more dutiful than urgent.
Tension does arise, in the ways the performances have been adapted to reflect our current litigious-cum-safe-space era. Officials wearing white lab jackets stand on patrol at the Royal Academy, ready to eject anyone who might get handsy. One woman, ignoring all the posted warnings, obliviously snaps a picture on her iPhone of the Imponderabilia performers (who, unlike Abramović and Ulay, enjoy the luxury of a heated entryway); she is quickly surrounded by museum staff, who watch as she deletes the offending pic. Before her 2010 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Abramović recently told The New York Times, museum officials had asked for the Imponderabilia couple to stand far enough apart to enable wheelchair access. She has railed against such measures, against recent limits placed on artistic expression, but she’s accepted many of the changes imposed on her own work as a pragmatic necessity: better reenactments than nothing at all.
If Abramović’s spirit hovers, sometimes fleetingly, over the exhibition at the Royal Academy, she appeared in the flesh later that same October afternoon at the Southbank Centre. On the last day of the takeover, in one of the concert halls, she introduced 11 of the artists staging performances. Her appearance—met with the hushed and rapt reverence accorded a saint—was no small matter. Earlier in the year, after routine knee surgery, she suffered a lung embolism and ended up in a coma; after her recovery, and unable to fly, she made the transatlantic voyage from her home in the Hudson Valley aboard the Queen Mary 2.
She’s a charismatic, free-flowing speaker; the partners at her academy had supplied her with a list of talking points. About performance art’s place in the larger artistic landscape, a landscape that has grown ever more moneyed, she said this: “When the economy goes to shit, performance comes up, which is my favorite time. Performance is something you can’t buy.”
Not that Abramović herself hasn’t undergone a transformation, from relative artistic obscurity to cultural celebrity, a wizened and faithful guru to the glitterati. Lady Gaga embarked on an Abramović retreat (a video clip reveals, among other things, a naked and blindfolded Gaga in the woods, hands aloft; a naked Gaga pressed up against a sizeable block of crystal; a clad Gaga and Abramović sitting back-to-back in high-legged chairs stationed in a lake). Not everyone has welcomed the shift: Abramović’s collaboration with Jay-Z on a music video led the culture website Hyperallergenic to declare it the death of performance art.
In 2016, she became entangled in theater of a political bent, when an email of hers to Tony Podesta, inviting his brother, John (who served as Hilary Clinton’s campaign chairman), to a “spirit dinner,” went public in the Wikileaks dump, leading conspiracy mongers to declare her a Satanist. A few weeks back, Volodymyr Zelensky further fed the trolls when he invited her to become an ambassador to help rebuild Ukrainian schools. Now she’s planning the launch of her own line of Longevity products, including face lotion and anti-allergy, immune, and energy drops. For someone who once nearly died during a performance inside a burning pentagram, this is an unexpected twist.
Her star turn dates in part to her MoMA exhibition, where she sat silently for 716-plus hours in an armless chair, as a succession of 1,545 visitors (Lou Reed, Björk, and James Franco among them) took a seat in front of her, some brought to tears by the moment of communion. Jerry Saltz, New York magazine’s art critic, dubbed it “hammy claptrap,” writing that such stunts let “novice viewers think they’re in the presence of some sort of mystic-crystal witch-artist able to transport them to spiritual artistic nirvanas.”
I thought of Saltz after Abramović, at the Southbank Centre, had played up one performer, from Myanmar—a political dissident whose identity remained undisclosed for fear of violent retribution by the country’s regime. After Abramović had set us loose in the Centre—but not before conducting a few breathing exercises and admonishing us to remove our watches and turn off our phones—I found the dissident sitting in a chair in the lobby, his face covered by a folded black T-shirt, the area taped off, ticketholders queueing at the bar behind him for drinks. One woman sat cross-legged in front of the unnamed individual, attempting somehow, by an act of forced solidarity, to imbue the insipid act with meaning.
Back in the main theater, one discovered actual frisson. On a makeshift platform mounted above the seats, a Cuban artist named Carlos Martiel was lashed to a flagpole with a couple revolutions of thick rope. He was naked, his hands covering his manhood, the Union Jack fluttering above (a small fan mounted in the beams generating a breeze). In his eight-hour, spot-lit vigil, I found unexpected power, the atrocities sanctioned by empire evoked with haunting immediacy.
Then, somewhere behind the stage: the sound of something striking the wall, a reverberating thud, some visitors recoiling at the shock. It was, I learned, after pushing through the crowd to glimpse around the corner, the Brazilian artist Paul Setúbal. Dressed in all black, a skullcap pulled over his head, he was patrolling a narrow corridor lined with white plywood boards, stopping to strike the walls with a plastic police baton. His eyes, visible through two slits in the cap, were vaguely menacing. From previous performances, the baton had left markings, a kind of surrealistic painting in black. As one succumbed to the seductive rhythm of Setúbal’s exhibition, a certain allure, even beauty, emerged in the anticipation of violence: the strongman’s fantasy, the basis of his power.
If this felt of the moment, much of the Abramović retrospective at the Royal Academy tugged at the past, and at our mortality. In Nude With Skeleton, first staged in 2002, and borne out of the practice by Tibetan monks of sleeping with a dead body, Abramović had lain naked on a platform, a human skeleton splayed on top of her. When I returned to the Academy later that afternoon, one of her protégés was re-creating the performance, but something seemed lost in translation, the original power diminished, the past moment incapable of being resuscitated. But in spite of that, or precisely because of it, what resonated was the ever-narrowing gulf between this world and the next. Never mind Abramović’s immunity drops. Here was something confronting our basic primal fear, something that placed us in a larger continuum, that offered a measure of spiritual reassurance. For the end is coming, but there’s art in that, too.
