With Marina Abramović, nudity, blood and pain become art

The museum visitor looks around furtively. His facial expression reflects helplessness, but also discomfort. How is he supposed to get to the next hall? The passage is blocked by a young couple who stand on either side of the door frame and look at each other motionlessly. Impossible to get past the two of them without brushing against them. The two are naked. The visitor takes a deep breath, then pushes himself as quickly as he can between the two naked bodies into the next room.

No doubt about it – at her retrospective in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk, Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović is also forcing visitors to shift their boundaries. Just like she has been doing for 50 years now. The co-founder of this art form is also called the “godmother” of performance. Abramovic has managed to make it mainstream. The now 77-year-old repeatedly went to extremes to test her endurance and her ability to suffer. For “The House with the Ocean View” (2002), she was watched for twelve days living in an apartment that had been mounted open like a shelf on the museum wall – without food, only water. She also went to the toilet in front of everyone. For Luminosity (1997), she sat for six hours on a bicycle saddle that was also screwed to the wall and was reminiscent of the crucified Christ – naked and freely balancing, with his arms and legs stretched wide. Anyone who watched her involuntarily felt the tension in their own bodies.

Marina Abramović, Four Crosses: Evil (positive), 2019 (detail). Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives. Photo: © Marina Abramović

“In such moments of 100% concentration you are in the here and now and nowhere else – and for me that is the most important place of all,” explains the artist, who insisted on traveling from New York to the exhibition opening. “In moments like this you are so vulnerable that you can’t pretend or fake anything. You show your true self.” This creates that essential bond with the audience that is so characteristic and so indispensable for performance art: “It is a dialogue, a flow of energy. You can’t see it, you have to feel it.”

The Amsterdam show, which was created in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Art in London, takes you on a tour of the exceptional artist’s most important works using videos, photos and installations. Four of her performances are being re-performed by young actors – in addition to the bicycle saddle performance, there is also the one with the naked couple in the doorway, it is called “Imponderabilia”. When it was created in 1977, it was Abramović herself and her partner at the time, Ulay, who visitors had to push past: “As artists, we wanted to form the gateway to art; we found that very poetic.”

For purists, a performance is no longer a performance if someone other than the artist who conceived it performs it. Abramović sees it differently: “I want to pass on my art to other generations; Bach is not only played by Bach, but by many other pianists.”

At the Marina Abramović Institute MAI in New York, founded in 2007, young people can receive special relaxation, meditation and concentration training to help them endure the performances of “Godmother” and the associated hardships and borderline experiences. 27 of them are in action at the Stedelijk show. However, the master demands far less from them than she did when she was younger: “They only need to be on the bike for 30 minutes instead of six hours like I did back then.”

Saw, hammer, razor blades, knife, gun

But, she admits, she was also extremely “wild, evil and crazy” in her early years. Growing up in communist Yugoslavia, she repeatedly rehearsed the uprising – to the despair of her teachers and her parents, both Tito partisans: “Everything was forbidden in communism, everything! I was always the black sheep.”

Already at the art academy in Belgrade she discovered that she wanted to use her body as an instrument for her art. In 1974, at the age of 27, she conceived “Rhythm 0”, one of her first and most extreme performances: She stands at a table with 72 objects – saw, hammer, razor blades, knife, pistol and bullet – and exposes herself to visitors for six hours . They can vent on her body and become more and more aggressive over the course of the six hours: first they just cut up the artist’s clothes, then they carve bloody marks into her skin, and finally someone holds a loaded pistol to her temple.

Marina Abramović, Das Haus mit dem Meerblick, 2002. Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Marina Abramović-Archiv © Marina Abramović. Photo: Attilio Maranzano

A year later, Abramović moves to Amsterdam, the city where nothing is forbidden in the hippie age. This initially takes the wind out of her sails; she is used to provoking and rebelling. “But here everything was allowed and being naked was completely normal.” She no longer understands the world, then a new one opens up for her: “I had landed in paradise.”

A spectacular cacophony

In Amsterdam she also met her great love, the German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen (1943 to 2020), known as Ulay for short. It clicks immediately. From then on, they explore the limits of their bodies together, running towards each other without slowing down, so that they collide with full force. Yelling at each other as loudly as possible. Slap each other in the face for 20 minutes – not to hurt yourself, but to explore the sound of the punches.

These performances can be seen as videos in the central exhibition hall: it has been transformed into a labyrinth of huge screens on which people moan, hit and scream – a spectacular cacophony. A video by Rest Energy is also shown here, a performance that has become symbolic of the artist duo’s relationship: He stands in front of her with a drawn bow, the arrow aimed at her heart, she holds the bow tightly and trusts him. Both let themselves fall backwards, so that the tension increases. He knows that if he doesn’t withstand this exertion, she will pay with her life.

When the relationship broke up after 13 years, Abramović continued her solo career. At the 1997 Venice Biennale, she sits for four days in a white dress on a huge pile of bloody cattle bones and tries to scrub them clean with a brush as her dress slowly turns red. She also sings Yugoslavian folk songs. “Balkan Baroque” is the name of this work, with which she comments on the still raging war in Yugoslavia, which is falling apart, two years after the genocide in Srebrenica. She receives the Golden Lion for this. The Stedelijk shows the work as an installation of video screens and props – still extremely expressive, even if it is no longer a performance.

In 2010, Abramović became a global star with “The Artist is present”: for 75 days, she sat down at a table in the MoMA in the morning and stood the gaze of visitors for seven hours, without eating or drinking or even going to the toilet, who, one after the other, sit down opposite her. People line up to look into the artist’s eyes, including Lou Reed, Lady Gaga, Björk, Sharon Stone and Isabelle Rossellini. Touching moments arise, there are strong emotional moments that testify to the basic human need for connection. At one point the artist can’t hold back her tears – when Ulay, her soul mate from her time in Amsterdam, unexpectedly sits down at the other end of the table. The curators were also able to successfully implement this performance using two walls covered in monitors: on one wall you can see the face of the artist, on the other that of the people sitting opposite her.

Installations view, Marina Abramović, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2024. Photo: Peter Tijhuis

“The artist is present” marks a turning point in Abramović’s work: what was previously a purely physical effort has become a mental one. The works that follow are quieter, more spiritual, inspired by the rituals of the Aboriginals or Tibetan monks. It is often said that she has become softer. “Nonsense!” she says indignantly. “Just sit motionless in a chair for eight hours!” It is far more difficult to push your mental boundaries than your physical ones. “I was 64 during the performance at MoMA. I wouldn’t have been able to do that at 30 or 40 – I would have lacked willpower, concentration and wisdom!”

Since the exhibition route is structured chronologically, the visitor can understand these developments very well. It is also commendable that the curators did not just show Abramović’s key works as videos or recreated installations. No matter how well this may have worked, it would have given the show a strong documentary character. However, with their re-performances, the young actors ensure that it has become a live art show, in other words: one that does justice to the “Grand Old Lady of Performance”.

Marina Abramović, Balkan-Barock, June 1997. Marina Abramović-Archiv. Photo: © Marina Abramović

However, in 2024 this was not possible without strict requirements and bans. The actors are not allowed to be photographed or touched. “Times have changed, being naked is no longer normal!” complains Abramović. Political correctness and a new prudery would increasingly restrict artistic freedom. When re-performing “Imponderabilia,” she therefore had to make a compromise: a second passage was created for everyone who was reluctant to push themselves between two naked bodies. “Better than giving up the performance altogether,” she sighs. And is right.

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Until July 14th at Stedelijk, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.