No one has done more to popularize performance art than Marina Abramović – and no work more so than her hit Moma (Museum of Modern Art) retrospective The Artist Is Present. In 2010, she sat at the New York museum at least seven hours a day, six days a week for almost three months, inviting the public to sit across from her one by one.
The virality of that performance piece, and the popular 2012 documentary about it, made the Belgrade-born artist, best known for his extreme works that test the limits of physical and mental endurance, a somewhat unlikely pop culture icon. High-profile collaborations with big names like Jay-Z and Givenchy followed, as well as merchandise, a skincare line and dozens of solo exhibitions in major museums around the world, including a retrospective at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart in 2015.
This week, Abramović launches her latest venture in Australia – a country that has played a central role in the artist’s sustainable performance practice. In 1980, the 33-year-old artist and her then-partner Ulay lived for five months in the central desert with people from Pintjantjara and Pintupi, an experience that led to their 1981 work Gold Found By The Artists, in which they sat across a table in silence for seven hours a day for 16 consecutive days at the Art Gallery of NSW. When we talk on the phone, Abramović calls it “the most formative landscape and experience I’ve ever had.”
Her work with Australia continues this weekend with Marina Abramović Institute Takeover: a four-day showcase of long-term performance art taking place as part of the Adelaide festival, featuring eight artists from Australia and Asia selected by Abramović and the other four members of her Institute. Those chosen include Mike Parr (who Abramović describes as our ‘doyenne of performance art’), Melbourne-based Bidjara artist and academic Dr Christian Thompson, and New York-based Koori artist and author SJ Norman .
However, the 77-year-old artist will not be present at the Takeover. Abramović suffered a pulmonary embolism last year that almost killed her; from her apartment in New York, she says: ‘I’ve had a lot of problems with my health, and [travelling to Australia] It’s a very long journey for me.”
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Abramović’s relationship with Australia has not been uncomplicated. In 2016, she was accused of racism when an excerpt from an uncorrected proof of her unpublished memoir began circulating on social media. The page contained observations that she later said were taken from a decades-old diary entry, in which she described Indigenous Australians as “really strange and different” people who “look terrible.” [to western eyes]’ and ‘look like dinosaurs’.
Aboriginals are not only the oldest race in Australia; they are the oldest race on earth. They look like dinosaurs. They are truly strange and different, and they should be treated as living treasures. Yet they are not.
But at the same time, you have to put in the effort when you first meet them. For starters, they look terrible to Western eyes. Their faces are like no other face on earth; they have large torsos (just one bad outcome of their encounter with Western civilization is a high-sugar diet that causes their bodies to swell) and stick-like legs.
Thompson and Norman, who had both worked with Abramović as part of an artist residency in Sydney in 2015 and are part of this weekend’s showcase, were among a number of high-profile First Nations artists making public statements at the time.
While Thompson defended Abramović, whom he described as a friend and mentor, Norman wrote in a Facebook post that he was “repulsed and deeply upset by what Marina wrote,” and described the segment as “indefensibly racist.”
In that long and nuanced message, he described his conflicted feelings about an artist he respects, whose fragment was “the misguided reflections of a white woman in the desert” and who he said had subjected him and other Aboriginal people to a racist gaze. . “Whether or not Marina Abramović is racist or not is not the conversation we should be having. I would much rather talk about Marina Abramović as a lightning rod for the systemic racism that permeates the entire discourse of Western art.”
Commenting on the controversy on Facebook at the time, Abramović said: “I have the utmost respect for the Aboriginal people, to whom I owe everything. The time I spent with members of the Pijantjatjara and Pintupi tribes in Australia was a transformative experience for me, and one that has profoundly and indelibly informed my entire life and art.
“The description in an early, uncorrected proof of my forthcoming book is taken from my diaries and reflects my initial reaction to these people when I encountered them for the very first time, way back in 1979. It does not represent the understanding and appreciation of Aborigines which I subsequently acquired.”
The book has now been published, with the offending paragraphs removed. When I now ask Abramović whether she spoke to Thompson or Norman about the incident prior to the Adelaide project, she laments media reporting, saying they wrongly took things “out of context” in 2016.
“I have nothing else [to say] – I apologized. It’s a complete misunderstanding because when they read my book, I have a whole chapter about Aboriginal people [and] how this meeting changed my life. I said very clearly: Aboriginals are the oldest race on earth [and] they should be treated like living treasures… It is so amazing that the Australians who are reacting so harshly to this are the same ones who are not treating these people well.”
In fact, First Nations Australians – including Shari Sebbens, Nakkiah Lui and Nayuka Gorrie – were among her most vocal critics on social media in 2016. But Norman also remembers a “difference between the responses that the mob had and then these very heated responses that many non-Aboriginal people felt that as a displacement of something they knew was going on within themselves,” he says now.
Although he was “somewhat surprised” to be invited to participate in the Takeover showcase, he said he had no reservations about accepting. “I am a working artist… [In this instance] I don’t really have any reservations about a check coming my way.”
For Takeover, he collaborated with Western Sydney-based molecular biologist and musician Dr. Mark Temple to convert the DNA of various bird species into music. Eric Avery, a violinist, singer and composer with Ngiyampaa, Yuin and Gumbangirr heritage, will perform the music live.
“[For Aboriginal people] a number is a container for data; when you sing the story of a bird or the story of a place, you are singing its source code [bird or] place. It’s a completely different way of understanding things [compared to western science]”explains Norman.
He will also not be present in Adelaide: “[Increasingly I’ve been] I think about my performance work like a song: one person can write a song, many people can sing it.”
Thompson, meanwhile, will perform a new work titled Wait in Gold, in which he pins small gold flowers to himself, transforming “from a human figure into a lush floral form.”
“[I’m exploring] ideas about disappearing and appearing, and being seen and not being seen. I’ve been thinking a lot about the referendum and the idea of having a voice and taking that voice away,” he says.
Looking back on his residency with Abramović in 2015, Thompson remembers counting lentils and rice, one of the core exercises in her “method.” ‘That took me six and a half hours…I’m imagining it [the Adelaide performance] will be about the same,” he laughs.
“You enter a very meditative space, where time seems to change in terms of how it moves around you.”
Other artists on the line-up include Indigo Perry, who will invite audience members to participate in ‘material gathering’ as part of her work, and Collective Absentia, the alias of an artist from Myanmar who works anonymously due to the risks involved involved in making art. examines the political violence in that country.
Abramović is especially sad to miss Parr’s 12-hour “blind painting” performance on the opening day of the Takeover. A similar performance, created in response to the war between Israel and Gaza, made headlines in December after Parr was dropped the next day by his regular gallery owner Anna Schwartz over what she described as “hate graffiti.” Schwartz denied censoring the work and it remained on display during the exhibition.
Abramović read the news. “It’s so difficult that you can’t actually do anything anymore, you can’t comment on anything anymore. And I think that is so important [we have] freedom of speech … [Artists] for this we should not be crucified.”
The Takeover performances take place in and around Adelaide’s festival center and vary in style – from silent to musical; from solo to interactive; static to roaming. Audience members also have the opportunity to take part in their own long-term experiment, with full- and four-day passes on sale.
“It is long-term work [artform] where you really change yourself, and with you, the audience, and the experience is very emotional,” says Abramović. “People come to see the work and they keep coming back and creating a kind of community.”