![]() ![]() It started when an email Abramović had sent to her friend Tony Podesta, brother of John Podesta, who was running Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was leaked. “I make art because I believe in art.”Ībramović’s profile has also brought her to the attention of a strange group of online conspiracy theorists who are convinced she is a cannibalistic satanist, or – because she is a member of the “liberal elite” – part of a global paedophile ring. Ambramović is an art world superstar, with large exhibitions and collaborations with celebrities (Lady Gaga once attended a private workshop with Abramović, in which the singer didn’t eat or speak for four days and found her way out of a wood, blindfolded and naked), bringing her fame and wealth. ![]() She has been ridiculed – performance artists being an easy target – from her early work in Belgrade, dismissed as an exhibitionist and masochist, but not these days (now, inevitably, some like to accuse her of selling out). For The Artist Is Present, her show at MoMA in New York in 2010 – the one that sent her mainstream – Abramović sat motionless in a chair for eight hours a day for three months while people queued for hours to sit opposite her, usually resulting in a silent and deeply emotional connection (it broke records, attracting 850,000 visitors). ![]() In 1997, she won the Golden Lion prize for best artist at the Venice Biennale – she had sat on top of 2.5 tonnes of cow bones, scrubbing the blood and gristle from them, for a piece called Balkan Baroque, her response to the war in the region. There was the time she lay in the centre of a burning five-pointed star (1974 she ended up losing consciousness) and the two weeks she spent living, on show, in three elevated boxes in a New York gallery in 2002. In her piece Rhythm 10 (1973), she stabbed a knife at speed between the spaces of her spread-out fingers the following year, for Rhythm 0, she lay in a gallery in Naples alongside a table of 72 objects including chains, whips, a pistol and a mousetrap, and allowed visitors to do whatever they wanted with her (she still has scars from it). From her earliest work, she has explored physical and emotional endurance, confronting fear and exposing vulnerability. “But I overcame the fear of ticks.” Overcoming is an Abramović theme. And then I got Lyme disease and I didn’t go for a while.” She smiles. Photograph: Courtesy Marina Abramović Archives/DACS 2020/BBC I concede there are down-to-earth elements – when we speak via Zoom, for example, she is drinking a mug of Yorkshire Gold tea, discovered through a Welsh friend. It’s all fabulous – as is Abramović, who is funny, warm and yet somehow otherworldly (she goes in for shamanism, crystals, clairvoyants and star signs). It’s just down to earth,” she tells me, completely seriously, of the film – even though her house, built in the shape of a star, is filled with amazing furniture and art, and the grounds are vast enough to hold an aircraft hangar-sized shed containing her archive. “I think it’s important to demystify the idea of this glamorous life. This delicious glimpse into the life of the world’s most famous performance artist comes from a new documentary for BBC One’s Imagine series. Sometimes, she will retreat to a hut in the woods by her house in upstate New York, for six days with no food, to contemplate a giant crystal she keeps there and “connect with the memory of the planet”. ![]() Then she will make breakfast to tango music. “That is how to start the morning with a smile on your face,” she says. One reads “fuck” and the other “negativity”. E very morning, Marina Abramović gets out of bed and puts on a pair of slippers. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |