Marina Abramović Redefines Performance Art

 

[I’ve blogged a bit on performance art and, specifically, Marina Abramović before on Rick On Theater.  See, for instance, “Performance Art” (7 and 10 November 2013), a run-down, as the title states, of the whole field (as of 13 years ago)—including a definition of the form. 

[“‘Art That Flows From a Will to Live’: Marina Abramović, Performance Artist” by Jessica Testa (7 September 2024) is a post on the artist on whom I’m blogging below (and which includes a short biography of Abramović), and “Feminist Performance Art” (22 May 2026) is a collection of articles on, as the headline indicates, performance artists, including Abramović, who work in a feminist vein.

[There’s even a post with the startling title “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist” (8 January 2011) by my friend (and prolific ROT contributor), Kirk Woodward.  You’ll have to read the article yourself to see why Kirk hung that label on the singer-songwriter.

[To be truthful, I’m not a big fan of performance art per se.  As I confess in “Feminist Performance,” my appreciation of performance is more for what its innovations and experimentation contribute to more conventional theater than for the live art itself that the artists make.] 

“‘THE BODY HAS ITS OWN WISDOM’”
by M. H. Miller
 

[The article below ran in T: The New York Times Style Magazine of 25 October 2026.  It was posted to the Times’ website as “Is Marina Abramović for Real?” on 9 October 2026 and updated on 13 October.]

Marina Abramović, on the cusp of 80, is still redefining performance for our time.

Contemporary art is often filtered through refusal. In general, artists don’t like to give away too much about themselves. Marina Abramović [Yugoslavian; b. 1946] is the opposite. Has any artist offered so much of her unfiltered self to the public? In 2010, during the lead-up to “The Artist Is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York [14 March-31 May 2010], in which she sat, silent and unmoving, in a wooden chair as thousands of people lined up each day to take a seat across from her, she estimates she gave about 320 media interviews. If you’ve followed her career, you likely know uncomfortably intimate details of her life. Before talking to her, I knew that when she had her first period at 12, she thought she was dying, because no one had ever told her about menstruation; that her father claimed to have only one testicle because of a grenade mishap; that she was 24 when she lost her virginity to a near-stranger while sharing an apartment in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), with her mother, under whose suffocating gaze she lived, off and on, until age 29.

["When people ask me where I am from, I never say Serbia,” Abramović declares.  “I always say I come from a country that no longer exists" [Sean O'Hagan, “Interview: Marina Abramović,” The Guardian [New York] 2 Oct. 2010]. 

[What became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was formed in 1918 after World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, gaining recognition in 1922.  It became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under Josep Broz (known by his nom de guerre, Tito) after World War II in 1945, and dissolved into five independent republics in 1992 and then six in 2006 (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia).]

Abramović’s style of conversation is performative, unsurprisingly. She speaks rapidly, in lengthy monologues punctuated by what James Wescott [English; b. 1979], one of her biographers and the author of “When Marina Abramović Dies” ([MIT Press,] 2010), describes as her “idiosyncratic Serbo-English.” Though she hasn’t lived in Serbia in more than 50 years, she notes with some resentment that she never fared well in her home country, especially with the press: “I remember the newspaper referring to my MoMA show,” she says. “‘Look at her, sitting in the chair and doing absolutely nothing and getting all this international affection because the Western culture is rotten and she’s a great product of this rotten culture.’ I can’t change this opinion ever.”

I had requested two hours for a first interview, thinking it might seem a minuscule interval for Abramović, 79. (“The Artist Is Present” lasted 736 hours and 30 minutes over a two-and-a-half-month run.) But one of the first things she tells me is, “I never talk two hours. Let’s talk one hour with intensity.” She’s on vacation, video conferencing from a house in a small Austrian village. She says that her art has helped her to understand herself better. “I discover why it’s so important, long-durational work,” she says. “After a few hours, you can’t pretend anymore. You can’t play somebody else. You actually show incredible vulnerability of yourself to the public, and the public understands and then magic happens. The biggest problem is our brain and intellect. We are overthinking all the time. Thinking is a huge obstacle. We put an entire world in our head that doesn’t exist. But the body has its own wisdom.”

I. Her First Studio  Her parents, Danica [1921-2007] and Vojo [1914-ca. 2000], were both Communist Party officials in Belgrade. Their relationship was toxic, violent and mutually hostile, but they had rather charmed lives as veteran partisans in Josep Broz Tito’s [1892-1980; Yugoslav communist revolutionary and politician; Prime Minister of Yugoslavia: 1943-63; President: 1953-80] National Liberation Army [anti-Nazi resistance partisans, 1941-45] who were granted high-ranking positions after the war. Still, it wasn’t an easy house to grow up in. There were no birthdays, because Abramović’s parents lied to her about hers, moving it up a day to Nov. 29, Republic Day, when they celebrated Tito instead. Danica never showed affection for her daughter. She’d yell and scream and beat her, so Abramović learned as a child to be silent and complacent and afraid. In a 2016 memoir, “Walk Through Walls” [Crown Archetype], she recalls the time she lost her first baby tooth and her gums bled profusely for months before her mother and father took her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder. She spent a year there convalescing. “This was the happiest time of my childhood,” Abramović writes. “Everybody in my family was nice to me.”

She got along better with Vojo, but he was an inscrutable, often absent man, the kind of father who gave his daughter a gun for her 14th birthday. When she was 17, Vojo entered her bedroom in the middle of the night after an ugly fight with his wife and told her he was moving out. An awkward adolescent now fully under her mother’s control, she took refuge in Bach, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Proust. Her interest in art was the only thing her mother tried to encourage. She allowed Abramović to use a spare room in the apartment as her first studio.

II. Courting Danger  She has stage fright. It’s more manageable now, but she tells me she still feels unsettled enough to spend the hours before a performance in the bathroom. As a teenager, she had entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade to paint but, after becoming disillusioned by her conservative education, not to mention Tito’s government (she burned her Communist Party card in 1968), she was drawn to the more conceptual works of Western artists like Joseph Kosuth [b. 1945], Lawrence Weiner [1942-2021] and Joseph Beuys [German; 1921-86]. She’d been thinking about the intersection of art and violence, and the questions she began asking were, from a historical perspective, novel: Would she hurt herself in front of the audience? Or to what degree would the audience let her hurt herself? There were other artists who put themselves in danger, like the American artist Chris Burden [1946-2015], a major influence, who in 1971 had a friend shoot him in the left arm with a .22-caliber rifle at a California gallery.

Whereas Burden’s action was meticulously planned, Abramović removed the forethought. She wanted whatever was going to happen to happen. In 1973, shortly after completing a postgraduate program in Zagreb, Croatia, she traveled to Scotland at the invitation of the gallerist Richard Demarco [b. 1930], who had founded an experimental summer school called Edinburgh Arts. There, in a high school gymnasium, she staged her first public performance [1973]. Called “Rhythm 10,” it was based on a drinking game popular among Yugoslav laborers: You spread out the fingers of one hand on a flat surface and stab between them with a knife held in the other, trying not to hit flesh. By the end of her performance, a piece of white paper was red with her blood. One of the few people in attendance was Beuys, who was on the faculty at Demarco’s school.

She attempted to stay in Western Europe, delivering mail in Edinburgh and taking on other jobs, but was soon back in Belgrade, living with her mother. During this period, she refined her ideas of what performance could be, gravitating toward even more dangerous scenarios. In 1974, Beuys, visiting Belgrade [Student Cultural Center], also attended a performance of Abramović’s “Rhythm 5,” for which she constructed a large five-pointed star out of wood scraps, covered it in petroleum and lit it on fire. She cut her toenails and hair before tossing the trimmings into the flames. She recalls Beuys telling her, “Be careful with the fire,” but she lay down in the center of the star anyway, spreading out her arms and legs. As the smoke engulfed her, one of her legs started to catch fire, but she didn’t notice. She’d already lost consciousness. An audience member — not Beuys, though legend has often claimed it was him — pulled her out and the performance ended. When she came to, she noticed the viewers’ reactions were largely, unexpectedly positive. They seemed transfixed.

III. Tempting Fate  As her reputation grew, the questions she was asking led to a final, inevitable one: Would the audience kill her? Later in 1974, she decided to find out at Studio Morra in Naples, Italy, creating a piece in which, as she has written, “the audience would provide the action. I would merely be the object, the receptacle.” It was called “Rhythm 0,” as if she had been counting down to it. In the gallery, she stood before a table with 72 objects, some innocuous, others less so: a feather, a bottle of perfume, lipstick, a jar of honey, a newspaper, safety pins, a carving knife, a saw, a bullet and a gun. Vojo’s 14th-birthday present to her was now returning, in a Chekhovian sense [reference is to Anton Chekhov, Russian playwright; 1860-1904] and she mentally prepared herself for someone to use it.

The performance began at 8 p.m. For the first three hours, very little happened. The only instructions were to use the objects on Abramović “as desired,” and the audience was unsure of how to behave. She simply stood there, waiting. Initially, she recalls, it was the female attendees who directed the men to do things — slice off her shirt to expose her breasts, smear her face with lipstick. One man stuck pins into her skin, which made her cry. One of the women wiped away her tears, but a mob mentality quickly took hold. Members of the crowd picked her up and placed her atop the table, spreading her legs and sticking the knife near her crotch. Someone then took the knife and sliced her neck before putting his mouth to the wound to suck up the blood. As Abramović recalls in her memoir, “a very small man, who just stood very close to me, breathing heavily,” loaded the gun, placed it in the artist’s hand and pointed it at her neck as he moved her finger to caress the trigger. The crowd came to and ejected him from the gallery. At 2 a.m., the performance was over. The audience scurried away, unable to look Abramović in the eye. Some called the gallery the next day to apologize.

Soon after, Abramović compiled photographs from this and the other “Rhythm” pieces and showed them at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. At the time, her mother was enforcing a 10 p.m. curfew, so she raced home after the opening. When she arrived, Danica was waiting in the dark, furious. She’d found out that nude pictures of her daughter were on display. She called Abramović a prostitute, spat on her and threw an ashtray at her head. Abramović entertained the possibility that her mother might kill her. She was excited at the prospect of her mother going to prison. But it was not how she wanted to die.

IV. Love  The next year, she traveled to Amsterdam for a performance. A German artist named Frank Uwe Laysiepen [1943-2020], who went by Ulay, met her at the airport and served as her guide for a couple of days. He was three years older, but they’d been born on the same date. They were drawn to each other immediately. “Our hearts beat as one,” Abramović writes in her memoir. They began working together, which was a breakthrough for Abramović: She was still vulnerable but she was no longer alone. For five years, they lived out of a Citroën van, performing wherever they could. Some of their works were quite simple. In 1977, they both stood nude, facing each other in a doorway in the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, Italy, close enough that visitors had to slide between them sideways and choose which body they would rub up against as they passed. Though her work still had the suggestion of violence, it was now built around themes of love and trust. In Dublin in 1980 [Rosc ’80: the poetry of vision; international exhibition; School of Architecture University College Dublin and National Gallery of Ireland], the pair presented “Rest Energy,” hooking small microphones up to their hearts, with Ulay pointing a loaded bow and arrow inches from Abramović’s, pulling the string back as far as he could. They stood that way for four and a half minutes, their hearts audibly beating faster and faster.

In 1982, they began seeking permission from the Chinese government to walk the Great Wall for a performance [The Lovers – The Great Wall Walk, 30 March-3 June 1988]. Abramović would start at one end, at the edge of the Bohai Sea, Ulay in the Gobi Desert, and they’d meet in the middle. Initially, the plan was that they’d get married there, but their relationship disintegrated as they were developing the work. He was unfaithful. She was depressed and jealous. So instead of having a wedding, they each walked about 1,500 miles to cross paths, and said goodbye. Ulay ended up marrying the interpreter who’d accompanied him on his walk, and Abramović would never collaborate with another person so closely again.

V. Fame and Its Discontents  If you admire Abramović, then you may also wish she’d say no every once in a while, or at least not say . . . that. An earlier version of her otherwise good memoir, which was revised for final publication, includes a chapter in which she describes encountering Indigenous Australians in the desert there for the first time in 1979. (“They look like dinosaurs. They are really strange and different and they should be treated as living treasures.”) This racist observation caused a global backlash, and it wasn’t the only time she’d disappoint her public. How could the person who made a work as uniquely subversive as “Rhythm 0” be the same one behind an inflatable installation [Snowy/Windy/Spring on Planet Z; open-ended run] currently on view at New York’s Balloon Museum in the South Street Seaport [DAYDREAM – Air Becomes Art; opened 5 August 2026; permanent exhibit] in which she declares in an artist statement, “Air has always been central to my practice”?

The first time she saw someone with a tattoo referencing her work, at a cafe in France, she knew she’d crossed over into mainstream culture. What a strange turn of events that this artist, of all people, would become someone whom the public was so invested in. In 2002 [15 November-21 December], she performed “The House With the Ocean View,” in which she lived on a platform at the Sean Kelly Gallery in Manhattan for 12 days. Abramović fasted, slept for no more than seven hours a day and did little else besides bathe, drink water and occasionally urinate into a toilet that had been built for her. The show was a sensation. Susan Sontag was a repeat visitor, sitting on the floor for hours. It was even written into “Sex and the City” [American romantic comedy-drama television series; HBO, 1998-2004]. (“There are depressed women all over New York doing the exact same thing as her and not calling it art,” Carrie Bradshaw says of the work [“One”; Season 6, Episode 12 (14 September 2003)].)

Eight years later, “The Artist Is Present” increased Abramović’s exposure and deepened the obsessive relationship her audience was developing with her. Björk [Icelandic; b. 1965; singer, songwriter, composer, record producer, and actress] and Patti Smith [b. 1946; singer, songwriter, poet, and author] and Lou Reed [1942-2013; musician, songwriter, and poet] lined up to stare into her face. She’d asked the museum to invite Ulay, whom she hadn’t seen in years, but was still surprised when he sat across from her. They both wept. Crying was a common reaction on the part of the audience members, who were overcome by Abramović’s sheer presence — by her commitment to them.

From then on, everyone in our culture was a performance artist, and she was their guru, from highbrow practitioners (Tino Sehgal [German; b. 1976; Berlin-based artist and choreographer of “constructed situations”]) to overconfident celebrities (James Franco [b. 1978; actor and filmmaker]) to Instagram influencers. Abramović, who never had kids and never wanted to, tells me at one point, “You have no idea how many children I have.”

VI. Peace  When her mother died in 2007, Abramović found her diaries. “If I read one page when I was growing up, our relationship would be completely different,” she says. She understood how “emotionally wounded” Danica had been by Vojo, and that her coldness was an attempt to make her daughter become stronger than she was. When I ask if she’s forgiven her mother, she says, “Oh, just recently, my dear.” It was when she was making her new work, “Balkan Erotic Epic,” which debuted last year in Manchester, England [Manchester International Festival, 1-31 July 2025], and will open at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in December [8-20 December 2026], that she was able to come to terms with the relationship. A four-hour autobiographical production, it begins with Tito’s funeral in 1980 and features her mother as a character played by the Spanish-Serbian performance artist Maria Stamenković Herranz [Swiss-born; b. 1976; performance artist based in Spain]. Unlike her mother in real life, Danica in “Balkan Erotic Epic” is warm, sensual, liberated. “Everything which I could not do with my mother, I could do through this character,” Abramović says.

It’s also the culmination of a realization she first had during “The Artist Is Present”: that her work is her only means of experiencing unconditional love, which has often eluded her in her personal life. It’s “just unconditional love generally for the universe, the planets,” she says. “I genuinely love human beings, and I especially love when they enjoy life. Most of the time, my own generation is so miserable.” This feeling she experienced as she sat facing all those crying people has carried her through her later career, in which she’s found a kind of tranquillity [sic; British spelling]. At the opening performance of “Balkan Erotic Epic,” she got to dance with Danica — or the version she’d invented, the one who loved her back. And it was in this moment that Abramović forgave her mother. “Now that I’m getting to 80, there’s no way out,” she says. “You have to learn to reconcile. Otherwise you leave here with this hate in your heart.”

VII. Life After Death  Three years ago, she had a blood clot in her lungs, fell into a coma in New York and nearly died [pulmonary embolism; May 2023]. Many of the people who were important to her were gone. Beuys died of heart failure in 1986. Ulay died of cancer in 2020. After so many years of courting death in her art, Abramović now understood how much she liked being alive. She hopes to live until she’s 100. That way, she says, “no one can ignore me.” She already has plans for her funeral, which are printed in Wescott’s biography. She developed them in 2005, after attending a gloomy memorial service for Sontag in Paris. She wants hers to be more fun. It will include three coffins: one containing her actual corpse, the others with lifelike dummies. The guests must wear any color but black. The British singer Anohni [Anohni Hegarty (b. 1971; British-born singer, songwriter, and visual artist based in New York City and Ireland)] will choose a song to perform (Abramović had originally thought of Frank Sinatra’s [1915-98] “My Way” [French song translated by Paul Anka [b. 1941], released by Frank Sinatra in 1969]). I’m curious how she thinks her death might happen. “Do you want it to be midperformance?” I ask.

“First of all,” she says immediately, as if this weren’t an odd question, “I can’t plan that, because you never know what’s going to happen. I only know that I don’t want to be afraid, I don’t want to be angry and I want to be conscious. I want to experience this passage from life to death very clearly. I have no idea how to achieve this, other than to be ready. This is why I think of dying every day. Because only when you really think about how death is there can you enjoy life fully — every single minute of it.”

[M. H. Miller is the features director for the New York Times’ T Magazine.  He’s a prominent journalist and editor who writes extensively on contemporary art, culture, and the historical evolution of New York City’s art scenes.

[Before joining the New York Times, Miller built a robust career as a culture journalist and editor.  His writing has appeared across several major literary, news, and art publications such as the New York Observer, where he served as a reporter and senior editor; ARTnews, where he worked as an editor; the Guardian; the London Review of Books; Bookforum; the Village Voice; and National Public Radio.]