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 [Scottish; 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 [Imponderabilia]. 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 [1933-2004; writer and critic] 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; 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 [17 January; Cimetière du Montparnasse]. 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 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.]

Feminist Performance Art

 

[I’ve blogged a bit on performance art on Rick On Theater: “Lady Gaga: Artist For Our Time” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2011), “Performance Art, Part 1” (7 November 2013) and “Part 2” (10 November 2013), “Penny Arcade: Two Performances” (15 November 2013), “‘The Second Life of Performance’” by Katie Kitamura (10 January 2016), and “‘Art That Flows From a Will to Live’: Marina Abramović, Performance Artist” by Jessica Testa (7 September 2024). 

[The reason there’s not more is that, frankly, it’s not a subject about which I know a great deal.  (My appreciation of performance art is more for what its innovations and experimentation contribute to more conventional theater than for the live art itself that the artists make.) 

[However, when I read the article below on the revival, so to speak, of interest in the feminist performance artists of the late-middle 20th century, my attention was piqued.  I decided it was more than worth sharing with ROTters; I hope you’ll agree when you read it yourselves.] 

“THE RADICALS”
by Amanda Fortini

[The article below, published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 May 2026, was also posted on the Times website as “Is Yoko Ono Still Our Most Radical Artist?” on 30 April.]

A crop of recent exhibitions prove how feminist performance art from the 1960s and ’70s is more relevant than ever.

In March 1965, almost two years before she’d meet John Lennon [1940-80] and form their infamous alliance, Yoko Ono [b. 1933] staged “Cut Piece,” a groundbreaking work of performance art, at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. It was the third presentation of the work (the first two were staged in Kyoto and Tokyo in the summer of 1964), but this one was filmed by the documentarians David [1931-87] and Albert Maysles [1926-2015] and has thus been preserved for posterity as a nine-minute black-and-white film. Ono, then an avant-garde artist known for her involvement in the Fluxus movement, sits impassively onstage next to a pair of fabric shears. She is dressed in clothes of obvious quality (an elegant black sweater suit with pearl buttons, a silk slip underneath, fishnet pantyhose), which members of the audience, strangers to the artist, are invited to approach and snip off.

[A very brief bio of Yoko Ono: Ono, an artist, musician, activist, filmmaker, and performance artist, was born in Tokyo. Her father was a wealthy banker and, during Ono’s early years, was transferred to bank branches all over the world, including San Francisco (1933, two weeks before his daughter’s birth), New York City (1940), and Hanoi (1941).

[In 1945, after World War II, Ono’s father moved to Scarsdale, New York, but Ono remained in Japan until 1952, when she joined her family. She enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, where, among other subjects, she studied music composition. She became interested in twelve-tone music and then moved into the “avant-garde.”

[In the ’50s and ’60s, Ono lived an eventful life, including two marriages, the birth of a daughter, and exploration with music and art of a decidedly experimental nature. She exhibited and performed in several venues. She came to London in September 1966 and met John Lennon in November at an exhibit of her conceptual art. He was intrigued by her art, and in September 1967, Lennon, who was still married to his first wife at the time, sponsored her solo show at a London gallery.

[Lennon’s first marriage was terminated in November 1968, and he and Ono collaborated on a number of works during the last two years of the Beatles, 1969 and ’70, and attended many public protests against the war in Vietnam. The couple married in March 1969. They had formed the Plastic Ono Band in 1968 as an outlet for their collaborative work.

[Ono and Lennon moved to New York City to escape the press attention, especially the racial prejudice in the media directed at Ono, in August 1971. They initially settled in Greenwich Village, but moved to the Dakota Apartments on the Upper West Side on Central Park West, between 72nd and 73rd Streets, in 1973.

[On 8 December 1980, Lennon, returning home with Ono after a recording session, was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman (b. 1955), who remains in prison on a 20-years-to-life sentence.

[Ono continues to perform, exhibit, and release recordings. She appears for, promotes, and supports many charitable, artistic, and humanitarian works and organizations around the world. She also works to preserve her murdered husband and collaborator’s legacy, having funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan’s Central Park in his memory in 1981-85, along with other memorials to Lennon.

[In 2005, as keeper of the Lennon flame, Ono was actively involved as a primary consultant to Lennon, a musical about the post-Beatles life of the rock songwriter with music and lyrics by Lennon and book by Don Scardino (b. 1949; retired actor; television director and producer).

[Ono made the whole Lennon catalog available to Scardino. The gatekeeper to the Lennon legacy, Ono retained final script approval and required the Broadway producers to present the completed script to her live in workshop format.

[The show went into previews on 7 July 2005 at the Broadhurst Theatre, opened 14 August to negative reviews, and closed on 24 September after 42 previews and 49 regular performances.]

At first, the audience-perpetrators are reticent and even polite, cutting bits from her sleeves and collar and waistband, then setting the shears back on the stage, as Ono stares ahead unperturbed. Eventually, though, an overzealous man saunters up and begins slicing off Ono’s slip with gusto, first cutting directly between her breasts, then snipping the slip’s arm straps and finally slicing all the way around her waist to reveal her bra. The audience titters with nervous laughter (“Don’t get carried away,” a female voice admonishes), while the artist herself begins to look uncomfortable, biting her lip, her eyes darting around. Only when the man clips Ono’s bra straps does the audience protest. “Stop being such a dweeb!” a female voice yells, breaking the offender’s spell; others boo and hiss. “Cornball,” a male voice declares. Ono’s eyes tilt upward as though imploring the heavens for assistance; she crosses her arms over her chest. But she perseveres, and the film ends before the performance does.

“Cut Piece” — in its enactment of public violence, escalating sense of dread and implication of the audience as voyeurs — was a pivotal work of feminist art and would inspire numerous others: Among them were Carolee Schneemann’s [1939-2019] provocative “Interior Scroll” (1975), in which the artist pulled a scroll inscribed with an excerpt from her book “Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter” (“If you are a woman … they will almost never believe you really did it” [Trespass Press, 1976]) from her vagina; and Marina Abramović’s [b. 1946] “Rhythm 0” (1974), in which the audience was encouraged to interact with the artist using any of 72 objects set on a table (a rose, a feather, a whip, a gun) while Abramović stood still. “Rhythm 0,” like Ono’s piece, reverses the usual artist-audience dynamic. “Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give,” Ono has said of “Cut Piece,” “the artist gives what the audience chooses to take.” Abramović, who had a loaded gun pointed at her, put it more bluntly: “What I learned was that . . . if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.”

Viewing “Cut Piece” now, what struck me is how genuinely unsettling it remains. I watched the short film once, then again, floored by how relevant, how prophetic, it feels in our own cultural moment, when many of the long-held gains of feminism, both legal and cultural, seem on the brink of being lost forever. The reality most people took for granted merely a few years ago — that men and women were inherently equal, and that as a society we were collectively striving to remedy the ways in which we weren’t paid or treated as such — is being peeled away with alarming speed. This atmosphere is surely one reason we are seeing a resurgence of interest in feminist performance art of the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, much of it difficult, aggressive and surprisingly radical — certainly for its era but even now.

In the past decade or so, the defining trend among curators has been to shine a light on artists who were previously “overlooked.” Various groups who were once misunderstood, neglected or ignored have been excavated and exhibited — artists of color, older women artists, women of Abstract Expressionism and so on (though “overlooked” is, of course, itself a deprecating term). The “rediscovery-industrial complex,” as it’s been wryly termed, has now reached female performance artists, arguably sidelined in their day not only for the confrontational radicalism of their work — what Schneemann called the “considered disregard for the comfort of the audience” [The Obscene Body Politic (Carolee Schneemann Foundation, 1991)] — but because their particular art form was not salable, collectible or tied to the market in any way.

Ono, who has a new exhibition, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” opening at the Broad museum in Los Angeles next month [23 May-11 October 2026], is at the center of this reassessment, but she’s not alone. In July, London’s Tate Modern, where the Ono show originated, will mount a significant retrospective [Ana Mendieta, 15 July 2026-17 January 2027] of the work of Ana Mendieta [b. 1948], the Cuban American multidisciplinary artist who died in 1985 at 36 years old. The exhibition picks up where this winter’s comprehensive show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York [7 November 2025-17 January 2026], “Ana Mendieta: Back to the Source,” left off, examining her short but prolific career through early paintings, remastered films, late sculptures and site-specific interventions in natural landscapes, which Mendieta documented with slides, photographs or film.

[Ana Mendieta died on 8 September 1985 after falling from her 34th-floor apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village. She lived there with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre (1935-2024). The circumstances surrounding her death were the subject of controversy.

[Prior to her death, neighbors heard the couple arguing violently and, after Mendieta’s fall, to which there were no eyewitnesses, Andre had scratches all over his face.

[During three years of legal proceedings, Andre’s lawyer described Mendieta’s death as a possible accident or a suicide. After a nonjury trial, Andre was acquitted of second-degree murder in February 1988. The acquittal caused an uproar among feminists in the art world, and remains controversial.]

Also this spring, Abramović, now 79 and the most influential performance artist still working — for “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA in 2010 [14 March-31 May], she sat staring at museumgoers for roughly seven hours a day over two and a half months, and has generally made testing the limits of human endurance her artistic pursuit — is presenting new and old work at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice [Transforming Energy, 6 May-19 October 2026], the first living female artist to have a major solo exhibition there. And her “Balkan Erotic Epic,” a four-hour dancing and singing extravaganza that mines Balkan folklore, will have its North American premiere at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in December [8-20 December].

[Before New York City, Balkan Erotic Epic (Abramović was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in the Balkans) has played in Manchester, U.K. (début); Barcelona, Spain; Bochum, Germany; and Berlin, Germany. Following New York, the project is scheduled to travel to Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Paris, France.]

Last year, Karen Finley [b. 1956], 70, the artist known for covering her body in chocolate to point out the degradation of women [The Return of Chocolate-Smeared Woman, The Flea Theater, 17 June-4 July 1998] — but even more so for suing the National Endowment for the Arts for denying her funding over “decency standards,” a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court [National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, et al. (1998); co-plaintiffs: John Fleck (b. 1951), Holly Hughes (b. 1955), Tim Miller (b. 1958), and the National Association of Artists’ Organizations; decided against the artists] — had a solo show at Freight + Volume gallery in Lower Manhattan [More Desperate Than Ever, 17 May-5 July 2025]. Other female performance artists had posthumous exhibitions at various major galleries in New York and Los Angeles: Schneemann (who often used her body as what she described as “visual territory” in transgressive pieces exploring female sexuality), Lee Lozano [1930-99] (whose most famous performance was a satirical inversion of feminism in which the singular artist avoided speaking to other women for 28 years [Decide to Boycott Women, August 1971 until her death]) and Hannah Wilke [1940-93] (who made stark work documenting her nude body’s deterioration from cancer). Curators have made it their mission to rescue subversive feminist performance work from the purgatory where it’s long dwelled. At a time when manosphere podcasters extolling the virtues of female subservience are increasingly influential in public discourse, the constitutional right to abortion has been overturned and social media is rife with a kind of emboldened misogyny I thought we’d left in a bygone era, what could feel more apt than a group of pioneering feminist artists who confronted exasperatingly similar issues in their own lives?

There are perhaps no two artists who were as misunderstood in their prime, and who are more worthy of a critical re-evaluation now, than Ono and Mendieta, who have more in common than one might think. Both lived in the shadows of famous men, both existed between two cultures and both made conceptual work about gender, power, vulnerability, dislocation, connection, ritual and transformation — work that was deeply female in its sensibility, and that was about navigating the fraught space between the female self and the larger world.

The Broad’s Ono show, through drawings, films, conceptual art, music, performance pieces, installations, photographs and archival ephemera spanning seven decades, illuminates her immense contributions to culture — some explicitly feminist, some implicitly so. Putting a finer point on this feels like a necessary corrective, as her Beatles-adjacent celebrity has often eclipsed her art career. “She used her work and her music to communicate a lot of important feminist messages,” Connor Monahan, Ono’s studio director, told me. (Ono is 93 and no longer gives interviews.) “But in a way, I don’t really think that’s been digested in society.”

Ono, who was born in Tokyo in 1933 and received classical music training as a child in Japan, told her father — a classical pianist turned successful banker — that she hoped to be a composer. He replied there were no great female composers. Instead, she’d become the first woman to study philosophy at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, lasting only two semesters before moving to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence College for three years and eventually finding herself at the center of the heavily male downtown avant-garde art scene.

Ono was making her early work amid the first stirrings of second-wave feminism; the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, combined with the publication of Betty Friedan’s [1921-2006; American feminist writer and activist] “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, lit the kindling of widespread discontent among postwar American women. In the 1950s and early ’60s, women were expected to suit themselves up in the suffocating corset of domesticity. Until 1974, unmarried women were often required to have a male co-signer when applying for a bank loan or credit card. Abortion was only legal in a handful of states by 1970, and sexual harassment, though pervasive, did not yet have a name. It’s this unnamed menace, I’d argue, that Ono so cleverly countenances in “Cut Piece.”

Two of her short films from this period (both made in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade) address feminist ideas. In “Freedom,” Ono, whose face is out of the frame, attempts to wrest herself free of the purple bra she’s wearing while a score by Lennon drones on in the background. “Fly” zeros in on a fly crawling over the rolling landscape of a woman’s naked body. Is the woman sleeping? Dead? The ambiguity is intentional. “This whole idea of a male society was based on the fact that women shut up,” Ono has said, “but shutting up is death, in a way. So we were always kind of pretending to be dead.”

In Mendieta’s case, the death was all too real — she fell from the window of her 34th-floor Manhattan apartment; her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was subsequently tried for murder and acquitted. Frustratingly, her tragic end has become the salient fact of her biography. Helen Molesworth’s [b. 1966; curator of contemporary art] popular 2022 podcast, “Death of an Artist,” investigated Andre’s suspected involvement, along with the couple’s tumultuous eight-month marriage; the actress America Ferrera [b. 1984] has announced plans to executive produce and star in an upcoming limited-series adaptation of Robert Katz’s [1933-2010] luridly titled 1990 account of the incident, “Naked by the Window.” To a maddening degree, Mendieta gets treated like the Sylvia Plath [1932-63; American poet and author; known for the 1963 semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar] of the art world. Her aesthetic obsession with blood and death and burials, with tracing the outline of her body in her iconic “Silueta Series” — a leitmotif of hers that unmistakably evokes a chalked crime scene — is said to prophesy her own death. Yet finally, with these shows, Mendieta’s mystical, powerfully haunting art gets its due.

Born in Cuba in 1948, she was sent to America with her sister at the age of 12. Mendieta made her most important work between 1972 and 1985: on creek banks in Iowa, where she lived in an orphanage, a boarding school and a series of foster homes as a child, then later studied at the University of Iowa’s avant-garde Intermedia M.F.A. program; in Mexico, where she visited pre-Columbian archaeological sites in the early ’70s; during a series of trips back to Cuba in the early ’80s; and in New York City, where she moved in 1978 and was welcomed by a community of feminist artists.

Mendieta’s varied oeuvre — influenced by Afro-Cuban religious rituals, Indigenous goddesses and the idea that a universal energy animates all life — includes paintings; photographs; works on paper; films of her pieces shot on Super 8, 16 millimeter and video; and sculptures she made at the American Academy in Rome, where she had her own studio for the first time, in the two years before her death. At Marian Goodman, there were drawings on leaves and an installation of black candles arranged in the shape of her body — called “Ñañigo Burial” (1976) [Ñáñigo refers to a member of a historic, Afro-Cuban, all-male fraternal organization], the installation was created by Mendieta for her first opening in New York [November 1979 at the A.I.R. Gallery (SoHo); Siluetas series]; it was lit the day I visited. But her signature pieces are her “earth body” works, as she called them, which are perhaps best described as ephemeral sculptures that straddle performance art, body art and land art, which Mendieta created using natural elements (mud, fire, feathers, flowers, blood, water, gunpowder) to carve, mark, burn or otherwise manipulate the earth. In “Imágen de Yágul” (1973) [“Image of Yágul,” a pre-Columbian Zapotec (indigenous pre-Columbian civilization that flourished from ca. 700 BCE-1521 CE in the Valley of Oaxaca in southeastern Mexico) archaeological site and former city-state], for example, she integrates her body into the landscape, lying inside an ancient Zapotec tomb, her naked form obscured by a gauzy spray of flowers; in other works, she inscribes her corporeal outline into the landscape by igniting it with gunpowder, say, or setting it on fire. Mendieta staged many of her pieces privately, capturing them in arresting short films and photographs, which are artifacts in their own right — “the afterimage of primordial remembrances,” in her words. Mysterious and intimate, her earthworks make you feel like you are being let in on a secret.

Ono and Mendieta have something else in common: Their work, as well as that of nearly all the female performance artists of this era, was marginalized, demeaned or slighted. When she died, Mendieta had no formal gallery representation and did not receive an obituary in The New York Times, though the paper extensively covered her husband’s murder trial. Reviews of the albums Ono released with Lennon were harsh: “A little of it goes a long way. Too long,” wrote the Times critic Don Heckman [1934-2024; New York Times pop and jazz music critic, 1969-73] of Ono’s half of the couple’s dual 1970 “Plastic Ono Band” releases, dismissing it as “wailing vocal sounds.” Her visual art was ignored almost wholesale until the 21st century.

Surely a primary reason for this dismissal of both women is that their work focused heavily on the female body. The body is the performance artist’s vessel, of course, but first- and second-wave feminist art, especially in the ’70s, was also engaged in “a rethinking of how we represent the female body in all its forms,” as the critic Lauren Elkin [b. 1978; Franco-American cultural critic, essayist, novelist, and translator] writes in “Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art” (2023). Some artists made work that was in-your-face, like Wilke photographing a series of topless self-portraits in which she covered her torso and face with labia-shaped pieces of chewing gum that looked like tiny scars [S.O.S. – Starification Object Series, 1974]. These artists were, as Elkin puts it, “harness[ing] the power of repulsion” to make their point.

Others employed the body as a vehicle for interrogating themes of displacement and identity, which were particular concerns for Mendieta as an exile. “I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette),” she wrote in an artist statement in 1981. “My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.” In her work, this return often means merging with the earth, as she does in the 1974 film “Grass Breathing,” where she lies beneath the sod, visibly inhaling and exhaling, like someone who has been buried alive. The three-minute silent film is claustrophobic, uncomfortable, intense, but also meditative, peaceful and almost erotic, masterfully taking the viewer through the full arc of emotions.

For these artists, the body, rather than being “mute” and “almost exclusively . . . a mirror of masculine desire,” as the [art] critic Jan Avgikos wrote in 1997, was, as it is in life, a site of liberation, agency, eroticism, pain. In a 2011 talk, “Regarding Ana Mendieta,” Schneemann, who was friends with the younger artist, said, “We have forgotten the danger, the dangers of depicting the explicit sensuous female body, we have forgotten how much hatred and resistance that inspired — rage, envy, domination.”

Have we? In “Moffitt Building Piece” (1973), Mendieta poured cow blood and viscera on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, then filmed passers-by, none of whom intervened. In “Rape Scene,” from the same year, she loosely re-enacted the aftermath of a female student’s rape and murder, inviting an audience into her apartment to witness her half-naked, smeared with animal blood and tied to a table. Ono and Lennon also made a film called “Rape” (1969), in which the camera relentlessly stalks an unsuspecting young woman; it incriminates viewers, just as Mendieta’s films do. Yet Ono’s most notable project in this vein is “Arising” (2013), for which she invited women to send stories of harm done to them simply because they were female, accompanied by a photo of only their eyes. Numerous testaments hung in the installation — a bracing reminder of the dark side of the universal female experience.

Is it fair, in the end, to group these female artists together under a feminist banner? Mendieta resisted any such identitarian designation — though her work was clearly invested in feminist themes, and justice for her death has become an article of feminist conviction. Schneemann was not fond of what she called “the confines of essentialist theory.” Lozano, in her absolute spurning of other women, was rejecting all categories imposed on her. Ono, for her part, cared about the plight of women, but the cause was a tributary that fed into her larger humanist aims. “I am a woman, and my experiences produce my works,” she said upon the debut of “Arising.” “To me, feminism should be about understanding women and their condition, about expressing who they are and what happened to them. If you put it this way, you see how feminism does not concern only women but everybody as humans. Also, men.” Although these artists didn’t always readily embrace the label, had they known how shockingly essential their art would remain over a distance of 40, 50, even 60 years, they might have seen it differently.

[Essentialism, which Schneemann rejected, is the belief that things have an underlying, unchanging nature that defines what they are. It argues, for example, that gender differences are fixed, natural, and biologically determined, rather than shaped by culture or history. This becomes a simplistic excuse for discrimination, intolerance, and inequity.]

[In 1992, I was approached by Drama Review editor Richard Schechner (b. 1934) to do a profile of The Shaliko Company for the planned series.  For the better part of a year, I shadowed company director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), attending rehearsals for the various productions he was directing. 

[The company’s main project at the time was the environmental production of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven—originally called Going to Iraq (and returned to that title after the 1992 staging)—and I attended most of the rehearsals.  The production, at Theater for the New City in Manhattan’s East Village, from 17 September to 11 October 1992.

[Malpede had been working on Going to Iraq/Blue Heaven during the build-up to Desert Storm, and her response to the Gulf war had compelled her to write about it.  The playwright was, however, already contemplating another occurrence as the base of the drama: the death of artist Ana Mendieta. 

[For Malpede, Mendieta’s fate is emblematic of the position of women artists in America, and she found herself struggling with this subject when war broke out in January 1991.  Aria, a sculptor who serves as the play’s central character, is a sort of avatar of Mendieta.

[(It’s interesting to note that the actress who played Aria in Blue Heaven, Rosalie Triana (aka: Rosalía Triana. 1946-2023), had portrayed Ana Mendieta in June or July 1992 in Madre Selva by Alma Sanchez (b. 1947; aka: Alma Villegas) at the Galerie Lelong—which showed Mendieta’s work.)

[There are three posts on Rick On Theater that cover Blue Heven/Going to Iraq, and one more that’s an interview of playwright Karen Malpede.  For those interested, these are: “‘As It Is in Heaven’” (25 March 2011), “Blue Heaven (Going to Iraq)” in “Some Women Writers from the Archives” (10 July 2019), “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq) – Part 1” (11 May 2020) and “Part 2” (14 May 2020), and “An Interview with Karen Malpede (1992)” (5 November 2014).

[Amanda Fortini has written for the New York Times (including contributing frequently to T), the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, the Paris Review, New York, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Slate, and Salon, among other publications.  She’s worked as an editor at Mirabella, the New York Review of Books, and Slate, and has been the William Kittredge Visiting Professor at the University of Montana.  

[Her essays have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Political Writing (PublicAffairs, 2008) and Best of Slate (Atlas Books, 2006), and she was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award in 2012.  After several semesters as a lecturer in journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s Greenspun College for Urban Affairs, Fortini has contributed articles and essays on Las Vegas, including several for the New Yorker, and an acclaimed cover story for California Sunday.]

"Art That Flows From a Will to Live": Marina Abramović, Performance Artist

by Jessica Testa 

[Marina Abramović (b. 1946 in Yugoslavia) is a pioneering performance artist, best known for her works that explore the physical limitations of the body, as well as the body’s potential as a vehicle to spiritual metamorphosis.  Born in Belgrade (now the capital of Serbia), Abramovic studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1965 to 1970 and in Zagreb, Croatia, at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1972.

[("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,” Guardian [New York] 2 Oct. 2010, Interview: Marina Abramović | Marina Abramović | The Guardian].  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 after World War II in 1945, and dissolved into six independent republics in 1992.)

[She was among the first generation of performance artists of the 1970s, a group that often resorted to using their own bodies as an artistic medium.  Her works often explore extremes of sensation, and, frequently, the audience is invited to participate in the intense, and often exhausting, painful performances.  Aramović's presentations include sound, video, photography, language, and sculpture, in addition to using her body as the central medium for her work.

[She later regularly collaborated with German artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen, 1943-2020; German performance artist known for his ambitious conceptual works) on other performative works, exploring the capacities of the body, as well as constructions of gender and social systems in their pieces.  

[In 1976, following her marriage to Serbian performance and conceptual artist Neša Paripović (b. 1942), Abramović went to Amsterdam to give a performance and decided to move there permanently.  She divorced Paripović in 1976 (m. 1970) and began living with Ulay, with whom she worked for about twelve years.

[From 1990 to 1995, she was a visiting professor at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at the Berlin University of the Arts.  From 1992 to 1996. she also served as a visiting professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and from 1997 to 2004, she was a professor for performance art at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig.

[Abramović also began traveling around the world to perform, exploring the body and nature with Ulay as a means of achieving spiritual transformation, in locations ranging from the Gobi Desert to the Tibetan mountains, and the Great Wall of China (1988).  At the end of this project, her relationship with Ulay dissolved.  

[She has exhibited her work at the Venice Biennale, where she won a Golden Lion award in 1997 (and met Italian contemporary artist Paolo Canevari, b. 1963, whom she would later marry), and at Documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Art Basel in Switzerland, and the Kumamoto Museum of Contemporary Art in Kumamoto, Japan, among many other venues.

[Abramović and Canevari moved to New York in 2002 and married in 2006.  She bought an estate in upstate Hudson, a small city in the center of New York’s eastern border of with Massachusetts, that became her private residence and a meeting place for performance art.  Abramović divorced Canevari and currently lives and works in Amsterdam and New York City.

[Eleven years ago, I posted a two-part article entitled “Performance Art” (7 and 10 November 2013).  It was a short history and exegesis of the artform as I understood it (and it would be pertinent to this post), so I will republish my definition of performance art (slightly edited and reformatted) for readers who haven’t encountered this hybrid of theater and art (my characterization):

Also known as “live art,” “living art,” or “body art,” performance art exists at the conjunction of the worlds of art and theater.  Performance, as it’s often called, is the demonstration or execution of the ideas of Conceptual Art, defined as “art of which the material is the concept.”  (Other, earlier art influences include Dadaism, Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art.)  

Conceptual Art, which flourished between the mid-’50s to the mid-’70s, elevated ideas and the process of creation over product and technique, and insisted that art can’t be bought or sold.  Like performance art, it can’t be commodified and brought home for display.  

Accepted as a separate medium of artistic expression in 1970s, performance, however, defies precise definition, asserts RoseLee Goldberg (b. 1947), an art historian, critic, and curator who’s lectured at many institutions and schools and who wrote the most comprehensive texts on it.  (Goldberg’s Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, originally published in 1979, was reissued in 2011 in an edition that brings the history of performance up to the first decade of the 21st century.)  

As performance artist Laurie Anderson (b. 1947), a composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings a variety of experimental music and art rock styles, puts it: “This is literally living art that continues to evolve and expand.” 

Except that it’s live art by artists, in fact, few practitioners will agree on what comprises performance art and the artists and writers about performance keep expanding the scope of the definition with each succeeding wave of experimentation and exploration.  By nature, performance art constantly changes and evolves, as the artists adopt and adapt new technologies and media, engulfing new ideas and concepts as they pursue their aims.  

The event might be performed only once (most common in the early years) or repeated several times, with or without a prepared script, improvised spontaneously or rehearsed over many months.  The works might be presented in solo performances or in groups, with lighting, music, or visuals made by the artists themselves or in collaboration with other artists.  Performances could take place in galleries, theaters, museums, streets, parking lots, public squares, parks, open fields, vacant lots, bars, night clubs, lofts, or any space the artist selects that’s suited to the piece.  

In general, however, in addition to being live, it’s also predominantly presentational and typically involves improvisation.  The artist-creator-performer, using her or his body as the primary artistic medium (either as canvas or as sculpture, or both), combines dance, music, drama, and often technology like film, video, projections, or computer imagery, as well as any other media that the artist can adapt and apply.  

Performance also encompasses behaviors outside the performing and visual arts like ritual, work activities, sports, and daily tasks.

[Because performance art is ephemeral, photos or videos are frequently the art objects displayed after the live performance and sold to subsidize the work and provide the artists with income.  They are also the only record of the art event that can be preserved or archived—with the caveat that the “liveness,” one of the fundamental criteria of performance art, is missing.

[(Note, incidentally, that despite my labeling performance art as a fusion of theater and art, Abramović has insisted: “To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre.  Theatre is fake . . . .  The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real.  Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real” [O’Hagan].)

[Jessica Testa’s interview with Marina Abramović ran in the “Sunday Styles” section of the New York Times on 4 August 2024.  In addition to “Performance Art,” other posts on the subject on Rick On Theater are: “Bob Dylan, Performance Artist” by Kirk Woodward (8 January 2011); “Lady Gaga: Artist For Our Time” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2011); “Penny Arcade: Two Performances” (15 November 2013); “Lady Gaga and Once” by Kirk Woodward (5 May 2014); "‘The Second Life of Performance’" by Katie Kitamura from T: The New York Times Style Magazine (10 January 2016)]

Marina Abramovic, still a performance artist at 77, talks about her desires to keep going.

Marina Abramovic stood and faced the ocean on Fire Island.

[Fire Island is the center islet of the barrier islands parallel to the South Shore (the Atlantic shore) of Long Island (though the name sometimes refers to all four of the small islands). It’s 32 miles long and ½ mile across at its widest point (9½ square miles in area) and lies off New York’s Suffolk County, the easternmost county on Long Island (and location of The Hamptons, the collection of villages—67 miles and 2 hours east of Fire Island—that are weekend and vacation homes to the arty and wealthy of New York City).

[Fire Island is a 2½-hour drive from New York City (though no cars are allowed on the island itself; one must park and take a ferry) and is a popular summer resort for New Yorkers, with an active LGBTQ community for which Fire Island is well known. There are fewer than 300 year-round residents and the population swells to 14,840 at the peak season. Many celebrities, from the entertainment world and other fields, have homes on Fire Island.]

For a long minute, her arms rose symmetrically from her sides until her body formed a T shape. Her long red dress was stark against the waves. Her palms faced forward.

Ms. Abramovic’s face was not visible, but it was conceivable that she was screaming. The performance artist once screamed for three hours, until she couldn’t anymore (“Freeing the Voice,” 1976 [Budapest]); once yelled into her lover’s reciprocating mouth for 15 minutes (“AAA-AAA,” 1978 [Amsterdam]); once persuaded hundreds of people in an Oslo park to shriek in homage to Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” ([Ekeberg Park, Oslo; 15-25 August] 2013).

[The iconic composition The Scream (Skrik in Norwegian) by Munch (Norwegian, 1863-1944) exists in several versions.  The first painted rendering was made in 1893 and is in the National Museum of Norway in Oslo. A pastel version, also from 1893, is in Oslo’s Munch Museum. The second pastel version, from 1895, was sold in 2012 to a private collector. The second painted version dates from 1910 and is also in the Munch Museum. Munch also created a lithograph stone of The Scream in 1895 and made about four dozen prints, several of which survive.]

Perhaps now she was expressing rage at humanity’s spoiling of the planet — the rising seas turned into garbage patches. Years ago, she said, after a deadly tsunami in Southeast Asia [the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, known as the Boxing Day Tsunami, that killed an estimated 225-230,000 people], she whipped the ocean 360 times, wanting to punish it [God Punishing (2005) in Phuket, Thailand, whipping the sea with hundreds of performers and reading poems at the first anniversary for those lost in the tsunami].

But no, Ms. Abramovic was not screaming at the ocean. At 77, she was trying to give it positive energy and “unconditional love as a way to heal,” she said in her artist’s statement for “Performance for the Oceans.” The new piece [May 2024] — an edition of three photographs to be auctioned in October by Christie’s in London [Frieze Art Fair, 9-13 October 2024)] — was made for the conservation charity Blue Marine Foundation.

Ms. Abramovic has long explored endurance and extremes, whether by sitting in the Museum of Modern Art for upward of 700 hours [The Artist Is Present, 14 March-31 May 2010] or walking across the Great Wall of China [The Lovers – The Great Wall Walk, 30 March-3 June 1988]. (Or, more recently, leading seven minutes of silence at a rowdy music festival [Seven Minutes of Collective Silence, Glastonbury Festival, near Pilton, Somerset, England, 24 June 2024].)

This year, she took the idea of endurance a step further. With an Austrian herbalist, Nonna Brenner, she introduced a line of products called the Marina Abramovic Longevity Method. They are tinctures made with vitamins and natural ingredients, like garlic and cranberry juice, to boost energy or support the immune system. (The instructions: “Take 50-60 drops two times a day — with food and water.” [This parenthetical insert from the online version is not part of the print edition.])

Immediately, some questioned whether the line, which promises “inside-out beauty,” was performance art. It was not. Ms. Abramovic, who survived a health emergency last year [see below, re: “pulmonary embolism”] — and who said she had worked with Dr. Brenner to treat her Lyme disease, including with leeches — wants to stay on this planet as long as possible, trash-filled oceans and all. “I’m not going anywhere until I’m 103,” she said.

“In American culture, when you’re old, it’s like you’re dirty, like something’s wrong with you,” said the artist, who was born in what was then Yugoslavia. “In Balkan culture, being old is actually great.”

This was the first thing Ms. Abramovic told me on a video call in June, while in Greece. We were supposed to talk about the ocean. We spoke more about the will to live. (They’re connected.) This conversation has been edited.

On Longevity

You say Americans are obsessed with staying young and living forever, but you’re also interested in living past 100. What’s the difference?

Every wrinkle is a threat in American culture. My idea with aging is to embrace the limits of the body. That you wake up in the morning, that you have pain, that you have arthritis, that you’re not flexible like you were before. Enjoying the limits and seeing how you can accept your body as it is. That’s the difference. Americans don’t accept their bodies as they are.

Personally, I’m a little afraid of living to 100. I don’t know what the planet is going to look like. You’re running toward it.

I really want to see aliens, finally, in my lifetime. Some years ago, I asked Richard Branson [English business magnate, founder of spaceflight corporation Virgin Galactic; b. 1950] if he could give me a one-way ticket to go up and not come back. I want to see what is behind all this. I want to see black holes. Who made the cosmos? I have the curiosity of a kid of 5 years old.

By the way, I think here’s how I’m going to look at 120: My nose is very big and my chin is glued together, and I will have one big hair growing out.

Humor about yourself is so important. We have to have a few jokes about this hell we’re living in.

Well, when your Longevity Method was announced, some people weren’t sure if it was serious.

I am completely smashed by the press. This is not new for me. If I read and took seriously people’s writing, I would not leave home.

I’ve worked with the body all my life. But first of all, I’m not the doctor. I’m just giving my name to Dr. Brenner in order to promote the product. Nobody knows about her. Everybody knows about me.

The products are drops for energy, allergies and the immune system. We are allergic to everything these days because of the way we’re eating food and how pollution is in the air. If you stabilize your immune system, and you don’t have allergies, and you have drops of energy, you’re doing fine. Nothing crazier than that.

You do seem healthy.

Every day I’m eating branzino, a grilled fish, with steamed vegetables. Nothing else. I don’t have dinner. I have a light breakfast, and then I eat around 2 o’clock. When you get older, you don’t need to eat so much because you’re not running around like crazy.

What keeps you up at night?

The news is always bad — every morning, one horror after another. Why are humans historically constantly at war? Why do we have violence? How is it possible that we never learned lessons? How is it possible we never learned simple things to forgive each other?

I think we need good news. In the Second World War, when everybody was painting the atrocity of the war, [Henri] Matisse [French Post-Impressionist artist; 1869-1954], for four years of the war, was only painting flowers. That’s what we need.

So you’re an optimist?

I always see the positive side. And mostly I’m right. Like, every breakup will look terrible in the moment. Actually, years later, you’re so lucky this person is not in your life.

Every day is a miracle. I wake up quite happy every morning. Not always — my life was really difficult. I’m only getting happy lately.

What makes you so happy lately?

That I’m alive. I am a little bit worried that I will not have enough time to do whatever I am interested in doing. I’m doing a big thing in Manchester [England] next year [Manchester International Festival, 1-31 July 2025]. It’s such a crazy project, I’ll just tell you the title: “Balkan Erotic Epic.” In Balkan culture, genitals were used in rituals to connect to the spirits and the gods.

It’s going to be such a scandal. Britain is so puritan. I can’t wait.

Are you going to appear naked?

I don’t know yet. When you have the naked body and you present it to the public, it’s not me anymore. If I’m fat, or with cellulite, or with sagging tits, who cares? I’m presenting a concept in that body.

Ask me something that you never asked anybody else before.

Since we’ve been talking about longevity, have you ever not wanted to be alive?

No. I always want to be alive. I had a very bad heartbreak [the break-up with Ulay in 1988]. It was the saddest thing in my life. But I was just crying. That’s it. And one day I woke up and I didn’t cry anymore.

On ‘A Good Death’

A few weeks later, Ms. Abramovic agreed to continue the conversation at her apartment in Manhattan. She showed me footage from the “7 Deaths of Maria Callas,” an opera she conceived that includes several video clips of Ms. Abramovic, with Willem Dafoe [stage and film actor; b. 1955] as her co-star, dying various painful deaths. [7 Deaths débuted on 27 July 2021 at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera (Bayerische Staatsoper).]

She showed me photos taken last year in a hospital, where she was treated for a life-threatening pulmonary embolism [May 2023]: images of the blood clots removed from her body during surgery and of her first time walking again after being in a coma. (For when she needs it, there is still a cane in her entryway, next to a framed photograph of the German dancer Pina Bausch. [See note with above parenthetical comment.])

After her discharge, she couldn’t travel by airplane for some time. So she took a boat to Europe, developing a new appreciation for the scale of the ocean. “What’s your Plan B, by the way?” she asked, referring to the day disaster strikes New York and its citizens need to flee. (Her plan is Australia; she has a permanent visa.)

When I arrived at the apartment, a 27-year-old performance artist mentored by Ms. Abramovic was just leaving. The artist, Miles Greenberg [Canadian performance artist and sculptor; b. 1997], asked if he could bring her back any gifts from his summer travels. She requested a “supernatural story.” She is interested in the mysticism — like crystals and numerology — and in 2016 won several bets with friends after her horoscope reader predicted that Donald J. Trump would win the election. (The horoscope reader said he would lose in 2024.)

After Mr. Greenberg left, she explained that she met him when he was 17.

“I don’t have any contact with anyone in my generation,” Ms. Abramovic said. “They’re so boring and depressed.”

So you don’t have any friends your age?

No. The oldest ones are 55 or 60. But not 77. They’re half-dead, they’re always complaining, they’re always sick.

What do you do for fun?

I always try to see life through a child’s eyes. I don’t take drugs, and I don’t drink. I love chocolate. But I don’t need to drink to be funny. I think I’m hilarious. I think I should do stand-up comedy.

Did your perspective on life change with your health scare last year?

Yes, oh my God. I have no reason to be depressed. I spent too much time on my broken heart. What a waste.

One of the reasons that I think survived was everything that I learned through performance about pain, about endurance. Last year was the most physical pain I had in my entire life. I could not move, for six weeks, my little finger. The other physical pain I could control. This was something uncontrollable. You can’t control death.

I read that you planned your own funeral many years ago [Keynote Address, 30 June 2015; Marina Abramović: In Residence, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney, Australia, 24 June-5 July 2015].

After Susan Sontag’s funeral, I was so discouraged. I want a big celebration. Nobody wears black, only bright colors. I had a crazy life, and I want to have a good death.

[Writer, critic, and public intellectual Sontag (b. 1933) died in New York on 28 December 2004, but according to her wishes, she was buried in Paris.  Her funeral was in Montmartre on 17 January 2005.]

Do you think you’re fixated on death?

No! I just wanted to stop being afraid of it.

[Jessica Testa is a New York Times reporter covering the worlds of style and fashion.]