The Artist is Present

An interview with Marina Abramović on the occasion of a major MoMA retrospective

Daniel Miller: Let’s start with this statement in the Daily Telegraph, published around the time that you curated your show in Manchester, which said that you were the ‘Godmother of Performance Art’...
Marina Abramovic: Which I hate. I said this once, and every single newspaper repeats this forever, like there is not anything that people can invent differently. Anyway. I said this once, a long time ago, because I’ve done performance so long.
DM: It reminded me of Roberto Bolano’s Savage Detectives. There’s a character who becomes ‘the godmother of visceral realism’, which is a fictional poetry movement. It seems to me you could be described as a visceral realist.
MA: Realism definitely – because performance is such a real situation, it takes place in a real space and a real time, to start with, and it’s not pretending anything. When you’re doing it for such a long time everything falls into a kind of bare presence – in this sense you can discuss it as a realism.

DM: So, a realism which is grounded in the visceral, in the body.
MA: Yes, that’s what I say. You know, body can’t lie. You know body can lie if you are performing for 15 minutes, or ten minutes, or one hour – you know, body can still act. But after a certain period it becomes what I call bare presence: real, vulnerable, uncovered body, which is bare… Really exposed. This vulnerable, exposed body, without any kind of protection, is really important, because that’s what the public can open.
DM: One way of doing this is through exhaustion?
MA: The most real, the most transformative performance, was long durational. Because you go through a certain emotional pain, you also go through the moment when the body stops existing, totally – it becomes kind of a luminious state of being and you transform into something else.
You can compare to the very high level of mediation. It’s funny, because I never read Buddhism or was interested in spirituality, but I was interested in performance. Performance brought me to certain states where I started freaking out because I didn’t know what it was, this kind of state, when the body stop existing.
Beyond an extreme pain, pain disappears – there is no pain anymore, but the pain is so strange. It’s so strange: pain looks like a door through which you can go into secrets. You have to go through the pain to understand that pain is illusion.

DM: When did you start thinking of performance in spiritual terms?
MA: Much later. Only when I actually started experiencing those kind of states. When I started having that kind of sensation was definitely during the Nightsea Crossing performance [1981–7]. After living with the Aborigines in the desert, my partner and I just sat opposite each other at a table, seven hours a day, not talking with each other, not consuming anything but water for 16 days. After about 12 days, stuff started happening to me which I was just: ‘What is going on?’ I’m looking to the guy… The idea was sitting motionless, absolutely don’t move, even if you feel this pain and you are going crazy. I was. The muscles become so tense that you think that if you don’t move you are about to lose consciousness. But when you say to your body: ‘Fuck it, just lose consciousness,’ and you really say this, then something amazing will happen. Nightsea Crossing is not crossing the sea by night: it’s a night sea of subconscious. There was lots of crossing of subconscious.
DM: Are you interested in the idea of night?
MA: Yes I am. Because you know night, it’s the old, between light and dark. You know, you know, you know of course that 2012, on 21st December, all the planets are going to be in one line with the earth.
DM: Yes, I saw the movie.
MA: No, I didn’t see the movie, but I went to… but the Aztec Calendars… But the one thing is effect: this will affect the magnetism of the planet. But I don’t know – is this the same as in the movie?
DM: Yeah… The idea in the movie is that the planets will align, and then destroy the world.
MA: No, no, no. This I don’t believe. This is not happening. What is happening is something different, it’s something that will really change the tides and effect our emotional life – because we are 70 percent water. I am very interested in Tibetan culture – it’s just the feeling of inner centre, the moment when you enter to any of the shrines or temples. Here it’s different: in Tel Aviv, there is ocean, you can breathe. But Jerusalem, don’t go there. That’s my advice.
You know, I was very very lucky to befriend Susan Sontag in her last years of her life. In her house it was wonderful. There was never food in the fridge, she just had olives, or something like that, but she had a computer in every room and in every room she was writing different things. So in the kitchen she was writing, I don’t know, essays, and a novel in the bathroom, and on every computer it was a completely different subject. So maybe you should do that.

In my very early childhood, everything about me and everything around me was to be artist. And I felt like a warrior, like a soldier – this whole idea of completely sacrificing your personal life, all kinds of wishes for this kind of high purpose. This is also something to do with my background, because both parents were national heroes, which is kind of insane, but I had to have a purpose. So I was always asking myself: ‘What is meaning of life? Why am I here? What is happening?’
So when I was twelve, I was very interested in trying to define the cosmos – I’m still interested. But what is art for? To understand what is beyond, and what is beyond the beyond. And then you discover that maybe we are all stuck on the heel of some big fat lady somewhere, and we can’t control anything. And it’s like that: you wake up and you need to do something. So that is what makes you an artist. It doesn’t make you a good artist, but it makes you an artist.
DM: What are you doing in your new work at MoMA?
MA: I can’t say, for the simple reason that the museum asked me not to talk about it. In a way I’m fine with that because I’m superstitious. Tell me, when the black cat crosses your path, are you crossing?
DM: Yes.
MA: But what about ladder?
DM: Ladder?
MA: You know, a ladder on the street….
DM: Uh… But this piece that you can’t talk about this – this is what you’re going to do at MoMA?
MA: Yeah. And the title of the piece is the same as the title of the show: ‘Artist is Present’. This is really the core of the work.
DM: And this is your retrospective.
MA: Yeah. But it’s not a retrospective of my work, but only of the performances when I am in it. Which is so radical – which is the most radical. And there are 36 artists re-performing five of my pieces, for three months.
DM: So now that you are having a retrospective, are you looking back a lot?
MA: Way too much! I have to look through every notebook, through masses of stuff – in Belgrade, in Amsterdam – in all the places I’ve been living. It’s all in crates, God, you forget things, you know… But I learned something amazing, which is that most of my ideas I already had when I was very, very young. I discovered my diary from when I was 17 and it was devastating to see – especially my emotional life, all the bullshit. Everything was the same was when I was 14. And I think I’ve made so many changes in my life, but my emotional structure is not changed at all. It’s uncanny.
DM: Another thing I wanted to ask you was about your generation…
MA: God, I’m so bored of my generation! There are really very few people who still have the vitality left: they are complaining or are sick or overdosed or drinking. It’s terrible! I’m 63 – I have less contact with my generation. There are some: Joan Jonas is still performing and I still see her. But there’s this bittereness and complaint: they don’t see how everything is so beautiful – with them, without them. They complain, thinking that their time was the best time and nothing new happened, everything which is new is wrong.
I tried to visit a studio here of two artists who have this residency programme in an apartment. Did you see it?
DM: No, not yet…
MA: You should see it. They have their own house, even the bedroom is called Crystal Room, Crystal Space. Go and see it.
DM: Okay.
MA: I mean, for me this is interesting, to see this kind of stuff. Because otherwise I could just make performances with curators of my own age. I was more interested to see the really new things – and there are plenty of new ideas. Sometimes, yeah, it is recycled, but so what? My generation recycled too.
Last July I curated this big event in Manchester: 14 artists, and young – young, young, young, as young as possible.
How to help this threshold? When you leave academy then nobody tells you anything. You can help, you can be generous and spare people so much pain, and disappointment, with the galleries, the markets, who use you, and all this shit – just to give some simple advice. I don’t know why my generation is so bitter about things.
But let’s talk about body drama: Elvis Presley and Martin Kippenberger. I want to give a lecture, just on body dramas. About all the ones who are young and die of overdoses because they could not handle their own energy. It’s kind of an interesting subject. And also: mothers. You know, every artist who lives with their mothers create obsessive works. Hanne Darboven, for example, lived her whole life with her mother.
DM: Louise Bourgeois…
MA: That’s father. That’s another subject…
DM: Proust, Flaubert, Baudelaire…
MA: Yeah, not bad.

DM: Final question: in some ways it’s difficult to know how to record something, because as soon as you start recording, you change something. So you lose an immediacy, or a presence. You lose certainty.
MA: This is why I am very much in favour of real-time recording. So now, for 600 hours I am recording – which is insane, and nobody is going to look for sure because it is 600 hours. But it’s kind of an honest recording; there’s no cut and we just have a hard-drive and record one-to-one. It’s a performance document: the performance is live and the document has to be real. When I made this Bruce Nauman piece it was recorded in real time. After quarter to midnight, a single mouse crossed the floor. It was amazing. It was one piece, but actually it was 24 hours and he had an observing camera in his studio. And just to see during the night one mouse was crossing the place. And the same thing happened during reenactment. You will never have this if you don’t record real-time. So at the Guggenheim there is a mouse, which you didn’t know before. It was wonderful. And just 15 minutes before the mouse was saying: ‘Why is the museum opened so late?’