by No one has done more to popularize performance art than Marina Abramović – and no work more so than her recent Moma (Museum of Modern Art) retrospective The Artist Is Present. Over almost three months in 2010 she sat in a New York museum for at least seven hours a day, six days a week, and invited members of the public to sit opposite her, one after the other .
The virality of that performance piece, and the popular 2012 documentary about it, turned the Belgrade-born artist, known for large-scale works that test the limits of physical and mental endurance, an unlikely pop culture icon. High-profile collaborations with big names such as Jay-Z and Givenchy followed, as well as merchandise, a skincare line, and numerous solo exhibitions at major museums around the world, including a survey at the Museum of Old and New Art -Art i. Hobart in 2015.
This week, Abramović launches her latest venture in Australia – a country that has played a central role in the artist’s long-running performance practice. In 1980, the 33-year-old artist and her then-partner Ulay spent five months living in the central desert with the Pintjantjara and Pintupi people, an experience that spawned her 1981 work Gold Found By The Artists, in which they faced each other at a table in silence for seven hours a day for 16 consecutive days at the Art Gallery of NSW. When we speak on the phone, Abramović calls it “the most formal landscape and experience I’ve ever had”.
Her work with Australia continues this weekend, with Marina Abramović Institute Takeover: a four-day exhibition of long-running performance art that will take place as part of the Adelaide festival, featuring eight artists from Australia and Asia selected by Abramović and the other four. members of their Institute. Those selected include Mike Parr (whom Abramović describes as our “doyen of performance art”), Melbourne-based artist Bidjara and Dr Christian Thompson, and artist and author of Koori from New York SJ Norman.
The 77-year-old artist will not be present for the Takeover, however. Abramović suffered a pulmonary embolism last year that nearly killed her; speaking from her New York apartment, she says, “I had a lot of problems with my health, and [travelling to Australia] it’s been a very long journey for me.”
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Abramović’s relationship with Australia was not simple. In 2016, she was accused of racism when an excerpt from an unedited proof of her unpublished memoirs began circulating social media. The page included comments she later said were taken from a decades-old diary entry, in which she described Indigenous Australians as “very strange and different” people who looked terrible. [to western eyes]” and “looks like a dinosaur”.
Aborigines are not only the oldest race in Australia; they are the oldest race on the planet. They look like dinosaurs. They are really strange and different, and should be treated as living treasures. But they are not.
But at the same time, when you meet them for the first time, you have to try. For one thing, it looks terrible to Western eyes. Their faces are not like any other faces in the world; they have large torsos (only one bad result of their contact with Western civilization is a high sugar diet that bloats their bodies) and club feet.
Thompson and Norman, who both worked with Abramović as part of an artists’ residency in Sydney in 2015 and are part of this weekend’s exhibition, were among several high-profile First Nations artists who made public statements at the time.
Although Thompson defended Abramović, whom he described as a friend and mentor, Norman wrote in a Facebook post that he was “deeply moved and upset by what Marina wrote”, and described the passage as ” inevitable racism”.
In that long and nuanced post, he described his conflicted feelings for an artist he admires, whose quote was “misleading depictions of a white woman in the desert” and which he felt racialized him and Aboriginal people. another. . “Whether or not Marina Abramović is racist or not is the conversation we should be having. I would much rather talk about Marina Abramović as a lightning rod for the systemic racism that permeates the entire discourse of Western art.”
Responding to the controversy on Facebook at the time, Abramović said: “I have the greatest respect for Aboriginal people (sic), to whom I owe everything. The time I spent with members of the Pijantjatjara and Pintupi tribes in Australia was a transformative experience for me, and one that profoundly and indelibly shaped my life and all of my art.
“The description in an early, uncorrected proof of my forthcoming book is taken from my diaries and reflects my first reaction to these people when I first met them way back in 1979. it and the understanding and appreciation of Aborigines that I gained afterwards.”
The book has since been published, and those criminal articles have been removed. When I ask Abramović now if she spoke to Thompson or Norman about the incident leading up to the Adelaide project, she laments the media coverage she says unfairly took things “out of context” in 2016.
“I have nothing else [to say] – Excuse me. It’s a complete misunderstanding, because if they read my book, I have a whole chapter about Aborigines [and] how this encounter changed my life. I said clearly, Aborigines are the oldest race on the planet [and] they should be treated like living treasures … It’s amazing that the Australians who react so harshly are the same ones who don’t treat these people well.”
In fact, First Nations Australians – including Shari Sebbens, Nakkiah Lui and Nayuka Gorrie – were among her most vocal critics on social media in 2016. But Norman also remembers “the difference in the reactions of the crowd and then those really heated reactions. A lot of non-Indigenous people were receiving, which felt like a displacement of something they knew was going on within themselves,” he says now.
Although he was “a little surprised” to be invited to take part in the Takeover show, he says he had no doubts about accepting. “I am a working artist… [In this instance] I really have no reservations about a check coming my way.”
For Takeover, he worked with western Sydney molecular biologist and musician Dr Mark Temple to transpose the DNA of different bird species into music. Eric Avery, a violinist, singer and composer with Ngiyampaa, Yuin and Gumbangirr heritage, will perform live music.
“[For Aboriginal people] a song is a data container; if you’re singing a bird story or if you’re singing a place story, you’re singing the source code of that [bird or] place. It’s a very different way of understanding things [compared to western science],” explains Norman.
He will not be present in Adelaide either: “[Increasingly I’ve been] thinking of my performance work like a song – one person can write a song, many people can sing it.”
Meanwhile, Thompson will be making a new work called Wait in Gold, in which he pins tiny flowers to himself, transforming “from a human figure to an opulent flower form”.
“[I’m exploring] thoughts about disappearing and appearing, and being seen and unseen. I was thinking a lot about the referendum, and this idea of having a voice and being voiced out,” he says.
Reflecting on his 2015 residency with Abramović, Thompson recalls counting lentils and rice, one of the central exercises in his “method”. “That took me an hour and a half … I’m imagining this [the Adelaide performance] it will be quite similar,” he said.
“You enter a very meditative space, where time seems to change in the way it passes you by.”
Other artists on the program include Indigo Perry, who will be inviting audience members to participate in “collecting material” as part of her work, and Collective Absentia, a Myanmar artist alias who works anonymously because of the risks involved in making art. he explores the political violence in that country.
Abramović is particularly sad to miss the 12-hour performance of Parr’s “blind painting” on the opening day of the Takeover. A similar performance, staged in response to the Israel-Gaza war, made headlines in December when his long-term gallerist Anna Schwartz fired Parr the next day, over what she described as “hateful graffiti”. Schwartz denied censoring the work and it was kept on display during the exhibition.
Abramović read the cover. “It’s so hard that you can’t do anything, you can’t comment on anything anymore. And I think it’s so important [we have] freedom of speech… [Artists] he should not be tortured for that.”
The Takeover performances will take place in and around the Adelaide festival centre, and will have a range of styles – from quiet to musical; from individual to interactive; static to wandering. Audience members also have the chance to take part in their own long-running experiment, with all-day and four-day passes on sale.
“It’s a long period of work [artform] where you are really changing, and with you, with the community, and the experience is very emotional,” says Abramović. “People come to see the work and they start coming back and coming back, and they form a kind of community.”
