No one has done more to popularise performance art than Marina Abramović – and no work more so than her hit Moma (Museum of Modern Art) retrospective The Artist Is Present. Over almost three months in 2010 she sat in the 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 at a time.
The virality of that performance piece, and the popular 2012 documentary about it, turned the Belgrade-born artist, best known for extreme works that test the limits of physical and mental endurance, into a somewhat unlikely pop culture icon. High-profile collaborations with big names such as Jay-Z and Givenchy followed, as well as merchandise, a skin care line, and dozens of solo exhibitions at major museums around the world, including a survey at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart in 2015.
This week, Abramović launches her latest venture in Australia – a country that played a central role in the artist’s durational performance practice. In 1980, the 33-year-old artist and her then partner Ulay spent five months living in the central desert with Pintjantjara and Pintupi people, an experience that spawned their 1981 work Gold Found By The Artists, in which they sat opposite each other at a table in silence for seven hours a day for 16 consecutive days at the Art Gallery of NSW. When we talk over the phone, Abramović calls it “the most formative landscape and experience I’ve ever had”.
Her work with Australia continues this weekend, with Marina Abramović Institute Takeover: a four-day showcase of long-durational performance art taking place as part of Adelaide festival, featuring eight artists from Australia and Asia who have been selected by Abramović and the other four members of her Institute. Those picked include Mike Parr (who Abramović describes as our “doyen of performance art”), Melbourne-based Bidjara artist and academic Dr Christian Thompson, and New York-based Koori artist and author SJ Norman.
The 77-year-old artist will not, however, be present for the Takeover. Abramović suffered a pulmonary embolism last year that nearly killed her; speaking from her apartment in New York, she says, “I have had lots of issues with my health, and [travelling to Australia] is a very long trip for me.”
***
Abramović’s relationship with Australia has not been uncomplicated. In 2016, she was accused of racism when an excerpt from an uncorrected proof of her unpublished memoir began circulating social media. The page included observations she later said were taken from a decades-old diary entry, in which she described Indigenous Australians as “really strange and different” people who “look terrible [to western eyes]” and “look like dinosaurs”.
Aborigines are not just the oldest race in Australia; they are the oldest race on the planet. They look like dinosaurs. They are really strange and different, and they should be treated as living treasures. Yet they are not.
But at the same time, when you first meet them, you have to put effort into it. For one thing, to Western eyes they look terrible. Their faces are like no other faces on earth; they have big torsos (just one bad result of their encounter with Western civilisation is a high sugar diet that bloats their bodies) and sticklike legs.
Thompson and Norman, who had both worked with Abramović as part of an artist residency in Sydney in 2015 and are part of this weekend’s showcase, were among several high profile First Nations artists who made public statements at the time.
While Thompson defended Abramović, whom he described as a friend and mentor, Norman wrote in a Facebook post that he was “repelled and deeply upset by what Marina wrote”, and described the excerpt as “indefensibly racist”.
In that long and nuanced post, he described his conflicted feelings for an artist he respects, whose extract was “the misguided reflections of a white woman in the desert” and who he felt had subjected him, and other Aboriginal people, to a racist gaze. “Whether or not Marina Abramović is racist or not is not the conversation we should be having. I would much rather talk about Marina Abramović as a lightning rod for the systemic racism that pervades the entire discourse of Western art.”
Responding to the controversy on Facebook at the time, Abramović said: “I have the greatest respect for Aborigine (sic) people, 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 has deeply and indelibly informed my entire life and art.
“The description contained in an early, uncorrected proof of my forthcoming book is taken from my diaries and reflects my initial reaction to these people when I encountered them for the very first time way back in 1979. It does not represent the understanding and appreciation of Aborigines that I subsequently acquired.”
The book has since been published, with those offending paragraphs removed. When I ask Abramović now if she talked with either Thompson or Norman about the incident ahead of the Adelaide project, she laments media coverage that she says unfairly took things “out of context” back in 2016.
“I have nothing else [to say] – I have apologised. It’s a complete misunderstanding, because if they read my book, I have an entire chapter about Aborigines [and] how this encounter changed my life. I said very clearly, Aborigines are the oldest race on the planet [and] they should be treated as living treasures … It’s so amazing that the Australians who react so hard to this 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 a “difference between the reactions that mob were having and then these really heated reactions that a lot of non-Aboriginal people were having, that felt like a displacement of something that they knew was going on in themselves”, he says now.
While he was “somewhat surprised” to be invited to participate in the Takeover showcase, he says he didn’t have reservations about accepting. “I’m a working artist … [In this instance] I don’t really get to have reservations about a cheque that’s coming my way.”
For the Takeover, he worked with western Sydney-based molecular biologist and musician Dr Mark Temple to transpose the DNA of different bird species into music. Eric Avery, a violinist, vocalist and composer with Ngiyampaa, Yuin, Gumbangirr and Bundjalung heritage, will perform the music live.
“[For Aboriginal people] a song is a container for data; if you’re singing the story of a bird or you’re singing the story of a place, you are singing up the source code of that [bird or] place. It’s a profoundly different way of understanding things [compared to western science],” Norman explains.
He won’t be present in Adelaide either: “[Increasingly I’ve been] thinking about my performance work like a song – one person can write a song, many people can sing it.”
Thompson, meanwhile, will be performing a new work titled Wait in Gold, in which he pins tiny gold flowers to himself, transforming “from a human figure into an opulent flower form”.
“[I’m exploring] ideas of disappearing and appearing, and being seen and not seen. I was thinking a lot about the referendum, and this idea of having a voice and having a voice taken away,” he says.
Reflecting on his 2015 residency with Abramović, Thompson recalls counting lentils and rice, one of the core exercises in her “method”. “That took me six and a half hours … I’m imagining this [the Adelaide performance] will be quite similar,” he laughs.
“You go into a very meditative space, where time seems to change in terms of how it moves around you.”
Other artists on the lineup include Indigo Perry, who will be inviting audience members to participate in “gathering material” as part of her work, and Collective Absentia, the alias of a Myanmar artist who works anonymously because of the risks associated with making art that explores the political violence in that country.
Abramović is particularly sorry to miss Parr’s 12-hour “blind painting” performance on the Takeover’s opening day. A similar performance, made in response to the Israel-Gaza war, made headlines in December after Parr was dropped by his long-term gallerist Anna Schwartz the following day, for what she described as “hate graffiti”. Schwartz denied censoring the work and it was kept on display during the exhibition.
Abramović read the coverage. “It’s so hard that you can’t actually do anything, you can’t comment on anything any more. And I think it’s so important that [we have] freedom of speech … [Artists] should not be crucified for that.”
The Takeover performances will happen in and around Adelaide festival centre, and will range in style – from silent to musical; from solo to interactive; static to roaming. Audience members have the opportunity to participate in their own long-durational experiment, too, with whole-day and four-day passes on sale.
“Long durational work is the [artform] where you’re really changing yourself, and with you, the public, and the experience is very emotional,” Abramović says. “People come to see the work and they start coming back and coming back, and create a kind of community.”
Marina Abramović Institute: Takeover runs from 1-4 March as part of Adelaide festival
