Marina Abramović

Photo by Platon

Marina Abramović in her own words: ‘Why don’t we have a ménage à trois?’

It was 1984, and the artist’s relationship was falling apart. She describes her attempts to save it, in an exclusive extract from her memoir


• ‘I face so much jealousy’ – read the interview with Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović
Saturday 22 October 2016 09.00 BST

ur plan was for me to start the walk at the Great Wall of China’s eastern end, the Gulf of Bohai on the Yellow Sea, and for Ulay to start at its western end, the Jiayu Pass in the Gobi desert. After walking 2,500km each, we would meet in the middle.

About our original plan, to marry when we met there, we now spoke less and less. It was 1984, and my relationship with Ulay was falling apart. Since the death of his mother two years earlier – specifically since I had refused, on the night of the funeral, to conceive a child – we had been furious at each other, but saying little about it.

Marina Abramovic: ‘One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it’
 Photograph: Mike McGregor/Commissioned for The Guardian

Marina Abramović says having children would have been ‘a disaster for my work’

‘I had three abortions,’ the performance artist told the Tagesspiegel newspaper. ‘One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it’

Nicole Puglise

Tuesday 26 July 2016 21.16 BST

The performance artist Marina Abramović said she has had three abortions during her life because having children would have been “a disaster for her work”.

In an interview with the German newspaper Tagesspiegel translated by ArtNet, she said that children hold women back in the art world.

“I had three abortions because I was certain that it would be a disaster for my work. One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it,” Abramović said in the interview published on Monday.

“In my opinion that’s the reason why women aren’t as successful as men in the art world. There’s plenty of talented women. Why do men take over the important positions? It’s simple. Love, family, children – a woman doesn’t want to sacrifice all of that.”

The 69-year-old is famous for her more than 40 years of performance art. One of her earliest works in 1974 invited the audience to use an assortment of objects on her, from a feather boa to flowers to a loaded pistol. She told the Guardian that she was “ready to die” during the performance.

“The difference between theater and performance is that in the theater the blood is ketchup, and in performance, it’s real,” she told Tagesspiegel of her work.

In 2010, Abramović sat passively across from strangers and celebrities at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), staring into their eyes in a piece titled The Artist Is Present. It was turned into a documentary and also controversially adapted into a music video by the rapper Jay-Z.

Ahead of her 512 Hours performance at the Serpentine in London in 2014, Abramović told the Guardian that she was “old-fashioned” in real life compared with her artwork.

“Of course, I dream to have this perfect man, who does not want to change me. And I’m so not marriage material, it’s terrible. But my dream is to have those Sunday mornings, where you’re eating breakfast and reading newspapers with somebody,” she said.

But in her interview with Tagesspiegel, she said she was “totally free” by having no husband or family. Her artwork creates a demanding travel schedule and she said she didn’t think she could live differently.

“I am the artwork. I can’t send a painting, so I send myself … In the last year I didn’t spend more than 20 days in New York. At airports I had to think ‘where is my suitcase arriving from?’” she said.

In the interview, Abramović also looked ahead to her 70th birthday party at the Guggenheim – “We’ll see if I can dance down a pole from all the way up in the museum. I’m still practicing,” she said – though she’s already planned her own funeral.

THE GUARDIAN

Marina Abramović talks friends, enemies and fear / ‘I face so much jealousy’

Marina Abramović

‘I face so much jealousy’: Marina Abramović talks friends, enemies and fear

The artist has always pushed herself to the limit, letting strangers cut her and turning her breakup into a performance. But only now does she understand why

• ‘Why don’t we have a ménage à trois?’ – an extract from her new memoir

Simon Hattenstone
Saturday 22 October 2016 09.00 BST

“Y

ou are 10 minutes early,” Marina Abramović says. The performance artist leads me to her bedroom in the Greenwich Village apartment where she lives alone – minimalist, lime green sheets, huge TV on the wall – and hands me a book. “You have not seen final copy of my book yet? Now with pictures. Here, look. I am back in 10 minutes.”

Marina Abramović reveals plans for her funeral, 'the artist’s last piece'

Performance artist, 67, wants three bodies – one real, two fake – buried in the cities she has lived in the longest, and singer Antony Hegarty to perform

Nancy Groves
Wednesday 1 July 2015 03.41 BST

Marina Abramović has already planned her own funeral, which will incorporate her final performance work, live music, a colourful dress code and plenty of black comedy.

In a keynote speech in Sydney during her 12-day residency for Kaldor Public Art Projects, Abramović – in good health at 67 – read out her manifesto, concluding that “an artist should die consciously without fear” and that “the funeral is the artist’s last piece before leaving”.

Marina Abramović

Performance artist Marina Abramović: 'I was ready to die'

In Belgrade, audiences cut her; in New York, they came in their thousands and wept. What will happen when Marina Abramović lands in London for her most radical show yet? Emma Brockes talks to the art superstar about lipstick, masochism – and why she's too much for any man 

• Have you got what it takes to follow the Abramović method? – video 

• Marina Abramović at the Serpentine


Emma Brockes
Monday 12 May 2014 15.43 BST

In 1974, Marina Abramović did a terrifying experiment. At a gallery in her native Belgrade, Serbia, she laid out 72 items on a trestle table and invited the public to use them on her in any way they saw fit. Some of the items were benign; a feather boa, some olive oil, roses. Others were not. "I had a pistol with bullets in it, my dear. I was ready to die." At the end of six hours, she walked away, dripping with blood and tears, but alive. "How lucky I am," she says in her still heavy accent, and laughs.

Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović: 'The planet is dying. We have to be warriors'

In an exclusive interview in Tasmania, the performance artist explains why she stays out of the studio, resists nostalgia … and how she ate three raw onions

• Video: Have you got what it takes to follow the Abramovic method?
• Zoe Williams: How I became a convert to the cult of Marina Abramovic
• Marina Abramović’s weirdest moments in art – in pictures

Nancy Groves

Thursday 18 June 2015 04.18 BST

Let’s start with a quick quiz: what do Marina Abramović (Serbian performance artist) and Tony Abbott (Australian prime minister) have in common?

Answer: they’ve both been filmed eating a raw onion. A whole one. In fact, Abramović ate three. “The first time, the light on video wasn’t so good. The second, sound was lousy. Third, I couldn’t speak or talk, my throat was burning.”

The Onion is one of 13 self-portraits at the beating heart of Private Archaeology, a new exhibition of Abramović’s work at Mona, the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. Filmed between 1975 and 2002, these extreme video close-ups show the artist furiously brushing her hair, gnawing her cuticles, meditating, being strangled by a boa constrictor, and lying: under a pile of crystals, in shallow water, or upside down.

“Good art is never made in studio,” Abramović says. “Good art I make in life.”

How I became a convert to the cult of Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović

How I became a convert to the cult of Marina Abramović

'The grandmother of performance art' had people openly weeping at New York's MoMA. Zoe Williams spent a whole day in her presence at her long-anticipated London show. Did she break down?

Zoe Williams
Saturday 14 June 2014 08.00 BST

R

obert is a 46-year-old psychiatrist and Elisa is 28, and from Italy, and they both arrived outside the Serpentine gallery at around quarter to six on Wednesday morning. They were waiting for the opening of the Marina Abramović exhibition – Elisa had seen her three times already: on London's Southbank, in Milan and in Madrid. "I think she expresses something that was already inside of us but that we couldn't express." At last year's retrospective at MoMA, The Artist is Present, Abramović sat in a chair; people came and sat opposite her. Many were openly weeping during it. Lars, 36, a fine artist who is joint first in the queue, having arrived at 4.30am, explained: "In that show, she was just a mirror, as if you were facing yourself. That's why so many people got so sad and started crying. Because they couldn't actually face themselves."

Marina Abramović in new Australian tour / 'She's like the Beatles'

Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović in new Australian tour: 'she's like the Beatles'

Serbian superstar artist will return to Australia, more than three decades after a transformational trip to outback Western Australia

Nancy Groves
Thursday 19 February 2015 21.47 GMT

It was the place where she first fixed her famous Gaze. Now Australia is preparing to welcome Marina Abramović for a double season of art in Tasmania and Sydney.

The “superstar” Serbian performance artist will visit Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in June to launch a major four-month exhibition of her work, before travelling to Sydney to personally administer the 12-day residency at Pier 2/3, revealed in late 2014 by Kaldor Public Art Projects.

Marina Abramović / Quote

Marina Abramović

QUOTE

by Marina Abramović 

I change houses like I change socks.

Top 100 women / Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović

Top 100 women: art, film, music and fashion

Marina Abramović 

Yugoslavian performance artist famed for her gruelling, intimate works that are legendary feats of endurance, self-exposure and risk


T

he daughter of high-ranking officers in Tito's Yugoslavia, Marina Abramovic makes gruelling, intimate performances that are legendary feats of endurance, self-exposure and risk. She has invited audiences to manipulate her body, providing whips, knives and a gun loaded with a single bullet. She has sat among rotting cow's bones, scrubbing them clean while singing a tragic lament, a performance that reflected on the civil wars in the Balkans, and won her a Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Her alarming art is leavened by great humour and tenderness. Abramovic is inspirational in setting the bar almost impossibly high for performance art.

THE GUARDIAN