I was scrolling through TikTok one night when I paused on a video of a woman in a red dress, sitting at a table with her eyes closed. A man stepped into the frame and took the seat across from her. She slowly opened her eyes, and tears filled them once she realized who it was. The two reached for each other, their arms stretching across the table in a moment of raw, emotional reunion.
The woman in the red dress, I later learned, was Serbian performance artist and pioneer Marina Abramović. She was performing The Artist Is Present, a piece in which she invited strangers to sit silently across from her — an endurance-based performance that ran for three months in 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, as a part of her retrospective. The man across from her that day was her former creative and romantic partner, Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay. Abramović, unaware that he would appear, was visibly overcome with emotion.
Abramović discussed this performance and others during her conversation with author Pico Iyer at the Lobero Theatre on May 6 for UCSB’s Arts & Lectures series. She tuned in via Zoom from her home in New York. Unfortunately, she could not attend in person due to personal health reasons. Despite her virtual participation, she connected with us as if she were there.
For The Artist Is Present, Abramović spent eight hours each day, with extended 10-hour sessions on Fridays, sitting without food, water, or bathroom breaks. She remained committed to the performance: “Whatever happened, I would not get up from that chair,” she told the audience in her presentation. She said the experience was grueling, both mentally and physically, even after a year of preparation, during which she only ate and drank at night. “I prepared this like [an] astronaut,” she joked.
According to The New York Times, nearly 1,400 people sat opposite Abramović for The Artist Is Present, for varying amounts of time — some for hours, some for minutes. She was deeply moved by each person: “The public want to be part of something,” she said. “And that part of something, I actually give to them.” Abramović may have brought some participants to tears, but they moved her just as deeply. “When I stood up from the chair, I was not the same. Everything changed in my life.”
You might know Abramović from what is arguably her most famous performance, Rhythm 0. In 1976, a 23-year-old Abramović stood in Galleria Studio Mora in Naples, Italy, for six hours while a crowd, using various items displayed on a table, did whatever they wanted to her. The 72 objects included a scalpel, a gun, a bullet, a rose, and honey. Abramović wanted to expose the potential for human behavior when given complete freedom and challenge the boundaries of performance art.
Over the six hours, she was drawn on, cut on her neck, stripped, kissed, and even had a loaded gun placed to her head. Abramović said she was not scared at this moment — quite the opposite. “I was ready to die for art,” she said. “I was 23 years old and I didn’t care.”
When performing, she says she steps “into another state of reality.” She leaves her former self behind, which allows her to push to new limits. “You go into the other super self,” she reflected.
Performance art is often seen as one of the most demanding art forms, and Abramović has been pushing its boundaries for over 50 years, with no signs of slowing down. Iyer asked the now 78-year-old if she had plans to stop. “It’s not going to happen,” she told him. “I will just work until I die.”
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