Last month, performance artist Marina Abramovic celebrated her 77th birthday. A mainstay of the Manhattan arts scene for decades, Abramovic became notorious during the 2016 Presidential campaign when Right Wing conspiracy theorists including Info Wars accused her of staging a magick ritual making use of blood, semen, breast milk etc. This was supposedly a ceremony concocted by “Satanist Aleister Crowley.” They were attempting to connect the Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with magical practice as the brother of her campaign manager was attending this ritual – which was, in fact, a thank you dinner for Kickstarter supporters who’d funded another of Abramovic’s projects. The New York Times interviewed her on the occasion of her birthday. The article begins:
Marina Abramovic stood and faced the ocean on Fire Island.
For a long minute, her arms rose symmetrically from her sides until her body formed a T shape. Her long red dress was stark against the waves. Her palms faced forward.
Ms. Abramovic’s face was not visible, but it was conceivable that she was screaming. The performance artist once screamed for three hours, until she couldn’t anymore (“Freeing the Voice,” 1976); once yelled into her lover’s reciprocating mouth for 15 minutes (“AAA-AAA,” 1978); once persuaded hundreds of people in an Oslo park to shriek in homage to Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” (2013).
Perhaps now she was expressing rage at humanity’s spoiling of the planet — the rising seas turned into garbage patches. Years ago, she said, after a deadly tsunami in Southeast Asia, she whipped the ocean 360 times, wanting to punish it.
But no, Ms. Abramovic was not screaming at the ocean. At 77, she was trying to give it positive energy and “unconditional love as a way to heal,” she said in her artist’s statement for “Performance for the Oceans.” The new piece — an edition of three photographs to be auctioned in October by Christie’s in London — was made for the conservation charity Blue Marine Foundation.
Read the rest of the article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/28/style/marina-abramovic-performance-for-the-oceans.html.
And here’s a bit of past coverage on Abramovic:
