This month sees the release of The Seven Deaths of Marina Callas by seminal performance artist Marina Abramovic. Besides making powerful and unusual work, perhaps Abramovic holds a special place in the hearts of the Thelemic community after the Trump campaign claimed that Hilary Clinton was connected with Satanists who’d attended a ceremony officiated by Abramovic that outlets like Infowars decribed as concocted by “Satanist Aleister Crowley.” As if being a devotee of the Prophet of the Lovely Star is a BAD thing. Well, there ya go!
Abramovic’s statement about this new work is:
“For thirty-one years, I have wanted to make a work dedicated to the life and art of Maria Callas. I have read all of her biographies, listened to her extraordinary voice and watched her on film. A sagittarius, like me, I have always been fascinated by her personality, her life — and her death.
“Like so many of the characters she created on stage, she died for love. She died from a broken heart. Most operas end with the woman dying and more often than not, it is because of love. She will leap from precipices, burn, be strangulated stabbed or simply go mad.
“I want to reenact the death scenes from seven operas — seven deaths that Maria Callas has died before me.”
View the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=48AB2itOWuE&feature=emb_logo.
View the whole work: https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/099197-000-A/the-7-deaths-of-maria-callas/.
And to quickly recap the past controversy: in the Summer of 2015, renowned NYC based performance artist Marina Abramovic invited Tony Podesta, the brother of Hilary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, to dinner and asked him to extend an invitation to his brother which he did, though John did not attend. Outlets like The Drudge Report and Info Wars, described Abramovic as a “Satanist” and stated that the dinner in question would feature a “Spirit Cooking,” allegedly a magick ritual making use of blood, semen, breast milk etc. This was supposedly a ceremony concocted by “Satanist Aleister Crowley.”
In the wake of these allegations the Huffington Post spoke with Abramovic who explained that the dinner was a reward for donors to a Kickstarter campaign used to fund an new art institute in New York’s Hudson Valley – no sex magick involved. Huffpost also noted that “Spirit Cooking” referred to a SERIES of etchings she’d done in 1996, only one of which made use of the naughty ingredients in question. Moreover, while Tony Podesta is a long time friend and supporter of her work, his brother in fact did not make it to the Kickstarter party.
Here’s the Huffpost piece: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/marina-abramovic-donald-trump_us_581cbdb5e4b0aac62483e73e
Her Wikipedia page starts:
“Marina Abramović (Serbian Cyrillic: Марина Абрамовић, Serbo-Croatian pronunciation: [maˌrǐːna abˈrǎːmoʋit͡ɕ]; born November 30, 1946) is a Serbian performance artist based in New York.[1] Her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Active for over three decades, Abramović has been described as the ‘grandmother of performance art.’ She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on ‘confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body.’[2]
Further down the page, discussing one of her more recent public performances it says:
“From March 14 to May 31, 2010, the Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Abramović’s work, the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA’s history.[28]During the run of the exhibition, Abramović performed The Artist Is Present, a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum’s atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her.[29] Ulay made a surprise appearance at the opening night of the show.[30]“
You can read the entire page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87
Here’s a New Yorker piece: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/08/walking-through-walls
Meanwhile Alex Jones’s website says http://www.infowars.com/spirit-cooking-clinton-campaign-chairman-invited-to-bizarre-satanic-performance/
and the Drudge Report posted the same story verbatim.
