Artists Who Inspire: Marina Abramović | Rev. Beth Dana | 07.07.024

Sermon Transcript

For three months, six days a week, seven-and-a-half hours a day, that’s over 716 hours altogether, the artist Marina Abramovic sat motionless on a chair in the middle of a big, open atrium at the Museum of Modern Art in New York expressionless, silent, looking at the museum visitors seated in the chair across from her. The Artist Is Present was the name of the piece, and of the entire retrospective on display from March to May of 2010. In recent weeks, I’ve had this interesting internal debate about whether I was present for this exhibit myself. I was living in California at the time, but I visited New York City often and moved there later that summer. I have this vivid memory of it, as if I was there. Not sitting in the chair across from her, but watching from the crowd in the atrium. Last month, I rewatched the documentary made about this exhibit, and I began questioning, was I actually there? Or did it just feel like I had been there because of what I had seen and read about it brought the experience alive?

Now, sadly, I think it was the latter. But this strange confusion of memory I think points toward the inspiring power of this piece and of Marina Abramovic’s art in general. During the three months of The Artist Is Present, 850,000 people visited the atrium, 17,000 on the final day alone. While museum visitors typically look at a piece of art for maybe 30 seconds, some people stayed and watched all day. Close to 1,500 people sat across from her, here are a few images of that. Some for less than a minute and some for over an hour. They had waited in long lines. Some of them had camped outside the museum overnight just to sit across from the artist and have her be present to them. When one person stood up and left, before the next person was seated the artist would look down and close her eyes, and then lift her head and look at the next person starting anew.

She treated each person she encountered with the same respect and attention. Scientists from America and Russia studied the dynamic of this piece, testing patterns of brainwaves triggered by the mutual gaze, and found that the brainwaves actually became synced. The artist became a mirror, inviting people to look inside themselves in a way that they don’t usually. And this brought many to tears, sometimes including the artist herself. There were many reasons that people came to sit across from her, but it became clear to her that so many people were carrying immense pain. For the artist, this piece went beyond performance.

She said, “I was there for everyone there, whether they sat with me or not. Suddenly, out of nowhere in the world, this overwhelming need had appeared. The responsibility was enormous. I was there for everyone who was there. A great trust had been given to me, a trust that I didn’t dare abuse in any way. Hearts were opened to me and I opened my heart in return time after time after time. I opened my heart to each one, then closed my eyes, and then there was always another.”

She described having this feeling of no borders between her body and the environment, a lightness and harmony with herself. She described it as holy. The [inaudible 00:04:30] poem that was our reading today is one that Abramovic thought of when conceptualizing this piece. She said, “My physical pain was one thing, but the pain in my heart, the pain of pure love, was far greater.” A friend of the artist has said that she needs the audience like she needs air to breathe. That’s the fuel that her life runs on. Some in the audience fell in love with her, and some misunderstood her love as personal to them. But in truth, Abramovic is in love with the world.

The incredible appeal and inspirational power of The Artist Is Present reflects a very human need, one that each of us has. The need to be seen, to be loved and to love, to feel part of something that’s larger than ourselves. The people who came to sit with her at the MoMA had this need, and so does she. For her, this need is rooted in the experience of her childhood and the beginnings of her career, and has profoundly shaped her into the artist that she is today. Marina Abramovic was born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, now Serbia. Her parents were partisans in World War II. Her father, Vojin, was a war hero in the Serbian army. And her mother, Danica, a major in the army and later the director of the National Museum of Revolution and Art.

Neither of her parents showed her any physical affection as a child. They believed kissing and hugging would spoil her. Danica was proud of her ability to withstand pain, and expected the same of others. “Nobody has and nobody ever will hear me scream,” she once said. Marina described her mother as having this walk through walls determination, something that has stuck with her and became the title of her 2016 memoir, Walk Through Walls. As a Child, they thought she might have a blood disorder, but it turned out to be a psychosomatic reaction to the trauma of physical and verbal abuse at the hands of her mother and aunt. Her father left the family when she was 18 and her mother took strict control of her and her brother. She imposed a 10:00 PM curfew that lasted until Marina finally left home at age 29. The enforcement of order and control was taken to extremes. To this day, she refers to her father and mother by their first names.

As a child, Abramovic did have a special connection, though, to her grandmother, whom she often accompanied to church. Her grandmother was one of the only people who showed her affection. She says that it was this strange mixture of spirituality and communist discipline that made her who she is today. Her life as an artist began under the communist regime of Tito, and while living in an abusive household. So it’s not surprising that many of her early pieces involved a lot of self-inflicted harm. She often quotes an artist friend who said, “Art is a matter of life and death.” The need to be seen and loved and to feel a part of something is reflected so poignantly in a story she tells about a more recent performance piece called 512 Hours, which took place in London in 2014. There were no objects in the gallery, just the artist, the audience, and a few simple props in an otherwise empty white space.

The visitors created a collective experience or performance together. There was a 12-year-old boy named Oscar who came every day after school just to stand on a platform with eyes closed for a long time. He wasn’t interested in any other part of the show. “I’m not so good at school,” he said. “But when I stand on the platform, then go home and stand in my room with my eyes closed, everything is okay.” Of this piece, Abramovic said, “It’s about humanity, humbleness, and collectivity.” Marina Abramovic hasn’t always been a performance artist, though. She started with painting. Her first paintings were of her dreams, all of them, both the dreams and the paintings, in deep green and night blue. “They were more real to me than the reality I was living in. I didn’t like my reality,” she said.

But as a teenager, she took lessons with a local artist who taught her something very important. The artist laid a strip of canvas on the floor, smeared it with glue, and then sprinkled sand on the glue. He then covered it with red, yellow, and black paint, poured gasoline on it, and lit it on fire. As the canvas exploded, the artist observed, “This is sunset,” and then he left. She hung the work on the wall to dry and then left for a family vacation. When she returned, the painting had disintegrated into a pile of ash and sand. French artist Yves Klein once said, “My paintings are but the ashes of my art.” Abramovic was beginning to learn that the process of art is more important sometimes than the result. And it was this that led her to performance art, where interaction is more important than any object.

In performance art, the human body is the medium. Abramovic has used the human body, her body most often, to make provocative statements that directly and boldly challenge the audience. With the body as the medium, the heart of her work is the shared experience of the audience and the artist. She wants the audience to see not her in the work, but to see themselves. As she said, “Nobody’s life is changed by somebody else’s experiences. I want more from the public. I want them to be involved and to go through changes as I do. It’s very difficult and it’s a pioneering job because for so long there have been set rules. The artist performs, the public observes. They’re not used to the new role I’m giving them,” she said.

I think this is just as true of life and faith and spirituality as it is of art. Our lives and our perspectives and our experiences of love come from being active participants and creators. And for me, this is one of the reasons that Marina Abramovic is, as an artist, is so inspiring. Another defining aspect of Abramovic’s art is the way that she throws herself into each performance piece and gives everything while also trying to practice detachment, something that she has learned from the story of the Buddha, but also from some difficult experiences working on performance pieces with Tibetan monks.

In 1999, she was invited to India to choreograph a musical performance piece for a festival bringing together five Buddhist traditions as well as Jewish, Palestinian, Zulu, Christian, and Sufi groups. She spent a month at the monastery working with 100 monks and 20 nuns singing the Heart Sutra together, which was a prayer common to all Buddhist traditions, with choreography that culminated in this elaborate human pyramid. “It was impossible,” she said. They could never remember their positions. They were always giggling. But she gave it her all and finally they perfected the routine. She was getting in the car to drive to Bangalore for the show when the abbot of the monastery said to her, “It was so great that you could come here. We really enjoyed your collaboration. But we have a problem.” The problem was they would not be permitted to do the choreography.

After a month of training and building special equipment, the abbot said, “You see, this idea of a human pyramid can’t work for us. In Tibetan Buddhism, nobody can be at the top.” Now, why hadn’t they told her earlier before she had put in all of this work? Well, she was their guest and they didn’t want to offend her. She spent the whole drive to Bangalore fuming and frustrated and exhausted, but the Tibetan lama riding with her just laughed. “Now, you are learning detachment,” he said. “You’ve done your best, now let it go. Things will happen as they happen anyway. Remember the story of the Buddha,” he said. “He received his enlightenment, but only after giving up completely.” The show went on. The monks sang the Heart Sutra, and there was no choreography. They just sat wherever they wanted. His Holiness The Dalai Lama came up to Abramovic after the show and hugged her and said, “You’ve done a wonderful thing.”

After that experience, she was shocked to be invited two years later to work with another group of Tibetan monks to prepare them for a festival in Berlin. She went back to India where she was presented with the facilities and the materials that she needed and 12 monks to train. They perfected their piece. She flew to Berlin to prepare for the festival. She went to meet the monks at the airport in Berlin. The plane landed and 12 monks came out, but they were 12 monks that she had never seen before in her life. It turns out that the monks that she had worked with didn’t have passports, and so they just sent new monks after all of that training and preparation. And her dear friend, the Tibetan lama, just laughed again. Another lesson in detachment. So she got to training, got to work training this group of 12 monks, and she said, “Everything went pretty well at the festival and a few more gray hairs were added to my head.”

Have you ever put a lot of work into something and then it didn’t go as planned? Anyone? Yeah. You know. It’s tough, isn’t it? Not all of us have a Tibetan monk beside us to laugh and remind us to practice detachment. Sometimes I wish I did as a parent, as a minister, just in life in general. Abramovic’s strict communist upbringing, while harmful in many ways, has also given her the discipline necessary to engage her body as a performance art medium. And part of healing her trauma, which has taken time and a lot of work and travel to many different parts of the world, has been learning to experience the world through her body in a healthy, open way. She teaches this through what’s come to be known as the Abramovic method. This method is what’s expressed in the Artist’s Life Manifesto that served as our first reading today.

It involves a series of exercises that teach endurance, concentration, perception, self-control, and willpower and confrontation with mental and physical limits, usually at some remote, retreat location in nature. For example, one of the exercises has participants going out into the forest where they’re blindfolded and then they have to find their way back home. “The artist needs to learn to see with their whole body,” she says. She does these exercises with young artists to prepare them for performance pieces. To connect with their bodies, to build strength and stamina, and to help them become more open and present emotionally. “In performance, you have to have an emotional approach,” she says, “a direct energy dialogue with the public and the performer.” This is the way in which she experiences the holy. I would call Marina Abramovic an artistic mystic.

By pushing physical limits and connecting at the heart level with something beyond herself, she experiences transcendence through her art. Even in art that’s dangerous to perform, she describes this experience of overcoming fear and feeling free. Early in her career as she finished a piece that would become a turning point for her, she said, “A very strange feeling came over me, something I had never dreamed of. It was as if electricity was running through my body and the audience and I had become one, a single organism. The sense of danger in the room had united the onlookers and me in that moment, the here and now and nowhere else. The fear was gone, the pain was gone. I had become a Marina whom I didn’t know yet. I had experienced absolute freedom. I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless. That was the moment I knew I had found my medium. No painting, no object that I could make, could ever give me that kind of feeling,” she said.

In these moments, which she’s had again and again in her life and career, sheer abundance of being floods her heart. And she feels at one with all of life, not wholly and separate from life, but wholly and a part of the whole. The artist is present. When I learn about and experience the performance art of Marina Abramovic, it makes me think of church. That’s why I present her to you today as an artist who inspires. When our bodies are centered and we’re present to one another, engaged in a collective experience of religious community, we are doing good church and our spirits grow. When we give of ourselves with generosity and dedication and steadfastness without becoming too attached to specific outcomes, but remaining open to what goodness might emerge from the work that we’re doing together, we are doing good church and our spirits grow. When we face fear and oppression with courage and a bit of healthy risk taking, and we experience freedom, perhaps even transcendence, we are doing good church and our spirits grow.

At the age of 77, Marina Abramovic continues to make art, to teach others, and to create transformative experiences for all who engage with her pieces. She said once, “I am only interested in an art which can change the ideology of society. And goodness do we need this kind of art in this time, don’t we? When dangerous, hurtful, and divisive ideologies are gaining prominence and power, we need transformative art that changes minds and hearts, that connects people to themselves, to one another, to the earth, and to the God of love. We need art that confronts people with themselves, challenges them to grow, breaks open the hardened fear and pain they carry within, and helps them to feel seen and loved and part of something bigger. To believe that maybe together we can chart a new path and walk through seemingly impermeable walls. So let’s all be that kind of artist.”

You might say, “But I’m not an artist. I have no artistic talent.” But no worries. Just as each visitor who walked into a gallery to one of Marina Abramovic’s shows, just as they created, were part of creating the piece, you have what you need too. No special talents or materials required, just you, your body, your spirit. The artists are present. So let’s get creative, shall we? Blessed be, and amen.