Naked Reality

One evening last fall, the world-renowned performance artist Marina Abramovic could be found at Jamyang Buddhist Centre, a converted courthouse in London’s inner city, talking about the profound influence Buddhism plays in her work. Remarkably, she had actually asked to come to Jamyang to get respite from the media frenzy surrounding her visit to the UK, and her full schedule. Dressed in her signature black, with manicured scarlet fingernails, she sat under the Buddha statue, on the bench where once the Beak prevailed, flanked by images of two of her gurus, Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. She was warm, relaxed, and appeared utterly at home.

“This is incredible, great energy space. I don’t feel I’m in London. I know you people will understand what I will say,” Marina said, her Serbian accent still strong.

The first woman to be honored with a solo exhibition in the Royal Academy’s 450-year history, Marina had, for three months, inspired, moved, puzzled, and challenged thousands with her work. Simultaneously, she had found time to put on and take part in her opera 7 Deaths of Maria Callas. Throughout it all there was never a word of explanation about the Buddhist underpinnings. And yet: “I integrate everything I have learnt from Buddhism into my art. Literally everything,” she acknowledged. 

The spark was ignited in the remote Western Australian desert, near Lake Disappointment, where she lived with two Indigenous Australian tribes for a year. Marina explained: “They changed my life. They are fully evolved beings, and, more importantly, they are born that way. They know everything that our rational mind can’t explain—telepathy, extrasensory perception. They live permanently in a state of here and now, where they are part of everything that is happening all at once. I wanted to become like that—so I set off for Bodhgaya, India, where the Buddha attained enlightenment, to find a teacher who could lead me to that state.” 

Her 1981 trip to Bodhgaya coincided with a visit of H.H. the Dalai Lama and his entourage. Marina, knowing nothing about Buddhism, was given the opportunity to offer a katag (white ceremonial scarf of greeting) to H.H. Ling Rinpoche, senior tutor to the Dalai Lama, a figure of immense spiritual and physical stature.

“He was just sitting there, with an amazing radiance of great vibration energy, and an incredible smile on his face. I offered him the katag, and what did he do? He flicked me with his finger in the middle of my forehead. That was all. I returned to my seat at the back of the temple, and maybe six, ten minutes later, I started crying, uncontrollably. I absolutely did not understand why I was crying so much. Of course, it was the heart opening, and it was so painful. I cried so much and so loud that I had to go out, because I was disturbing everyone. I continued crying for hours.

“What had happened? I concluded that Ling Rinpoche embodied profound wisdom, with the innocence of a child. He was like a baby, an 80- or 90-year-old baby. He was pure love.” H.H. Ling Rinpoche died two years later but remained as Marina’s heart guru. 

She stayed in Bodhgaya for three months, taking teachings from Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche and enrolling in a twenty-one-day vipassana retreat. From then on, she understood that Buddhism—in particular, Tibetan Buddhism—had what she was seeking.

Coincidentally, her work was at a standstill. For eight years she had been working on a project to walk the Great Wall of China with her partner, the German artist Ulay, starting at opposite ends (five thousand miles apart) and meeting in the middle, in a pledge of marriage. It was full of arcane symbols and themes. Chinese bureaucracy was holding it up. After Bodhgaya, she decided to do a three-month solitary Tara retreat, at the Tushita Meditation Centre, Dharamsala (home of the Dalai Lama), to see if it would shift things. Tara, Buddha of compassion in action, female, bold, and fearless (like Marina), was said to rush to those in need. 

She got lost on the way up to the mountain center, and, with night falling, she stumbled across a small house with an old monk washing dishes outside. “Tushita?” she asked. The monk merely nodded and ushered her inside. There sat Ling Rinpoche, smiling. “Somehow I was led to his house. I stayed, I don’t know how long, and then the crying began again! Tushita was right next door. This was such an important lesson for me, taught often by my lamas. You lose the road to find the road. That is what we have to do. We have to let go.”

For ninety days Marina experienced the typical austere conditions and strict discipline characteristic of solitary retreat: a tiny room, a raised wooden platform for a bed, eating one meal daily, staying within restricted physical boundaries, reciting hundreds of thousands of mantras. The rules and discipline suited her—they made possible an extraordinary opening of consciousness: 

“What is incredible is that I lost the line between the waking and sleeping state. When I went out, I could hear the grass growing. One morning, during walking meditation, I stopped in horror. I realized I was actually killing millions of sentient beings right there—the bugs and so forth on the ground. After that I couldn’t walk anymore. You attain that kind of awareness of what is around you and who you are.”

The retreat worked, and in 1988, the epic walk along the Great Wall began, albeit the meeting in the middle marked a parting. 

Marina transposed her retreat experience into the piece that made her famous: The House with the Ocean View. There is no house, no ocean, and no view except for the audience that sits in rapt silence in front of her. For twelve days and nights the artist remains on an elevated platform containing a wooden bed, table, chair, metronome, shower, and toilet. Nothing else. The rules are draconian. The artist submits to no talking, no communication, no reading, no writing, no phone, no food, only pure water to drink. There is no exit. The rungs of the ladders propped against the platform are made of large steel knives, blades pointing upward. The audience looks on, often for hours, as the artist showers, uses the toilet, lies on the wooden bed, but mostly sits at the edge of the structure, gazing back at the audience—her face mirroring the manifold thoughts, feelings, and emotions of her very active inner world. 

Originally, Marina performed this piece herself. Recent health issues, however, have brought her to train other artists. 

“I was ready to die for my art. At 33, you do that sort of thing!”

“Nothing happens. Nothing is ever going to happen. There’s no storyline, no entertainment, no stimulation, no variety—the accoutrements demanded by modern life are missing—for twelve solid days. I take the expectation out—it becomes a naked reality,” she explained. 

It should be excruciatingly boring, and yet the audience is gripped, and frequently deeply moved.

“I have thousands who come in the morning just to see me, then come back from the office just to breathe the same air. They sit thinking they will stay for fifteen minutes and will be there for three or four hours,” she said. 

“I devised this as a purification practice. I wondered, if I can purify myself for twelve days without food of any kind, just drinking pure water, can I purify the molecules of the air around me? Can I actually purify the public who come in to watch? It is hard. I kept my mind sane and focused by sitting on the edge of the platform and connecting with the audience, to stay in the present,” she explained. 

Rather than going insane, Marina experienced something greater:

“I completely lost myself. It’s not me anymore. Something else happened. Buddhists call it ‘suchness,’ which is ‘emptiness,’ a state not void but full of meaning. You have a kind of universal knowledge that is everywhere, that we can never actually reach because our heads are full of stuff. When you empty yourself, that knowledge starts coming. I call it liquid knowledge.”

Marina’s art is undeniably confronting as she physically enacts outrageously dangerous scenarios, thereby holding up a mirror to the viewer’s own mind—be it benign, curious, or hostile. Rhythm O, performed in Naples in 1974, consisted of a table containing seventy-two objects, some for pleasure, some for pain. They included flowers, a gun, a bullet, knives. 

“I told the audience they could use anything they wanted on me. I took full responsibility. I made myself an object, a puppet.”

She admits it was an act of defiance against the prevailing norm that the ideas she was presenting were not art, and that she had better admit herself to a mental hospital. “Everyone was thrashing performance art. I was 33, and so angry. I was ready to die for my art. At 33, you do that sort of thing!”

She sat for six hours, not responding in any way to whatever was done to her. The audience started off playfully but gradually became increasingly abusive. They cut her clothes and her flesh, at which point the guards closed the piece down. “I started walking back to my room. I was half naked, blood was everywhere. I looked like a nightmare. The public ran from me. They could not understand why they did this. They called the gallery the next day to say they were so sorry. A white streak appeared in my hair. I decided I was not going to do that one again. The public can really kill you.” 

She’s been accused of having a death wish, of being masochistic and sensationalist. In Rest Energy, a four-minute film recorded in 1980, Marina and her lover, Ulay, balance each other on opposite sides of a drawn bow and arrow that is aimed directly at Marina’s heart. One slip of concentration from Ulay would kill her. She admits it was extremely hard, but the fear and danger she subjects herself to, she insists, are integral to her art. “They are acts of liberation,” she says, perhaps in the same way that the path to enlightenment is strewn with danger and challenges, and, as the Dalai Lama suggests, the goal is gained more quickly through suffering than happiness. Marina lives this out, with her very visible displays of physical and mental endurance and rigid self-imposed discipline. 

Sometimes the pain is unexpected and accidental, but again it reaped its rewards. In The Artist Is Present (2012), for three months she sits across a table from a person, looking directly into their eyes, for eight hours every day, without ever moving or taking a single sip of water. She later removed the table—against security’s protests—when a man in a wheelchair approached because she couldn’t see if he had legs.

“After three days I realized I had made the mistake of choosing the most uncomfortable chair possible, a ‘monastic chair.’ The chair had no arms, so I could not lift myself up. The pain was excruciating. My ribs sank into the stomach, my back was in agony. Stubbornly sticking to my rules, I was too proud to change the chair. Now, this is what happened. It is so interesting. The pain was everywhere, and my body really wanted to move. I was determined not to. The pain got stronger and stronger, to the point when I thought I was going to faint. Then the thought came, OK, faint. That was the moment the pain disappeared, as though it had never been there.

“When you push yourself 150 percent, then you know you can get there every time. It’s incredibly important to understand pain and how it opens doors into experiences that are impossible to explain. For me, the person in front of me disappears and becomes light. I get 360-degree vision, and my sense of smell becomes as acute as an animal’s,” she said.

She continued: “When you’re engrossed in the pain, your mind is thinking—and the other person’s mind is thinking, thinking. These minds are criss-crossing each other. It’s a mess. When the pain goes, however, something happens to the mind. Gaps appear in the thinking, the gaps get bigger, and at one point you enter into a nonthinking state. For the first time you really see the person—and the person becomes highly emotional, because they see that I can see them, and they start seeing me too. It’s vibrational. The connection is incredible—that opening is very special, and then the heart opens. The effect ripples out to the audience—they see what I am seeing and are deeply affected. People wait for hours to come and sit with me. Even the guards who’ve been watching every day change into ordinary clothes on  the weekend and wait in line to sit. We have seventy-six people who came more than twelve times, who have created a club just to talk about their experience. 

“The point is, we don’t like uncomfortable things, we always go for happiness, the easy way out. Yet happiness is impermanent, it always transmutes into something else. This is why we never change. We repeat the same patterns, over and over again. Every time we meet something that we’re really afraid of—when there is an obstacle, facing a territory we’ve never been to—we risk failure. Failing is very important. I think the measure of success is related to the amount of failure you’re ready to chance. If you don’t take this risk, you always do the same shit,” she said. “If you look at the history of art, all great art was made not out of happiness but great suffering,” she added.

After staging many death-defying pieces through her work, Marina, 77, faced the real thing last year when she almost died during a knee operation when several clots traveled to her heart. Did facing her own death change her, give her insights, alter the perspective of her work?

“It’s a very important question,” she answered. “It’s totally different when you’re pushing your own physical and mental limits, because then you are in control. What happened to me was out of [my] control. I realized life and death are so close. We have this whole idea of ‘me’ living forever, but in those moments I knew that in two seconds I could be ‘gone.’ It’s changed me so much. I feel an entire new life has been given to me, that some high forces decreed it was not my time to go. I still have so much to do. I feel I must take care of what I do with this new period. I want to do things that really make me happy. Now, I’m always in a good mood. I even sing in the shower. I have pain in my legs due to the operation, but I don’t care. It is a worry, because I’ve never made any art from happiness!”

The old Marina of strict discipline and spiritual seeking is still very much present, however. 

“You know what pleases me most? Vows! I love vows,” she said. When I get old enough, I am going to a monastery for the rest of my life, because I really want to know how to prepare for the transition between life and death. The Sufis say ‘life is a dream, and death is waking up.’ My dream is to die consciously and without fear or anger. That would be pretty good.”