Marina Abramovic: Everything Is Silence
To mark Marina Abramovic’s 79th birthday, revisit her 2024 Mastermind interview, in which she reflects on near-death, discipline and the role of silence in life and art.
Photography by Richard Burbridge
Fashion by Xenia May Settel
This article was published in Mastermind 16, September 2024. Purchase all issues here.
“My life has been really wonderful after I nearly died last year,” says Marina Abramović. In a sunlit studio, sitting across from me at a white table, the 77-year-old performance artist is reflecting on the pulmonary embolism she recently, and barely, survived. Abramović also shows me a cane she has to walk with ahead of a knee operation. None of it, however, appears to have slowed her down.
Abramović’s career is thriving. Following a major retrospective at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 2023, her opera, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, was nominated for an Olivier Award, and she has just picked up the Sonning Prize, Denmark’s highest cultural honor. Further awards are coming her way this year, she adds. “I think people think I’m going to die, so they’re giving me all these awards,” she says, laughing. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The Serbian artist boasts an œuvre that has tested the limits of time, consciousness and her own body. It’s work that has taken will and clarity – qualities honed through more than five decades of craft.
In the 1970s, Abramović began to do durational performances that are part ritual, part endurance tests. Her early works, such as Rhythm 10 (1973) and Relation in Space (1977), performed with her long-time partner and collaborator Ulay, sought transcendence through gesture; later works, including Nightsea Crossing (1981- 87), another work with Ulay, and the blockbuster The Artist Is Present (2009), mined pure energy from stillness.
One of the works that is closest to her heart is 2002’s The House with the Ocean View, in which she spent 12 days living in a gallery installation of three units representing a living space, bathroom and bedroom. Visitors were asked to remain quiet as Abramović slowly ate, slept and used the toilet. “It’s about the energy, the state of mind,” she says of the work. “Everything is silence.”
Silence, in fact, comes to the fore in Abramović’s practice, as it is woven into her manifesto. “An artist has to understand silence,” it stresses. “An artist has to create a space for silence to enter his work.” This embrace emerges from her spiritual journeys – which have taken her from the Australian outback to Indian monasteries – as much as her ever-deepening creative quests. In our conversation, she expands on her hard-fought pursuit of this state of consciousness and the enduring role it plays in her life.
I remember reading your manifesto and being struck by the part about how artists must create silence and solitude.
Marina Abramovic And live with running rivers and volcanoes, and be away from family, away from friends, away from the studio, too.
Why is silence so important to you?
MA I think that we live our life in such a disturbing way. It’s constantly more and more, and more and more. We have pollution, consumption, this constant sound and too much work. We never really have time to be with ourselves.
But I also think that we are afraid to be with ourselves. Because when you’re with yourself, you start thinking about the big things: “Who am I? Where am I going to go? What do I have to do?” And also about mortality: that whatever we do, one day we’re going to die. And that’s something that we don’t want to think about, so we push all of it away. I think the only way you can enjoy life is if you understand that it’s temporary. But to do all that, you need silence. You need to go to places where it’s just nature, and away from all this hell.
How do you make space for silence in your life?
MA First of all, I create long-durational works, where time actually stops. If you’re doing something long-durational, you have to live in the present. If you live in the past or future, you lose concentration. But then, also, I go away. I experience other cultures that are very different from my own, in order to connect with nature and to different people. If you go to monasteries in different places in the world and understand how the people there approach consciousness, you learn so much. It’s really important to be exposed to other cultures, not as a tourist, but to really integrate. It’s not just going there to take selfies, then going back. I’m against that.
What does it mean to integrate?
MA It’s to do stuff. If you read a book about someone who’s made an incredible journey, when you finish the book, you’re the same because you didn’t make the journey. To me, it’s all about going there and staying long enough that you have communication with people. It’s doing the work to get to that state of mind. Mostly, it’s repetition. When we talk about mantras, we think, “Oh, this is really interesting.” But actually, if you understand the power of the mantra, that you are repeating one sentence for a long period of time, you actually establish exactly the same pattern of breathing. Breathing is everything. If you breathe too fast, you can fall in love. If you breathe a certain way, you can get angry. I have gone to retreats for months where I don’t see anybody. After a while, whether you’re sleeping or you’re awake, it becomes the same. You actually get your state of mind to open your consciousness.
I’m curious about the state of mind you get into to perform your pieces. What goes into disciplining your consciousness and will?
MA To me, it’s really important to remember that it’s about now. Right now, I’m talking to you. I’m nowhere else in my life. I’m here. All we have is the reality of this table. That’s not easy because often your habits of thinking come into your mind. We are constantly thinking, even if we think we are not thinking. Even when you’re sleeping, you’re thinking. So, I’m training constantly to create gaps for me to enter into this presence and silent space. You know that piece that I made, The House with the Ocean View?
Yes, you lived in a gallery space for days, in an atmosphere that was totally silent.
MA The public comes, and nothing happens. I take a shower, I pee, I don’t do anything else because I don’t eat some days. I just work. There is no storytelling. There’s absolutely nothing. But people still don’t leave because something is different molecularly. It was so incredible for me, the revelation in this piece. I realized that if I purify myself, I purify the air I breathe. That changes the structure of the space – energy changes.
In Buddhist practice, there are two types of meditation. One is where you concentrate on breathing, and you visualize that you’re breathing absolutely the cleanest air from outside. Then you breathe out all your repression, fears and pain. But there’s another where you actually breathe all the negativity of the world into your lungs, purify it and breathe out clean air. That’s something that would happen in The House with the Ocean View. Throughout the days, without any food, just pure water, something unbelievable happens. You enlarge your senses. You start seeing aura, you start feeling people, you start seeing smell. That’s really possible.
In the piece, you also chose to stand most of the time on the edge of one platform, above a ladder with knives for rungs.
MA Because that kept me in the moment. I know that if I sit on the chair too long, my mind can drift somewhere else. But up there on the edge, I know that if I fall, I can really hurt myself.
To me, the most interesting thing about House with the Ocean View was the experience where I was looking at one of the audience in a very, very concentrated way. At that moment, I felt I had to pee. That’s something I can’t control. So, I said, “Okay, I’m going to make peeing the most transcendental act there is.” But you only can do it in that state of mind. I kept looking at him and walking, and he was walking with me. When I came to the toilet, I slowly took off my trousers and my underwear. I sat on the toilet and started peeing. As I peed, I visualized a waterfall. I peed, I finished peeing, then I peed three more drops. Before I stood up, I took the toilet paper, four pieces, and I held them in a special way. It was all ritualistic. Then I cleaned myself and put everything back on. I walked back to where I started and continued. This was a revelation. Everything, every gesture, is transcendental. If you’re in a state of mind, you can transfer the state of mind to others, with no words spoken at all.
What do you make of death, the final silence?
MA That really is silence, talking about death. Nothing is there anymore. I saw only one person die in my life. I didn’t see my mother or my father die. But this person was my first husband’s father. He was very sick, something to do with the kidneys, and he was always in a sitting position in bed with the pillows. He could not lie down – he was in so much pain. They always asked me to visit him, to just sit with him a little bit. I would sit there, and I just kind of read and looked at him because he could not talk anymore. There was one point when he looked at me, and very, very slowly, he released the pillow and lay in the bed… He saw something. All the pain was completely gone from his face. His muscles were relaxed, and he had a smile. He closed his eyes, and he was dead. It was such an amazing moment. I was not even close to him, so I didn’t have the need to scream or whatever. It was quiet. His wife was in the kitchen, and I didn’t want to call her immediately because I felt that he needed this peaceful moment. I always felt that maybe he decided to die with me because it was more quiet.
How do you see your own mortality?
MA You know, in my work, I’ve always been in control of everything. But I was not in control of what happened to me recently. It’s so interesting that, in my manifesto, I say, “You have to have no control in your life, but you have to have complete control of your work.” It was true. I want to die without anger, consciously and without fear. I want to see the passage from one reality to another. The Sufis say, “Life is a dream, and death is waking up.” It is also a question of those 21 grams of energy when the body dies. That energy leaves the body, and energy is indestructible. I believe in that. I don’t want to die sick or in an accident, any of that. But you never know.
You can’t control it.
MA You can’t control it. But because my grandmother died at 103, it’s my dream to live to 100. I think female artists get more respect after 100. I need to get to that! You know, Georgia O’Keeffe died before 100, and so did Louise Bourgeois. Oh my god, they could not make it. But let’s see.
Hair by Tsuki. Makeup by Frankie Boyd. Manicure by Jenny Salinas. Fashion assistance by Amanata Adams.