Your DNA is galactic. You have come to Earth from a distant galaxy for a specific purpose. Your purpose is to help people to overcome their pain and grievances.

Shamanic oracle Denise from Curitiba to Marina Abramovic

Otto Muehl derided performance art as something bourgeois and insipid. Otto Muehl was a bad person, but as an artist he displayed considerable boldness and intensity, therein he has some credibility. The Viennese Actionists championed performance art themselves, yet with a definitive anti-bourgeois thrust. Performance art is something quite diverse and a territory with fuzzy borders. Forerunners of performance art have been the works of artists as diverse as Alan Karpow, John Cage, Joseph Beuys or the Fluxus movement. As an art form, the Happening was the direct forerunner of performance art, often these Happenings originally would take place only in the inner circles of the artists themselves. They were some sort of experimentation and stemmed out from ad hoc ideas and they already took place in the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s there came structural transformations within and around the art domain. Painting seemed to have come to an end and exhausted in its inner possibilities; at least it would become ever more difficult to be highly original and avant-gardist as a painter. The separation between the lofty sphere of art and the “mundane world”, between Kunst and Kitsch, between high art and popular art became blurred. The political entered the domain, notably also the “voices of the oppressed”, art became open to “gender and diversity”, a move that was also directed against the notion that there could be a “master narrative” that dominates art, as has been exercised by the various avant-garde movements before. Also “low art”, popular art, became more sophisticated at this time and legitimately reached into the domain of high art, notably as concerns popular music (and popular musicians like Laurie Anderson or Glenn Branca would also be performance artists). Theater and dance moved to new terrains that would become osmotic with performance art (and vice versa). Alongside with questions of gender, identity and the hitherto oppressed, also the body entered the “spiritual” domain of art and would become a means of expression as well as an entity under investigation. Within this potpourri performance art emerged and solidified. Performance art is diverse. It violates borders between disciplines, genders, social stratifications, ethnicities, between the private and the public sphere (with both becoming more and more a sphere of staunch political articulation), between the intimate and the exposed, between private and public persona, between spirit and the body. In such a way, performance art is truly experimental and questioning. It does not give answers and solutions, it throws up things. It unsettles and discomforts. It is, in a way, also articulation and expression in itself: it does not present the result of an artistic articulation but the process and performance of articulation (which does not rule out that performances come with clear and distinct messages, yet usually the messages are ambiguous or there are no messages at all – which means that performance art does what art should do: open up the space for imagination). Performance art may be enigmatic; and art may be (and should be to some degree) enigmatic. Performance art also often is transgressive. I use to say that art should strive for transcendence. I.e. that, through immersion in itself, imagination should become so purified that the Geist finally meets the Geist itself. Out of this comes the magic touch that manifests as great art. Yet in the 1960s and 1970s the natural “line of flight” was not transcendence, but transgression. In the end, transgression is something weaker and more reduced than transcendence. And so, also performance art is not the strongest form of art, or the high point of art, as it results. There is good performance art, but performance art also establishes a domain where stupidiy and incompetence may flourish. It lowers the barrier for that which is considered as legitimate artistic expression and now we have resulted in living in an age of the low hanging fruit for wannabe artistic expression. Of course nobody would want to miss performance art though. It has expanded our horizon and our understandings and our means of expression. Despite performance art having become some kind of a formula long ago, performance artists may not qualify as sellout artists. Immaterial art does not sell well, and the rich people hardly invest in immaterial art. However, there is the problem that in contemporary art, art or an artwork has become some kind of mere installation or intervention. You place something in the corner what should not be there or would not be expected there. This is then considered to be an artwork. That will attract attention, however it may make little sense apart from that. Therein, the artwork is threatened by degenerating into some kind of empty peculiarity. This is a development that lies along the trajectory that also includes performance art. And may easily manifest in performance art itself. Mediate on this.

Marina Abramovic with the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 2012

Marina Abramovic, the Grand Dame of performance art, has no bourgeois roots at all. She comes from communist Yugoslavia, and both her mother and her father were staunch partisans; her father even was close to Tito (although he would later fall out with him). Her upbringing was harsh, especially her mother was brutal to her, and she hated the dullness and uniformity of Yugoslavian socialism. Yet the physical pain she endured and the risks she exposed herself to in her performances may be related to the hardening and inurement she experienced in her early days. In the 1970s and 1980s she would cooperate with her partner Ulay. They would make performances together where they hit each other, screamed at each other or mistreated each other up to the point of exhaustion. In her solo performances of that time, Marina Abramovic inflicted pain on her body and exposed herself to dangerous situations. In Rhythm 0 she would give anyone permission to treat her and carry out things on her as the person would like. While noting happened for a long time, the situation gained momentum after a while and finally nearly escalated as someone threatened to shoot her. These people would later regretfully claim that they never wanted to do such things to her and cannot tell what happened to them: yet it was a lesson in social mimesis, and the provocation Abramovics´s silent and enduring self-exposure would cause on others. Abramovic´s performances would – tacitly or openly – usually include the audience, which also means that their results were open and unclear. Ulay and Marina would also come into contact with people from very different cultures and their spiritualities. Notably, they spent a long time among Australian Aborigines and embraced much of their culture. In her artistic career Marina Abramovic would come into contact and spend time with buddhist monks, indigenous people from South America, Sufis, and she would meet the Dalai Lama. She made performances inspired by these cultural exchanges and also in favour and on behalf of these groups, to raise awareness for their issues and grievances. As a true artist, Marina Abramovic is a spiritual person and wants to use spiritual tactics and knowledge to come to a state of clear consciousness. Her art is also about what art should be about, namely situating man in the wider world and how he is connected to the wider world. Her art is about the problem of pain and overcoming pain through compassion and sympathy. After years of preparation and a politics of blockade by the Chinese government, Marina Abramovic and Ulay made their ultimate performance in 1988, where they walked in the direction of each other from the opposing ends of the Chinese Wall. Originally, when they would meet in the middle, they intented to marry, instead they ritualised their final separation, as they have become estranged over the years. After the separation from Ulay, Marina Abramovic´s work would become more object-orientated. She would create “transitory objects” with which the audience can operate. Yet primarily she would continue to do performances that would become mixed with other media. Balkan Baroque was a performance about the Balkan war, for which she received the Golden Lion at the Biennale in Venice in 1997; House with the Ocean View was a huge performance where she lived, visible for everyone, in an open house in a museum and made her daily routines. She would finally become a world figure with her performance The Artist is Present at MoMa in 2010, where she endured sitting motionless in a chair in front of individuals from the audience each day for 8 hours over the course of 3 months (which is extremely demanding for the body and she received training from NASA specialists who train astronauts for missions in space extensively before). They then would gaze at each other. The important lesson to be taken is that Marina Abramovic seemed to experience that most people do not look into themselves, try to shun their interior from consciousness. This would then become apparent when they try to concentrate on another person who kind of serves as a mirror for themselves. This would make them uncomfortable. Although they may be based on very simple or seemingly nonsensial ideas, Marina Abramovic´s performances hit the nail – even more, they hit a nail where you haven´t noticed a nail before. They are effective. They actually demonstrate that The Artist is Present. That may be a quality in itself, and a quality that cannot be effectively demonstrated by other or more traditional art forms. It has been criticized that the boldness and immediacy of performance art, and its obvious shock effects, may indeed be effective and make an impression on the viewer, but that true art opens up space for reflection afterwards. Which is what performance art, and the art of Marina Abramovic, does rather not and has little to offer in those respects. And indeed, that´s a problem. However, it may not be a fatal problem as other qualities of the artwork take over and make sense. You may say that beauty or the sublime may be what should be expressed in art. But art may also express intensity, immediacy, coolness, boldness, presence, materiality. Also these are qualities in this world, and art may do right in trying to express these qualities per se. It needs to be noted that Marina Abramovic is not only a performance artist with a limited range, but that she is actually more comprehensive. Her images, videos, photographs like The Kitchen, The Current, Four Crosses or Nude with Skeleton are tasty and well-arranged. She has a sense for aesthetics. And, in the end, some of her work, either material or non-material, has iconic qualities. If you sum up all of this, her art makes quite a lot. Finally, art should engrave itself in the universe, leave a trace in memory and existence. Or, as they say, art should “make a difference”. That is what Marina Abramovic has achieved with her art. I personally like the most her performance where she made a confession to a donkey and that one performance where she has masturbated audibly in a den beneath the floor of a museum. The performance took several hours and she came 8 times. In 2024, at the age of 77, Marina Abramovic made a performance at Glastonbury music festival in England where she managed a huge audience to remain silent and in a spirit of medidation for seven minutes. That seems no mean achievement, and maybe it was what she called it herself afterwards: a miracle. She has a commanding personality, but in a cool way. She said that she needed all her life experience to become like this, of course. But either way, Marina Abramovic is identical to herself. She is very real. Finally, there is goodness and compassion, self-assuredness and bravey inside her, and she radiates these qualities. They establish her charisma. Some say, or suspect, that Marina Abramovic is a vain egomaniac (though, at least, a likeable one and one whose self-exposure and exhibitionism should be excused for the sake of the purpose). I have read her autobiography and I have seen some interviews with her, and she appears to be a pleasant and humble person. I can recommend her autobiography. Unfortunately Marina Abramovic did not come to Vienna and so I could not cheer her up with regards to her nose.

PRELUDE TO A NOTE ABOUT MARINA ABRAMOVIC July 27 2025

Naturally I was thinking that Damien Hirst must be an airhead, and that is what you seem to get again at the current exhibition in Vienna. In the olden days, art was an enterprise that involved great intellectual depth. Nowadays, it is mostly some smart superficiality. In autumn at least we shall have an exhibition celebrating Marina Abramovic. That´s why I am reading her autobiography right now. She seems to be a likeable person. In her autobiography she occasionally reveals that she feels embarrassed by her formidable nose. But that is how women usually are, unless maybe they have reached some state of ultimate, transcendent perfection in an aspect (or not even then…). I, by contrast, find her nose somehow cute. Maybe Marina Abramovic will come in person later this year. I will then tell her that her nose is cute and nothing to worry about. Most likely, she will flat out deny that. Because that´s how women usually are. I will then try to cheer her up, tell her that her nose is charismatic and therefore makes her more beautiful. To which she will most likely respond somehow like “Eek, no”, … and so on. This will then be my conversation with Marina Abramovic, a conversation between two of the most important living artists today.