How Buddhist practice shaped Marina Abramović’s performance art
By Vicki McKenzie
On the evening of 22 November 2023, amidst the media frenzy surrounding Marina Abramović’s solo exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, the world- acclaimed Performance Artist could be found at Jamyang Meditation Centre talking about her meeting with the Tibetan Lamas and the enormous impact they had on her life and work. Dressed in her signature black, with manicured scarlet finger nails, she sat under the Buddha statue, flanked by images of two of her gurus, Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, founders of Jamyang Centre and the FPMT. She was warm, relaxed and seemed utterly at home.
“This is incredible, great energy space. I don’t feel I’m in London,” she said, her Serbian accent still strong.
The first woman to be honoured with a solo exhibition in the RA’s 450-year history, Marina had, for three months, inspired, moved, puzzled and challenged thousands of people with her powerful work. Not many possibly understood the strong Buddhist ideas underlying it. “I integrate everything I have learnt from Buddhism into my art. Literally everything,” she acknowledged.
Her spiritual journey was brought out in a rich conversation with Ven Wangyal, Jamyang’s Spiritual Programme Co-ordinator. The spark was ignited in the Australian desert where she lived with two Aboriginal tribes for a year. They changed her life. “The Aborigines are fully evolved beings and 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 which 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,” she said.
Her visit coincided with that of HH Dalai Lama, together with his entourage, and thousands of devotees. Fortuitously, Marina was given the chance to meet HE Ling Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama’s senior tutor, a figure of immense spiritual and physical stature. She knew nothing about Buddhism, but she lined up in the temple to offer Ling Rinpoche a ceremonial white scarf (katag), the traditional gesture of welcome.
“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 6, 10 minutes later, I started crying, uncontrollably. I absolutely did not understand why I’m 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.” HE Ling Rinpoche died 2 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 21 day Vipassana retreat. From then on, she understood that Buddhism – in particular Tibetan Buddhism – had what she was looking for.
Co-incidentally, her work had reached a standstill. For eight years she had been working on a project to walk the Great Wall of China with her partner, starting at opposite ends (2,500 miles each) 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 FPMT’s Tushita Centre, Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama. 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 centre, and with night falling, she stumbled across a small house with an old monk washing dishes outside. “Tushita?”, she asked. The monk merely smiled 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 Tibetan Lamas. You lose the road, to find the road. That is what we have to do. You have to let go.”
In that first retreat Marina experienced the traditional austere conditions, strict discipline and the rich rewards that were to be reflected in her work. “I always set my own rules, which I keep, using all my will power and determination.” she said.
The tiny space of her room, sleeping on a platform, eating one meal daily, staying within restricted physical boundaries, having no communication, reciting hundreds of thousands of mantras over three months resulted in an extraordinary opening of consciousness:
“What is incredible is that you lose 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 realised 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 the walk along the Great Wall began. However, after 8 years in the making the relationship between Marina and her partner had changed. They walked their walk but met in the middle understanding it marked a parting.
The piece that made her famous was House With Ocean View . She explained that The House represents the structure, the Ocean is the Mind, and the View the audience. Here the strict solitary Buddhist retreat, which removes all sensory stimulation to reveal the ultimate nature of your mind, is most clearly replicated. For 12 days and nights the artist remains on an elevated structure containing a wooden bed, table, chair, metronome, shower and toilet. Nothing else. There is no exit. The three ladders propped against the platform are made out of large steel knives, blades pointing upwards. The rules are draconian. There is no talking, no communication, no reading, no writing, no phone, no food, only pure water to drink, and no way down as three ladders propped against the stage are made of huge knives, blades pointing upwards. The audience looks on rapt, 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, has brought her to train other artists.
“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 12 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 15 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 12 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 said.
Rather than going insane, Marina (and the artists who followed), experienced something greater:
“I completely lost myself. It’s not me anymore. Something else happens. The 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 and often shocking as she physically holds herself up to outrageously dangerous scenarios to reflect the viewer’s own state of mind – be it benign, curious, or hostile. One of her early pieces consisted of a table containing 72 objects, some for pleasure, some for torture. 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 was 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 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 we’re 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.”
The pain, fear and danger she puts herself through, (like serious meditators) she insists are integral to her art. In the end, she declares, they are an act of liberation.
In The Artist is Present, she sits across a table from a person, looking directly into their eyes, for eight hours every day, for three months, without ever moving, or taking a single sip of water. She removed the table – against Security’s protests – when a man in a wheel chair approached because she couldn’t see if he had legs.
“After three days I realised 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%, then you know you can get there every time. It’s incredibly important to understand pain and how it opens doors into experiences which 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 non-thinking 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 everyday change into ordinary clothes at the weekend and wait in line to sit. We have 76 people who came more than 12 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, aged 77, faced the real thing last year when she almost died during a knee operation when several clots travelled 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 control. I realised 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 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.”
A version of the this article was originally published in Tricycle magazine, this lightly edited version has been produced for Jamyang Buddhist Centre courtesy of the author Vicki Mckenzie.
