On an October Friday night in Manchester, I sat in the darkness of Aviva Studios leaning against a giant erect penis while a woman dressed in Balkan garb showed me her genitals and screamed. This was Marina Abramović’s “Balkan Erotic Epic”, which Abramović introduced as “a completely uncompromised work of art”. She smiled cheekily as onlookers zoomed in their phone cameras. “Go have a cigarette, fine, if you must,” she announced, “but come right back in. Four hours isn’t long enough.”
The room was filled with the reimagined eros of Balkan rituals: dancers stroked skeletons in a graveyard orgy, naked men fucked plastic grass to bring on the harvest, a scientist suggested we feed our husbands menstrual blood and body hair to keep them ours forever. Abramović surveyed the performance from the corner: a glamorous figure in a fitted black dress, her hair long and lush, her lips dark red; more compelling than ever as she nears her eightieth birthday. Even amongst the erotic and extreme she seemed the most mesmerising figure in the world.
Abramović likes to call herself “the grandmother of performance art”, but really she is its golden child – the only performance artist who is a household name. She grew up in Soviet Yugoslavia (this show opens with Tito’s funeral) under a mother so devoted to the regime that she imposed a 10pm curfew until Marina was 29. Her rebellion began in the 70s, with works that treated the body as both weapon and shrine. In Rhythm 5 (1974), she lay inside a burning wooden communist star until she passed out from lack of oxygen. In Rhythm 0 (1974), she famously placed 72 objects on a table, including a rose, a whip, a loaded gun, and invited the audience to use them on her in any way they wished. Six hours later, she stood naked and bleeding, the gun pressed to her neck.
These performances are the reason Abramović is both deified and dismissed: a saint of endurance or a masochist for hire, depending on who you ask. She’s pushed her cynics even further in her new ventures, which have begun to look less like endurance art and more like a way to endure capitalism. In 2021 she started selling her art as NFTs (non-fungible tokens, widely used in art and crypto circles as a way to own digital versions of art). They “let the artist become sovereign”, she said. In just a few weeks, she launches the next stage of her NFT: no longer just selling crypto versions of her art, she’ll be selling her method and philosophy; a synthesis of her inner search for meaning somehow put for sale in the metaverse.
She has already been selling the unsellable. It is very difficult to make money from performance art, because you can’t hang it on a wall. She has not sold any of her live performances, (some performance artists sell them as instructions), but photographs of her stunts sell out quickly. At Saatchi Yates this week, a new series sold out for £1,800 a piece. Older editions have fetched $500,000. After one show, Igor Toronyi-Lalic wrote in the Spectator: “I’d much rather be swindled by Marina than anyone else”.
Her transformation into a techno-mystic has brought the artist towards a more ancient grift: promising the secret to a longer life. One of her collaborators, Katya Tylevich, describes her lifelong devotion, “artistic and otherwise”, as an effort to change “the speed with which time moves”. Her latest mission, “to rediscover forgotten rituals and knowledge of the past”, is framed as a way to have, paradoxically, “more time to live in the present.” The show, the NFT, the longevity drops, all seem to circle this same obsession with extending the self beyond the body.
It was an Austrian doctor, not unlike the odd Flemish scientist in her performance promising to ensnare husbands with spells, who convinced Abramović of the power of “ancient wisdom and natural healing”. For £99 you can now buy her Longevity Drops (available in “Energy”, “Allergy”, or “Immune”), of which she recommends swallowing 60 per meal. You can also subscribe to her Method, a regime of spiritual recalibration involving tasks like walking backwards through a forest with a mirror. If the early Marina tested the limits of flesh, the new one seems to be testing the limits of our faith in her.
The world of longevity and crypto, like Abramović’s performance, is dominated by men who confuse virility with vision. Somewhat akin to her naked men fucking the ground to summon a harvest, Elon Musk believes his own sperm might populate Mars. Bryan Johnson injected his own son’s blood into himself in a stunt that was Marina-esque. Peter Thiel is investing millions in cryonics and lectures on the Antichrist Abramović once lay on ice, with a pentagram cut into her body, letting her body freeze as it bled. We have seen this performance before: the ancient promise of eternity, rendered as a contemporary possibility. The difference is that while they cling to technology as salvation, she’s still one step ahead in reaching for the more extraordinary ritual of art.
Her NFT, too, feels like an extension of that same spell: a digital relic of her own endurance, minted in eternity, promising that the performance will never end. Watching her in Manchester, gleaming and alive amid the screaming and the chaos, it was easy to believe she might actually succeed. She may never die, not because she’s unlocked the secret of longevity, but because she’s made herself impossible to forget. If the future belongs to men who want to upload their minds, let them have it; Abramović will outlive them all the old-fashioned way: through myth, through audacity, through her sheer, undeniable will.
[Further reading: Florence and the Machine’s season of the witch]
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