Coronavirus: Artist Marina Abramovic is present: look into her eyes

Creatives have always embraced isolation as a form of inspiration, but it took Marina Abramovic to turn it into an art form.

Artist Marina Abramovic with the Austrian Commander Cross she received in 2008 for her work in the arts. Picture: Reuters

Creatives have always embraced isolation as a form of inspiration, but it took Marina Abramovic to turn it into an art form.

The world’s foremost performance artist has variously spent a year wandering in the Australian desert, sat for a week naked and silent­ on a bicycle seat in an art gallery, and walked a 2500km stretch of the Great Wall of China just to break up with her partner.

Then there is The Artist is ­Present (2010), Abramovic’s best-known work, for which she sat motionles­s and unspeaking, eight hours a day, for two months at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. People queued for days to sit opposite the Belgrade-born, New York-based artist to experience, just for a few moments, the feeling of staring into her unblinking gaze.

But with America paralysed by the coronavirus crisis, the 73-year-old has been forced to put much of her work on hold, and to ponder the question: what is a performance artist without an audience?

“Artists must wait for better times,” Abramovic tells The Weekend Australian from her home in New York. “There will be eventually audiences to perform to (but for now) I am keeping a very positive mood. Only with the positive mood can we fight this situation.”

The so-called godmother of performance art — arguably the world’s best-known living artist — is the 39th and final identity to join Review’s Isolation Room series, an online video collection that during the past two months has featured musicians, dancers and artists performing from their living rooms for The Australian’s readers. The series ends today. Abramovic has created a new work for Review, entitle­d Look into My Eyes, For One Minute. The artist speaks briefly to the viewer, closes her eyes, then opens them and stares. The piece can be found at The Australian online.

Despite her sanguine outlook, Abramovic is not convinced this period of global quarantine will be a fertile one for culture. Art comes when it is ready, she says. “It is difficult­ to predict when an artist can create or not. Any time can be a good time.”

Marina Abramovic performs her piece Look into My Eyes, For One Minute, for the Isolation Room series.

Time is on Abramovic’s mind. In March, her former partner and long-time collaborator Ulay died after a long battle with lymphoma. The pair had spent the 70s and 80s at the radical forefront of performance art, creating works — body- slamming into or screaming for hours at each other; tying their hair together for days; one work featured the pair holding a loaded bow and arrow, aimed at Abramovic’s heart — that made waves in the art world. It culminated in 1988 with The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk, in which they walked towards each other from opposite ends of China’s giant structure. Ninety days later they reunited in the middle of the wall, where they hugged and ended their decade-long relationship.

“Ulay was sick for the last 10 years. So his death was not a surprise to me,” Abramovic says. “But even when death is expected it is still difficult. It is very emotional for me. I have been left with the sad realisation that he is not here any more.”

Abramovic with former partner and artistic collaborator Ulay.

The artist has a special relationship with Australia. She visited Sydney in 2013 for John Kaldor’s 13 Rooms project and in 2015 for a retrospective of her work at Hobart­’s Museum of Old and New Art, where MONA founder David Walsh publicly proclaimed “Marina­’s work makes my balls shrivel”. But her fascination with Australia began in 1979, when after showing at the Sydney Biennale with Ulay, the pair ventured into the West Australian desert and spent a year with indigenous groups. It was in the Australian desert, she told The Australian in 2013, that her life changed forever.

“Australia is always a place I want to return to,” she says. “I hope when things become more normal I can stay for a longer time.”

The Isolation Room series, co-ordinated by music writer Andrew McMillen, has garnered almost 300,000 views on The Australian’s YouTube channel and has feat­ured artists such as Missy Higgins, Brian Cadd, Tim Rogers, Sarah Blasko, Chris Cheney, Colin Hay, Ian Moss and Deborah Conway.