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1Marina Abramovic -- https://www.superfictions.org/new-page-3 --
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3The Three Coffin Trick
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6I met the Performance artist Marina Abramovic during her 2015 major survey exhibition Private Archaeology at Mona (Museum of Old and New Art), in Hobart, Tasmania. I’d previously met her in Edinburgh in 1988, when I was publishing ALBA magazine. I’d been involved in co-curating an exhibition of Dutch art in numerous venues across Scotland. She was planning a performance and needed to buy some steak knives. We spent a happy couple of hours wandering along Leith Walk, rummaging through hardware stores until she declared a certain set “perfect”.  
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8Almost thirty years later, on the other side of the planet, surrounded by videos, and archives of performances going back to her earliest collaborations with her former partner Ulay (he screaming at her; she screaming back even louder and longer at him), the exhibition also featured many recent works that have grown from her Abramovic Method. Free of iPhones and other links to social media, visitors to the museum are taken through a series of “exercises” that include counting grains of rice, being led wearing ear muffs at an excruciatingly slow walking pace by a “facilitator”, and resting on a camp bed for an indeterminate period of time. There was a lifetime’s work to discuss. The interview ran over time. It continued for several hours more at a parallel project three weeks later in Sydney. Abramovic began by remembering early scenes from what she described as a “very lonely childhood”.  
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10Part One: The Hobart Interview
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12Peter Hill: I’d like to start by talking about the system of painting you developed as a child. There seem to have been three stages from what my research tells me. The first was “dreams”, the second “big socialist trucks crashing”, and the third was “lying on my back painting clouds”. I’m curious about how you formulated this system?
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14Marina Abramovic: That’s very interesting, no one has asked me about painting for a long time. You know, as a child, I really lived some kind of polar reality. My mother and father were both communists, involved in running the country just after the war. My mother was a Major in the army, and my father was a General. My childhood was like a boot camp. All the beds had to be made perfectly, like in a hotel. I spent a lot of time on my own as a child, and lived for a lot of the time with my grandmother. I never as a child played with dolls, or any kind of objects. I always played with shadows.
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16PH: Shadows?
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18MA: Yes, shadows. I would sit in my room and look at the shadows of the cars passing on my wall, creating these lights. Or I would go into bed and go under the blankets and lift them with my legs and the shadows would come, and I’d play with them. As a kid, and I know many kids do this, I would also create a sort of invisible world and have imaginary conversations. I also read a lot and had many dreams that were extremely vivid. Sometimes the dreams and the books seemed more real than the reality of my home. I remember when I read Dostoevsky – The Brothers Karamazov -  I didn’t leave the house until I finished the book, it was so real for me. I was not interested in what was around me because I’d surrounded myself with the book. My dreams are always so vivid. I dream in colour. I dream in black and white. I have repetition dreams. And I have dreams in which I am dreaming the dream in another dream. And so I have to wake up several times to be properly awake, if you know what I mean. 
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20PH: One dream inside another, like Russian dolls?
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22MA: Exactly. And I had friends in the dream that didn’t exist in reality. I would revisit them in future dreams. So the dreams were a kind of obvious choice for me to paint. And I used a very certain kind of green and blue in these paintings. And I also wanted to dress in green and blue. After that, in school in a communist country, everything was about order and discipline, and achievement and heroism. And I was very fascinated by these very big trucks that were always transporting things from one place to another. They were like big, green military trucks. And then sometimes I would see them collide. They were so overloaded. And I would go and photograph them, and take the photographs home and paint them. Then I got this idea and went to the children’s store and bought little toy trucks. I took them to the highway and left them on the road. I wanted to photograph the big trucks smashing the small ones. But it never happened. The little trucks always escaped untouched. So I then made these paintings of the big trucks being destroyed by the little trucks, the children’s trucks, as a way of saying that innocence cannot be destroyed. So my childhood, in reality, was very kind of sad, I was not happy as a child. 
23After that I turned from the trucks to the sky. And I looked at the clouds, and they were coming and going, and I painted them.
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25PH: And wasn’t there a time when you were lying on your back and staring at the sky, and twelve military planes whooshed past?
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27MA: Yes, and that changed everything. It was a kind of revelation for me. The most incredible thing for me was seeing the planes arriving and then disappearing again, leaving their vapor trails behind.  At first I wanted to paint it. And that is when I thought, why paint something that is two dimensional when I can have the freedom to work with everything – with sound, with sky, with fire, with water, with myself. 
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29PH: I’d like to shift from the formative period that was your childhood to the equally formative time you and Ulay spent with the Aboriginal community in Australia. You also spent time on a group project in Micronesia with John Cage, Daniel Buren, and Laurie Anderson. 
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31MA: And there was also Brice Marden and Joan Jonas. It was quite something. But my time with the Aboriginal people was life changing. It changed everything for me. And what I’ve said many times in my lectures, full-blood Aborigines are  fully-realised human beings, the most advanced on the planet. They use so much more in their brain – extra-sensory perception, telepathy, and so on that we don’t any more. Tibetans, by contrast, are the second most developed peoples on the planet. They have developed techniques that will one day lead them to this place – but the Australian Aboriginals are already there. So these two cultures have influenced my work enormously. There is the idea of living in the here and now, and of having no possessions – the Aborigines don’t give a shit about possessions. And this incredible connection to the land and to the energy of our planet. It’s just mind-blowing. In 1985 Ulay and I worked with an Aboriginal elder and took him to Amsterdam with a Tibetan lama and we made a Performance piece called Conjunction, and it was the first time these two peoples had met, the Tibetan and the Aboriginal. And this was a big inspiration for Jean Hubert Martin and his exhibition Magiciens de la Terre. Picasso took African masks and he did things with objects. But we took real people, and we created art and performances with them.
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33PH: And you didn’t make much work of your own during the period with the community?
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35MA: We didn’t make any work. The whole idea was just the experience of being there, and not of making work. And we then went to The Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, and for sixteen days we made Night Sea Crossing. And this is not a real crossing of the sea at night but it’s about crossing the night sea of your subconscious. The entire piece was inspired by our time with the Aborigines. We had a boomerang on the table, covered with gold leaf, and a snake, a python, to represent the Rainbow Serpent that is so important in the Dreamtime. And the idea of being motionless, of making long durational works, that came from Australia, from sitting under a dry mulga tree in the desert in 55 degree heat, and you can’t move because you heart is beating so fast. And I had such amazing visions from this time – they were more than dreams – and I wrote them all down in an extended diary. I had a vision of the shooting of the Pope, and so many other things, and forty-eight hours later we were back in Sydney, and this had just happened, but I’d seen it in my visions twelve to forty-eight hours before. You are like a receiver and a sender when you are in the desert. At first it is very hostile, but once you have adapted there is something open that is mind-blowing. It is such an important culture that has survived so long without the written word… 
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37PH: For tens of thousands of years…  
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39MA: That’s right. And the Dreamtime exists only in the present, there is no past or future. And Performance Art is the same. Time exists in the present, in the now. And life is like this. Even one second from now an asteroid can hit the planet and we can all be destroyed. And yet we lead this incredibly irresponsible life, thinking we are here forever.  We don’t understand the polarity of our existence. And Aborigines are totally attuned to it.
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41Part Two: The Sydney Project
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43John Kaldor is an Australian art connoisseur and philanthropist who has, over the past fifty years, brought over thirty art projects to Australia by some of the world’s leading practitioners. He began with Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet (1968-69), Gilbert and George The Singing Sculpture (1973), Jeff Koons Puppy (1995), Vanessa Beecroft’s VB40 in 1999; Tino Sehgal’s This Is So Contemporary (2014), and he recently hosted Marina 
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45Abramovic: In Residence, in 2015.
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47This iteration of The Kaldor Projects was held in one of a series of enormous two-storied piers that shoot out into Sydney Harbour, near the iconic bridge and Opera House. Hundreds of people were already standing in line when I arrived mid-morning. Once inside, they could take part in the Abramovic Method on the lower pier, counting rice, walking slowly, and navigating raised platforms. Or, they could climb upstairs and explore the lives and art of twelve young emerging artists who had committed to live in the pier for the duration of the project, submitting to the instruction and encouragement of Abramovic herself. Each night, one of them would give a lecture about their on-going research and how it was evolving. Later, they would retire to their beds – twelve Ikea-like, minimalist, sleeping pods, plainly – perhaps voyeuristically - visible to all. By day, they worked on their projects and devoted much time to being interviewed by the world’s press. 
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49At the far end of the queue, I could see a giant portrait of Abramovic, that seemed as tall as an office block, hovering high above the crowds like a female Buddha. I made my way to the base of its chin, where I was met by one of the artist’s many assistants. She led me to the “Green Room”, that oasis of shelter at the heart of all major art and literary events. As is usually the case, it turned out to be small, white, and empty of anything of interest other than a dressing table, mirror, and small fridge. The Kinks melancholy anthem Death of a Clown entered my head unbidden. And then Marina Abramovic entered the Green Room, and everything changed. The universe lit up with her special presence. We would spend about two hours in here, when she wasn’t leading me around both levels of the pier and introducing me to her young protégées. We would go on to talk about her project 512 Hours at London’s Serpentine, and for a while were joined by American choreographer Lynsey Peisinger and Sophie O’Brien, Australian curator of 512 Hours and In Residence. The measurement of time in these works made me think of the great Scottish Performance artist Alastair MacLennan and early works such as Neither Nor: 24 Hours, also an influence on Douglas Gordon and his 24 Hour Psycho. “In the world of Performance Art,” Abramovic said, “We refer to Alastair as our grandfather. We have all learned so much from him.”
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51I still had unasked questions from Hobart before I could concentrate on the Kaldor project. I dived straight in, enquiring about her long-planned funeral. I’d heard there were going to be three coffins at the service, and I imagined them all lined up next to each other like a macabre three-shell trick. Find the body!
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53“No, no, no,” she said. “I will have three funerals simultaneously, one in each of the three cities where I have spent most of my life – Belgrade, Amsterdam, and New York. But no one will know which coffin I am lying in.” And in an age where so many people seem trapped by the certainties of atheism or fundamentalism, I was heartened by her mix of doubt and faith when she said, “I’ve always thought that death will be the next big adventure. What it will be like I don’t know, but it will be an adventure.” I mention that I’d heard the Guggenheim had offered to host her fast-approaching 70th birthday.  
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55“They held my 60th there, and offered to do it again ten years later. And I’ve decided I want to learn to pole dance for my 70th party. So I will do it.”
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57This fits with what she told me later about the three-way split in her personality. “There are at least three people inside my head. Part of me is very regimented and drawn to rules and instructions. It comes from my parents in the Former-Yugoslavian army (this is how she still likes to describe Serbia). Then there is the part of me that likes to have fun and adventure and try new things. Finally, there is the lazy me, who lies around eating chocolate and ice cream, and watching box sets of DVDs.”
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59I must have looked surprised, and she told me life wasn’t always full of such first world choices. “Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen) and I were very poor. For many years we lived and slept in a van and drove all over Europe, existing on very little.”
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61Mention of Ulay makes me think of two things. The first was his surprise appearance at New York’s Museum of Modern Art during Abramovic’s recent long durational performance The Artist Is Present, when she spent hours every day, for several weeks, staring across a table into the eyes of strangers, never making physical contact. Until, that is, Ulay materialized in front of her, and her hand moved towards his as her eyes welled with tears. And in this age that constantly indexes itself, you can (you probably have) access it on YouTube. But this was not the prelude to a reconciliation and re-establishment of their professional and domestic activities. They are currently embroiled in court actions, as petty and with as much at financial stake, as any rival actors seeking star billing. Ulay is a sick man with ongoing health problems. He is fighting for joint attribution of intellectual property, or at least a fairer percentage of sales than Abramovic is prepared to acknowledge. He is being given international shows again. Performance Art may, until recently, have been a marginalised and lowly-paid discipline, but for some – like Abramovic – those times have changed. 850,000 people paid $25 to sit and stare at the artist at the MoMA retrospective. 
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63But Abramovic’s work, at its best, is cathartic, and never more so than when she recently took one of her  “Scream” 
64performances to Norway, and a park in the Ekeberg district where Munch’s The Scream was painted. Three hundred locals turned up to take part in the event, screaming until their lungs ached. Poignantly, some of them were family members of victims of the Anders Breivik massacre of 77 young Norwegians.  Anecdotal reports say that in those cases the screaming did help towards the healing, if not the closure that will probably never come.