Marina Abramović’s career as a performance artist started in the 1970s, when she, the daughter of Yugoslavian elites, started to present provocative works to the Belgrade public. Over the years, she gradually became known worldwide and is now considered one of the most famous contemporary artists. At 77, Abramović still shows no signs of stopping. She’s always creating new work and capitalizing on her artistic worth. Abramović often finds herself in the middle of media scandals. She even faced allegations of racism and Satanism.
Who is Marina Abramović?
The controversial Marina Abramović is one of the leading performance artists and heroes of contemporary art, born in 1946 in Yugoslavia. Marina has been exploring the limits of the human body, spirituality, trauma, and mystic experiments for the last 50 years.
Abramović’s pieces have been shaping performance art for decades. Today, her artworks not only inspire generations of younger artists but are often recreated by them. She is known for her provocative and interactive works. For example, in the deeply disturbing Rhythm 0, she offered the audience 72 instruments to use on her body freely, while calmly sitting in front of them in a Naples art gallery. Little by little, the visitors’ aggression gradually grew. They cut up Abramović’s clothes and hair, scratched her, and threatened her with a loaded gun. Six hours later, Abramović silently stood up and started approaching her audience, forcing them to flee in horror, scared by both their actions and consequences.
Controversy #1: Family Background and Class Consciousness
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterThe origins of Marina Abramović and her family members are one of the reasons why her art receives mixed responses from many viewers, including her fellow Serbs. While talking about the Communist regime, religious contexts, and violent history of Yugoslavia, the artist conveniently erases issues of class and privilege. In 2000, Marina Abramović represented Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale with her performance Balkan Baroque. Seated in a dark basement, she cleaned and washed cow bones while humming Serbian folk songs. Over time, her dress got stained with blood and dirt, and the bones and rotting flesh filled the room with an insufferable odor.
The performance was dedicated to the victims of Yugoslav wars, bloodshed, and the foul smell of spilled blood that metaphorically lingered in the air. The Yugoslavian side hated the performance believing that art had to be aesthetically pleasing. The then-minister of culture of Montenegro started a full-blown campaign against Abramović in the press and had to resign when the artist won the Golden Lion for her performance.
However, the outrage of the general public concerned not the aesthetical qualities of the work, but the class blindness of Abramović. Marina was raised in a family of Communist elites and she left the country in the late 1970s. Therefore, she was not able to experience the events the way less privileged Yugoslavs did. Instead of admitting this and addressing her own perspective, Abramović wore working-class struggles and folk narratives as costumes designed for emotional manipulation.
Controversy #2: Marina Abramović Versus Indigenous Australians
In 2016, an excerpt of Abramović’s memoir provoked allegations of racism and xenophobia. The book Walk Through Walls contained the artist’s diary entries from various stages of her career. One of the notes concerned her 1979 visit to Australia during the Sydney Biennale. After the show, Abramović and her then-partner Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen) spend six months in the Great Victoria desert with the tribe of Indigenous Australians. In the note inspired by this experience, Abramović wrote that the locals looked like dinosaurs and seemed terrible to Western eyes. She made several derogatory comments about their bodies and appearance that immediately caused outrage in the media, even before the release of her memoir.
The issue was not with the diary entry itself, despite the racist language—since that could be explained by the 1970s white-centered culture and Marina Abramović’s own bias—but the decision of the artist and her editorial team to add it to the memoir. In her public apology, Abramović stated that her contact with the Indigenous Australians was crucial for her development as an artist and that her initial judgment was incorrect and misinformed. However, this public backlash could have been easily avoided by a more thoughtful editorial work. The diary entry was omitted in the printed version of the book, but still inspired a social media hashtag #TheRacistIsPresent, mimicking Abramović’s performance title.
Controversy #3: Satanism
One of the most absurd yet loud scandals concerning Marina Abramović concerned her alleged involvement with Satanism. In 2020, a group of right-wing activists noticed that one of the leaked emails to a Democrat John Podesta (whose account was hacked by Wikileaks in 2016) was an invitation from his brother Tony Podesta, to attend a performance by Marina Abramović. The performance, titled Spirit Cooking, originated from a series of etchings and notes, describing imaginary alchemic recipes based on natural materials and bodily fluids. The original yet relatively unknown version of the work mutated into Abramović writing instructions for her dinner guests on a wall using pork blood. Later, however, it transformed into a more comforting practice of guests simply making soup together. Most likely, the performance attended by Podesta was hardly anything more than that.
But for conspiracy theorists and right-wing fanatics, the trigger was already pulled. In the following days, they accused both Abramović and Podesta of conducting Satanic rituals and sacrificing humans. They also remembered her performance Rhythm 5, during which Abramović laid inside a burning pentagram-like symbol, referencing both the religious and political state of her native Yugoslavia. Abramović denied all allegations of Satanist beliefs, but that did not stop her haters from protesting. In 2020, their complaints forced Microsoft to pull an online advertisement featuring the artist.
Controversy #4: The Marina Abramović Institute
One of the ugliest scandals Abramović was ever involved in is connected to the construction of the Marina Abramović Institute in New York. The institution was planned as an educational center for upcoming performance artists, keen to learn the so-called Abramović Method. In 2015 Abramović tried to accuse the rapper Jay Z of failing to make a promised donation to fund her institute. Jay Z promised a donation in return for Abramović participating in his music video Picasso Baby. What Abramović did not know was that the rapper kept all his receipts, easily proving the transaction. Appalled and risking a substantial lawsuit, Abramović was quick to blame her assistants, who supposedly miscalculated her finances.
By 2017, Marina Abramović raised more than $660,000 for her planned Institute using Kickstarter. The building design was created by the famous Rem Koolhaas and was almost ready to be brought to life, but that never happened. The Institute now functions without a permanent residence, and the donated money was never returned to the donors.
Controversy #5: Marina Abramović’s Skincare Line
The most recent case of Marina Abramović achieving notoriety in the press happened when she promoted the release of her skincare line. Under the brand name Longevity Method, Abramović and a holistic healer Nonna Brenner made a face lotion and energy drops, supposedly aimed at reconnecting the consumers with the forces of nature and vitality.
This is not the first time Abramović dived into the realm of wellness and alternative healing practices. She offers her own mindfulness method as a tool for developing one’s creative consciousness. The Abramović method is promoted by various A-level celebrities and offered as a part of her retreats and artistic workshops. A price tag for unlocking your creative self and reuniting with nature during a five-day workshop starts at more than $2,500 per person. Therefore, Abramović endorses a capitalist approach to developing a relationship with the spiritual.
Accusations of selling out and using her artistic reputation for projects of questionable quality are not something new for Abramović. Apart from the skincare line, her latest project was the opera performance Seven Deaths of Maria Callas. A quasi-biopic about the famous opera singer involved professional opera singers, actor Willem Dafoe, and Abramović herself playing Maria Callas. The ambitious tribute, however, was seen by many as too ambitious with expensive decorations and Abramović’s ego hardly corresponding with the project’s narrative qualities.
