Marina Abramovic, installation view “The Artist is Present”, MoMA, New York 2010. Photo © Marco Anelli
Sleek: What about the challenge of the discomfort and pain?
MA: There were moments when I could not even lift my hand to take my dress off. In the last months I could not even be touched because literally every molecule in my body was in pain. The body is not used to being static so it was rebelling.
Sleek: Did time disappear?
MA: Totally. In the beginning a guard asked, ‘Do you want us to give you some kind of sign about the time?’ I was sitting there to forget about time.
Sleek: Is it the work that you are most proud of?
MA: I try to challenge myself. The work before was Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim, which was a very difficult piece. I’ve been in this country for ten years and I’ve only made three pieces. Each piece was harder than the one before it. Now I am doing my funeral.
Sleek: How did that come about?
MA: After I walked the Great Wall of China, and I split with my partner of twelve years, in 1988. I was forty years old at that time. I wrote this sentence, ‘I feel fat, ugly and unwanted.’ At that time I hated theatre. But I thought that the key to all the pain in my life is my work, and the way to translate that pain into something else is to stage your own life in the context of theatre. To play out your life in front of you somehow liberates you from it. Charles Atlas was the first one to actually stage it in Madrid, in 1989.
Sleek: He staged what exactly?
MA: The Marina Abramovic biography. My life as theatre. There is one scene where I am saying goodbye to Ulay, and the real Ulay was in the theatre with his pregnant Chinese wife. It was a situation in which reality and theatre became one. It created such an incredibly liberating feeling that I decided the only theatre I am ever going to engage with is the theatre of my life. So every five or six years I will ask a different director to re-edit my life. Last time it was Michael Laub, a Belgian theater director, who made Biography Remix.
Sleek: I nominate David Lynch for the next interpretation.
MA: I love David Lynch. He has invented a new language of cinema. Plus, he’s very interested in transcendental meditation. I would love to meet him and do something with him. But, our paths haven’t crossed. One day… I am now sixty-five. A few years ago I approached Bob Wilson. In my performances I am in complete control. In the theatre, I give all my control away. I give my diaries, intimate letters, and photographs to the director. He has total freedom. Bob looked at me and looked at my life and said, ‘Okay, you are going to play your mother’ – I always fought with my mother.
Sleek: She’s no longer alive?
MA: No. She died three years ago. Last September I was rehearsing the role in Madrid with Bob, and my brother came from Belgrade to see us. He looked at me and said, ‘You are exactly like her.’ This is my biggest fear! It was a horrible compliment. Anthony, of Anthony and the Johnsons, is a great writer and musician and he is creating nine songs. He is singing three of them on the stage and I have to sing one. And William Dafoe plays the narrator and my father. He has many different roles. It starts with the funeral then goes into the childhood, and finishes with the raising of the soul and another funeral. Other directors have put a lot of my work into the stories, but Bob is taking my work out and is putting my life stories in, crazy stories like the one about when I was twelve years old and I felt terribly ugly. I had orthopedic shoes. I had a big nose, which I hated. I was obsessed with Bridget Bardot’s nose…
Sleek: Because Bardot had a small nose?
MA: Right. Small and kind of upturned. Each time I asked my mother for a Bridget Bardot nose she would just slap my face and that would be it. So I created this perfect plan, at the age of twelve, that one Sunday morning when nobody was at home I would go to my parents’ bedroom. They had a big matrimonial bed with sharp edges. I was going to spin around as fast as I could and fall on the edge of the bed to break my nose. And then, we would go to the hospital with the Bardot photographs in my pocket. So I go to the room, I spin around and miss the corner. I cut myself in the wrong place, there’s blood everywhere and the photographs fall to the floor. My mother comes into the room and slaps my face. End of story. Bob has staged this episode, with a young girl playing me and I play my mother in this scene, in front of a huge Bridget Bardot projection. Looking back I’m lucky that it didn’t happen. It is very scary to have a big nose on a childish face, but when you grow up your features all really fit with one another. I would look horrible with a Bardot nose.