Marina Abramović: ‘We are all responsible for the ocean’

Marina Abramović needs little introduction. The Serbian artist has, over a 50-year career, become world famous for durational works in which she puts herself through extreme physical and emotional duress. She has lived and starved in a New York gallery; lost consciousness while lying in the frame of a burning wooden star; repeatedly stabbed the spaces between her fingers with a knife (letting out the occasional moan when the blade slipped); and, most famously, in 1974, remained passive for six hours while spectators were invited to do what they wanted to her. ‘I learned that the public can kill you,’ she said of that harrowing performance, which turned a section of her hair white.

Born in 1947 in what was then Yugoslavia, Abramović grew up in a strict but privileged household. Her parents had been partisans and heroes in the Second World War and were part of the Yugoslav elite. Much of her early work focused on the savagery of President Josip Tito’s dictatorship, and she used her body as a metaphor for the repressive regime.

In 1997 she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for Balkan Baroque, a work made in response to the war in the former Yugoslavia, in which she spent four days scrubbing bloodied cow bones: the cleaner they became, the more she was covered in blood. ‘It was incredibly brutal to do and to smell,’ she says, noting that she became a vegetarian after the event.

Now 77, the perennially watchable artist is as indomitable as ever. With her raven-black mane and mesmerising stare, she has been described as a sorceress for the way she seems to feed off her audience. People queue for hours simply to sit in her presence, and what she offers them in return is honesty and ‘unconditional love’. ‘I don’t want to show only the best part of myself,’ she says of her practice. ‘To connect with my public, I have to show them who I really am.’ At Glastonbury Festival in June this year, Abramović led thousands of festival-goers in Seven Minutes of Collective Silence, to show ‘how we can all together give unconditional love to each other’.

Her love for humanity is matched by her passion for the environment. Her quest for spiritual enlightenment has taken her all over the world — ‘I go to the East to get, and I go to the West to give,’ she says — and she has spoken often of the energy she gains from nature. ‘Everyone,’ she says, ‘should hug a tree for at least 15 minutes.’ A trip to the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil in the early 1990s (famously photographed by Sebastião Salgado) revealed to her the catastrophic consequences of extraction, and she has been forthright in her views on environmental destruction ever since.

Abramović is one of 10 international artists, including Ai Weiwei and Edmund de Waal, who have donated artworks to the auction Blue: Art for the Ocean. The works will be offered by Christie’s in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 10 October 2024, in support of Blue Marine Foundation, a conservation charity dedicated to restoring the ocean to health by addressing overfishing. Abramović’s contribution is a photograph (the first of an edition of three, plus two artist’s proofs) from Performance for the Oceans (2024), in which she stands on the shore of Fire Island, a sandbar off Long Island, New York, and offers her unconditional love and energy to the ocean.

The work is in the German Romantic tradition. Abramović stands with her back to the viewer, echoing the painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1817), by Caspar David Friedrich, in which a gentleman in a frock coat looks out across mist-covered hills into a vista of mountaintops and sky. In Abramović’s version, she stands in a red dress, her arms raised, Moses-like, to the ocean, while the dolorous surf batters the land into wind-blown granules. It is a work both sublime and terrible.

In 2012, Fire Island, best known as a gay summer hangout, was badly damaged when Hurricane Sandy tore away a strip of its dune coastline. Since then, its fragile barrier against erosion has been slowly eaten away. Abramović uses Fire Island as a morbid symptom, a warning that the planet we have trashed may soon be uninhabitable. ‘We are all responsible for the ocean,’ she says, ‘and as a human collective we have more consciousness and energy that we can give to the environment.’

Performance for the Oceans, the first edition of three photographs captured during a unique performance by Marina Abramović in May 2024, will be sold in Blue: Art for the Ocean as part of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 10 October 2024. 100 per cent of the hammer price for all lots will be paid to Blue Marine Foundation, a UK registered charity (charity number 1137209)