One of a Kind

Marina Abramovic’s desire to communicate with her audience has led her to spend hundreds of hours on show in galleries, being stared at by strangers, yet establishing a  profound sense of connection. Erica Wagner meets the world’s greatest performance artist.

- Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic is laughing as she confesses her guilty secret to me. She doesn’t smoke, she doesn’t drink, she takes very good care of herself, sees a personal trainer, and once a year goes to India for “a complete cleaning-up”, to a place she describes as being “between a sanatorium, a prison, and a monastery”. But still, I say, there must be some indulgence in those moments when she really feels she has to let go.

“Chocolate!” There is rapture, as well as laughter, in her voice. “I like chocolate.” Those three simple words don’t do justice to the rapture expressed. “And I’m not interested in all that cacao, 72 percent bullshit. I like creamy, I like with butter and caramel. When I was a kid I always liked After Eights. But, you know, if you give me a box, I don’t eat one, I eat all!” I’d never have guessed that this was her weakness; but you don’t have to spend long speaking to Abramovic to discover that she is full of surprises. Her work—rigorous, enormously demanding both of herself and of her audiences—might lead one to think that there was something severe about her, an impression perhaps reinforced by her fall of dark hair, her aquiline profile. But when we talk I discover that she is anything but. Born in Belgrade (in what is now Serbia, but which she always refers to as Yugoslavia) just after World War II, she has a rich voice that is still heavily accented, her English grammar and syntax full of the inventive inversions and compressions of the non-native speaker.