33 Artists in 3 Acts (37 page)

For Abramovi
, the question of how you know you’re an artist is much more important than what an artist is. “Humans have to figure out their purpose in life!” she says. “Many people spend so much time doubting. Before you choose a profession, you have to stand still, close your eyes and think: who am I? I was extremely lucky that I found my purpose at a very early stage. Since the day I was born, I didn’t want to do anything else. I had my first show when I was twelve.” Abramovi
’s conviction is like a hurricane-force wind. “You know you are an artist when you have the urge to create, but this doesn’t make you a great artist,” she continues. “Great artists result from the sacrifices that you make to your personal life.” A woman, she claims, has to be like a man to be an artist. “One of the reasons why there are fewer women artists than men is because women don’t want to sacrifice their main function to reproduce, to have a family, and the comforts of everyday life.” Abramovi
, who is sixty-four, chose not to have children. Some time ago, she called herself the “grandmother of performance art.” Nowadays, she disassociates herself from the epithet because she dislikes its suggestion that she is ready to retire.

It often appears that Abramovi
has cast herself in the role of the artist as priestess or shaman. “The public is in need of experiences that are not just voyeuristic. Our society is in a mess of losing its spiritual center,” she says. “Artists should be the oxygen of society. The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, to open consciousness and elevate the mind.” Abramovi
loathes nihilism and “art that comes out of drugs and the trash holes of being drunk.” She is a teetotalling vegetarian, keen on
the clear state of consciousness delivered by fasting. In a way more like aboriginal initiations or Buddhist rituals than conventional Western art-making, Abramovi
’s work aims to be transformative. After the MoMA show, she feels altered. “I still don’t have a complete image of what happened to me,” she admits, “but I am different in so many ways.”

According to Abramovi
, time is the key to the transformative power of
The Artist Is Present
. “You can pretend for two or three hours, but then pretension stops and the performance becomes life itself,” she explains. The only other Abramovi
performance to last this long was
The Great Wall Walk
(1988), which also extended over ninety days. Although regally self-sufficient now, Abramovi
was once part of an artistic duo with the German artist Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay. They became involved both romantically and artistically in 1976 and made many works together, such as
Imponderabilia
(1977), a performance in which the couple stood completely naked in a doorway through which the public had to pass. By the late eighties, their relationship was faltering and they decided to end it in a ceremonial way on the Great Wall of China. Abramovi
started at the Yellow Sea while Ulay set out from the Gobi Desert. They each walked 1,500 miles and when they eventually encountered each other, they said goodbye. During
The Artist Is Present
, Ulay came to sit with Abramovi
. “He was part of my life, not somebody of the audience, which is why it is the only time I broke the rule,” she says, explaining why she extended her hands to touch his for a moment before he got up to leave.

Abramovi
admires those with more willpower than herself, citing Tehching Hsieh, a Taiwanese performance artist based in New York, who did five year-long performances before he quit making art in 2000. His best-known work is
One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece)
, in which the artist punched a time clock every hour on the hour for 365 days. Each time he punched the clock, he exposed a single frame of film, which led to a short movie. He shaved his head before he started the piece, so his growing hair reflects the passage of time. The video also documents his mounting exhaustion and evident derangement.