Marina Abramović has attained a level of fame normally unimaginable to performance artists. (Particularly one born in Serbia in 1946, just after the devastation of World War II.) It goes beyond retrospectives at the MoMA. She has teamed up with Adidas and faced off with Jay Z. (See below.)
Abramović has also caused a fair amount of controversy and general chaos. She once announced she had been “completely used” by Jay Z and blasted him for not giving a promised donation to the Marina Abramović Institute and compared him unfavorably to her experiences with Lady Gaga … only to have her Institute apologize to Jay Z, saying he had, in fact, made the promised donation. They issued a public apology to Abramović as well, stating they should have kept her better informed.
Her biggest public dispute involves the man who was her lover and collaborator starting in 1976 for 12 years, Frank Uwe Laysiepen. (Or, as he is professionally known, Ulay.) Their final performance piece in 1988 was truly epic, even by their ambitious standards. They planned to start at opposite ends of the Great Wall and meet in the middle to marry. They both walked the wall over a three-month period, but when they came together, it was the end—for them personally and professionally, as they broke up and had no more contact until 1999. (The hour-long video below, featuring narration from both, captures the end of everything for them.)
In 1999, they briefly resumed communication to strike an agreement to sell works they had created together, only to have Ulay file suit in 2015, insisting that “Abramović failed to provide him with accurate statements of sales, and had paid him only four times in the course of 16 years.” He claimed to have only learned of the Adidas ad, which drew on their joint work, after it was already being filmed. He expressed concerns that she was essentially trying to eliminate his role in their collaborations.
This September, the court ruled in Ulay’s favor. She would be required to pay him $264,000. In an odd bit of timing, roughly a month later on Oct. 25, Abramović returned fire with the release of Walk Through Walls: A Memoir. Ulay plays a significant role in it, and the portrayal is not flattering. Abramović notes she desperately tried to save their relationship, even agreeing to a ménage à trois, only for it to increase her general bitterness: “That was the moment I stopped liking his smell.”
Indeed, even the Great Wall of China only inspires frustrating memories. She notes that he stopped walking so that she would meet him at a particularly “scenic spot”: “I didn’t care about photo opportunities. He had broken our concept for aesthetic reasons.”
(Abramović also had less artistic reasons for being embittered: “I would soon learn he had impregnated his translator.”)
With all the tensions continuing in their relationship almost 30 years after the breakup, it’s worth recalling the one tender moment the two had in the last decade. Watch the pair unexpectedly (and quite movingly) reunite in 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art during one of Abramović’s performances. It happens just over a minute into the video, but it’s worth watching the beginning to get a sense of how the piece normally works.
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