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Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Marina Abramovic, in "Nude With

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Self-Mutilation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Marina Abramovic in her SoHo studio preparing to pay homage to a 1973 performance piece by Gina Pane.

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: November 6, 2005

Correction Appended

MARINA ABRAMOVIC really had her heart set on being

crucified.

It was supposed to be the showstopper, maybe literally, in seven

consecutive nights of often harrowing performance art that she will

stage beginning Wednesday in the rotunda at the Guggenheim Museum. The crucifixion

would have been a re-enactment of a near-mythical event in the canon of performance art,

when the artist Chris Burden, in the spring of 1973, had his hands nailed to the roof of a

Volkswagen (the "people's car") and then had the car rolled out of a Venice, Calif., garage

into the daylight while the engine screamed.

In many ways Ms. Abramovic's redux would have been the

perfect illustration of the strange obsession, nurtured for

more than a decade, that is bringing her to the Guggenheim:

"covering" famous performance art pieces, much in the way

one rock band covers another's hit, adoringly but in a

different voice, with new riffs and rhythms.

In music, it's a time-honored tradition. It even happens

occasionally in the visual arts with artists like Richard

Pettibone, who has made a career of painting teeny copies of

Warhols, Duchamps and Stellas. But in the world of

performance art, where transience was an integral part of

some of the best-known work from the 1960's and 70's, the

idea of replaying pieces as if from an orchestral score has

usually been seen, if at all, as heresy.

And so when Ms. Abramovic - herself a groundbreaking

performance artist - started going around seeking permission

from artists or their estates, even offering to pay for the

privilege of re-enacting the works, she was not always well

received. She recounted going to Dsseldorf with her sights

on one of Joseph Beuys's seminal pieces from 1965 - "How

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In person, Ms. Abramovic does not really convey a sense of being someone willing to

carve a star into her stomach with a razor blade, as she will do at the Guggenheim,

restaging one her own pieces from 1975. When a visitor arrived recently at her bright,

roomy SoHo loft, furnished with nice midcentury tables and chairs, Chopin was playing on

the stereo. She made mint tea and put out almonds and pieces of candied ginger. She

laughs often, and loudly, and sometimes seems embarrassed when talking about her more

extreme work.

For a while now, she has called herself the "grandmother of performance art," but she does

not look very grandmotherly, with long, dark hair and a trim figure. She recently posed for

a picture in Vogue and chose to dress up like Sofia Loren, in a tight sweater. Contrary to

her reputation as a dark priestess of the avant-garde she also spoke with delight - and no

apparent irony - about how an episode of "Sex and the City" recreated scenes from a 2002

performance in which she fasted for 12 days while living full-time on a shelf at the Sean

Kelly Gallery in Chelsea.

"It's fantastic," she said, "the popular culture absorbing me."

Despite her years of pushing her body to its extremes, Ms. Abramovic does not seem to be

much the worse for it, though she does bear some scars and pulled up her shirtsleeve to

show a recently acquired one, long and straight, on her left upper arm.

"In normal life, if I cut myself I cry like a baby because I'm totally emotional andvulnerable, and I don't like pain," she said. But in a performance, much as in ancient

religious endurance rites, "then the pain is not an issue."

"We are afraid of dying, and we are afraid of pain, so much," she said. "I like to get rid of

the fear of pain by staging the pain in front of the audience, going through this pain and

showing them that it's possible. It turns into something else. Then you have this energy to

do it."

Partly to prove that she is as committed to these ideas as she was in her 20's, Ms.

Abramovic had wanted to include not only Mr. Burden's crucifixion piece but also a

re-creation of what she considers her most radical work, called "Rhythm 0." Performed

only once in Naples in 1974, its premise was terrifyingly simple: She agreed to stand in a

gallery for six hours while anyone who came in could choose any of 72 objects around her

- including knives, scissors, a needle, a loaded gun - and do anything they wanted to her

with the objects. It was her only work in which she essentially ceded control over her

body, and over the pain to be inflicted, to her audience.

The participants became involved slowly at first, but after a while Ms. Abramovic's clothes

were cut off, and her body marked, burned and cut. Finally, a man took the gun and made

her put it up to her head, trying to force her to squeeze the trigger. She didn't resist, but a

fight ensued as other spectators intervened. "This was the only performance where I was

really ready to die," she said. Trying to explain why, she repeated a well-known quotation

from the artist Bruce Nauman, one of whose performance pieces will also be recreated in

her show: "Art is a matter of life and death. This may be melodramatic, but it is also true."

But she will not get the chance to demonstrate that proposition at the Guggenheim, at least

in so stark a fashion. She and Nancy Spector, the museum's curator of contemporary art,

had long discussions about the dangers involved in the piece, about the difficulty - or near

impossibility - of getting permission for the gun and about whether the piece could bestaged without it.

"The risks really outweighed anything else," Ms. Spector said, "and then it really came

down to the legal questions. We just couldn't find a way to have a loaded gun in the

museum. And she, being who she is, could not do something halfway. She really did want

to perform a work that had that level of toughness that really confronted her audience and

gave them a sense of this side of her work."

There is no question, even with the exclusion of the loaded guns and nails, that

Guggenheim visitors will see tougher work than they have seen on Museum Mile in a long

time. Each performance will last for seven hours, adding Ms. Abramovic's own twist on

performances that were originally much shorter, stretching them out into her trademark

endurance tests.

In the Beuys piece, she will cover her head in honey and gold leaf, cradling a dead rabbitand whispering to it about pictures on the wall (a meditation on rationality and language -

and a kind of in-joke about art scholarship). In a cover of a Gina Pane performance from

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1973, she will lie on a bed above lighted candles and make cuts around her fingernails and

lips while slides of women painting their nails flash on the screen. Ms. Pane's work often

focused, very painfully, on the objectification of women, a theme that Ms. Abramovic will

also explore in a less grueling but more revealing way in a Valie Export performance from

1969: she will stalk around a stage with a large fake gun, wearing pants with the crotch

removed. In recreating the piece by Mr. Acconci, she will not be seen at all, but like Mr.

Acconci when he made it famous in 1972, she will be concealed beneath the stage,

masturbating and speaking suggestively through a microphone to the visitors walking nearher.

"The question is whether the piece will really work with her doing it, and not him," Ms.

Spector said. "We don't know. This whole thing is about asking questions as much as it is

about presenting finished work. I think it's starting a discussion that a lot of us really need

to have."

She added: "Of course, there's also the practical question of how she is going to do this,

physically, and I'm not even sure."

Occasionally, Ms. Abramovic is not quite sure herself.

"I am so afraid of this piece," she said, "but the moment the public is there, I'll go from a

lower self to a kind of higher self. I don't know how. It just happens."

Plus, for the first time, she said, she has hired a personal trainer.

"I'll be O.K.," she said, laughing. "He is good. Very tough."

Correction:Nov. 6, 2005, Sunday:

A front-page article in Arts & Leisure today about the performance artist Marina

Abramovic misstates the dates when she will re-enact famous performance pieces at the

Guggenheim Museum. They will be seven consecutive nights beginning this Wednesday,

not next month.

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