The fact that I worried she may be upset about which soup she gets both shows my hopeless Britishness and ignores the fact that this is an artist who has flagellated, cut and burnt her naked body for her art in public on many occasions. She is probably not the type to get worried about soup.
In fact, she is a woman who fits no type at all. She is gloriously, gorgeously unique and manages simultaneously to be sincere, saucy (she likes telling dirty Serbian jokes*), free-living, disciplined, reckless and loving, and is about the most interesting and alive human being I have ever met.
In her performance art over the years she has pushed herself to the point where she has lost consciousness, gained scars, spilt blood and risked her life. One of her earlier works, Rhythm 0, involved her lying on a table while people were given access to seventy-two different objects – scissors, a feather, a scalpel, honey, a whip, etc. – and told to use them on her as they saw fit. By the end she’d been stripped naked, had her neck cut, thorns pressed into her stomach and a gun put to her head.
She has recently hit seventy and is more in demand than ever before. MOMA’s 2010 retrospective of her work, ‘The Artist Is Present’, super-charged her international profile. As part of this exhibition, she sat immobile and silent in a chair for over seven hundred hours while thousands of visitors queued, some overnight, to sit opposite her. Marina would hold eye contact with each person, fully present in the moment, reacting to them only if they cried, by her crying too.
She explains that being present, gaining consciousness, is a big theme in her work. She sees cultivating inner-awareness as the best way to disentangle ourselves from the artificial structures of society, so we don’t feel disempowered or helpless. ‘With many people, there is a sense the world is falling apart and it creates a feeling of just giving up. And that inertia is the real danger to society. People have to realise we can create change by changing ourselves.’
This heightened consciousness can only come if we stop thinking and achieve a state of mental emptiness; only then can we receive what Marina calls ‘liquid knowledge – the knowledge that is universal and belongs to everyone’. The mission to help people attain it explains her more recent work, in which she invites her audience to count grains of rice or water droplets, to open the same door over and over again, to ‘create distractions to stop distraction, and rediscover the present so they can then rediscover themselves’.
Given the originality and uncompromising nature of her work, the risks she has taken and the sacrifices she has made, it is unsurprising that her main piece of advice is a rallying cry to commit deeply to whatever it is you feel that you must do.
‘Today 100 per cent is not enough. Give 100 per cent, and then go over this border into what is more than you can do. You have to take the unknown journey to where nobody has ever been, because that is how civilisation moves forwards. 100 per cent is not enough. 150 per cent is just good enough.’
I hugely respect the advice, but I reply that most people may not be prepared to put themselves in harm’s way and in real pain for their passions as she has done. But for this too she has advice. ‘Yes, the pain can be terrible,’ she replies, ‘but if you say to yourself “So what? So Pain, what can you do?” and if you accept pain and are no longer afraid of it, you will cross the gate into the non-pain state.’
Advice I choose to accept rather than put to the test.
* ‘How do Montenegro men masturbate? They put it in the earth and wait for an earthquake’ (Apparently a favourite Serbian joke about how lazy Montenegrin men are. With apologies to all our male Montenegrin readers. Source: Abramović, M.).
‘TODAY 100 PER CENT IS NOT ENOUGH. GIVE 100 PER CENT, AND THEN GO OVER THIS BORDER INTO WHAT IS MORE THAN YOU CAN DO. YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE UNKNOWN JOURNEY TO WHERE NOBODY HAS EVER BEEN, BECAUSE THAT IS HOW CIVILISATION MOVES FORWARDS. 100 PER CENT IS NOT ENOUGH. 150 PER CENT IS JUST GOOD ENOUGH.’
– Marina Abramović
TERRY WAITE, A PATIENT MAN
I’VE JUST HEARD WHAT MUST be one of the most understated sentences a human being could utter. I’m having lunch with Terry Waite in his local cathedral town of Bury St Edmunds. He is telling me about his experience of being held hostage for five years in Lebanon in the late 1980s, after having gone there as the Church of England’s envoy to negotiate the release of existing prisoners. He describes his four years of solitary confinement in a tiny, windowless cell, chained to a wall. He recounts the beatings and mock executions he suffered. He explains how he had to put on a blindfold if a guard came into the cell, so he didn’t see a human face for four years, and how they refused him a pen, paper and books and any communication with the outside world, including his family. He reflects back on it all and says, ‘Yes, it was a bit isolating.’
Terry Waite is the human manifestation of what it means to be humble, to serve and to sacrifice. He put himself in harm’s way in the hope that he could help others. And twenty-five years later he is still working tirelessly to help people who have had family members taken hostage, which says it all.
The craziest thing is that he claims he was mainly doing it for himself. I tell him I know the concept that no charitable gesture is selfless, but this is pushing it. He insists, saying his career has been about achieving reconciliations and that following that path has helped him reconcile the different sides of his own self.
He is also quick to point out that many people have to endure far more than he did. He talks of people held captive in their own body, when disease or accident have taken away their ability to move. And he knows only too well of the many hostages who don’t get to come home at all.
Both Terry’s words and actions advocate the profound importance of having empathy: it is a fundamental tenet of his approach to life. He recounts meeting with the British mother of a man who was beheaded by terrorists in Iraq, who even in her terrible grief said that she knew her suffering was no different to that of a mother in Iraq who has lost her son through warfare or insurgency. ‘In that simple statement she summed up with tremendous courage something we should never forget: we are all members of the same human family. We all have fears, and hopes and aspirations. We all have our vulnerabilities, so we should be very careful before we attribute negative stereotypes to other people.’
Terry’s empathy helped him stick to the three rules he set himself when he realised that he’d been taken hostage: no regrets, no self-pity and no sentimentality. He also stuck to his principle of non-violence, a philosophy tested to the extreme when one day he found a gun in the toilet left accidentally by his guard. (Terry said ‘I think you’ve forgotten something’ and handed it back to him.)
So, how does one cope with four years of entirely unjust and unrelenting solitary confinement?
‘I did my best to structure each day. I would allocate a period of time to doing my exercises, then I would write for an hour or two in my head, then do mental arithmetic. And I spent a lot of time dreaming up poetry too. And then it would be time for some more exercises. And so on.’
I tell him it seems it would be impossibly hard to fill all those lonely hours. In another world-class example of being understated, Terry just nods and responds, ‘You know, the whole experience wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d just let me have some books.’
He claims there have been unintended benefits of the ordeal. It gave him the confidence to leave his salaried job afterwards and live a freer life. So one related piece of wisdom he is keen to pass on is that every disaster, or seeming disaster, in life can usually be turned around and something creative can emerge from it. ‘That is not to say such suffering is not difficult and damn hard, but it doesn’t need be totally destructive. It’s the way you approach it, and the way you