Drink a glass of water as slowly as you can.
Look at your reflection.
Stretch as if for the first time.
Complain to a tree.

So dictates The Marina Abramović Method: Instruction Cards to Reboot Your Life, a 30-pack of exercises out next week from Laurence King Publishing. “I really like the cover,” Abramović says placidly from her New York apartment; framed by the Zoom screen, her vibrant red shirt and backdrop of pale cabinets mimic the hues on the box—all that’s missing is the golden halo. Her eyes crinkle behind her thick black glasses. “The cover looks like for the baby food cereal from the ’30s.”

Abramović, known variously as the grandmother and godmother of performance art—and also, arguably, the only famous performance artist—was born in Belgrade in former Yugoslavia in 1946. (“When people ask me where I am from,” she once told a journalist, “I never say Serbia. I always say I come from a country that no longer exists.”) In one of her best-known early works, Rhythm 0 (1974), Abramović surrounded herself with 72 objects, ranging from a rose to a scalpel to a loaded gun, and over the course of six hours allowed her audience to use them to do as they wished to her. Her romantic and creative partnership with the artist Ulay, who died of in 2020 almost 10 years after being diagnosed with cancer, produced Rest Energy (1980), in which Abramović held the curved end of a loaded bow, Ulay held the arrow aimed at her chest, and the pair leaned back, counterweighting each other as their heartbeats broadcast through microphones; as a final breakup work, they walked the Great Wall of China from opposite ends. In 1995, Abramović performed Cleaning the Mirror; as she scrubbed down a dirty human skeleton, she became covered in the grime. After advising the Sex and the City episode in which Carrie meets Aleksandr Petrovsky at a Chelsea art show, based on Abramovic’s 2002 piece The House With the Ocean View, the artist befriended actor Kim Cattrall.

More recently, between March and May 2010, visitors to MoMA (including Lou Reed, Jemima Kirke, and Björk) queued for hours to have a turn sitting across from Abramović as she performed The Artist Is Present. In 2016, early uncorrected galleys of her memoir, Walk Through Walls, attracted unfavorable attention for her depiction of Indigenous Australians, prompting the hashtag #TheRacistIsPresent. (The passage in question was changed prior to publication and she released a statement that stated, in part, that the page came from diary entries that reflected her “initial reaction to these people,” which had since changed.) In 2017, Ladurée captured her in macaron form. (Notes of coffee, cardamom, the feeling of seeing the line where the sea meets the sky.) In 2020, Abramović debuted her first opera, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, and last year she partnered with WeTransfer as a “guest curator” for the company’s creative arm, WePresent. “During the pandemic, I think I’m the person who traveled more than anybody else,” she tells me. “I just came back from Sri Lanka. I work constantly. So I don’t have, really, the syndrome of being locked down, and I ignore this whole thing. I get tested, I’m vaccinated, and I go and work.” Soon she’ll be heading to Rome, Amsterdam, and Madrid.

Throughout her long and varied career, Abramović has been honing, practicing, and finally proselytizing—in workshops conducted through the Marina Abramović Institute, and now in the deck of cards—her method, born from a process that she calls “cleaning the house.”

Each of the cards features a photo from one of Abramović’s performances on one side and a directive—many of which include long periods of observation or repetitive movement, such as staring into a partner’s eyes for an hour, gazing at your own reflection, opening and closing a door for three hours, drinking a glass of water as slowly as you can—on the other. Working through them, “You’re actually changing your mindset,” Abramović says. “You enter into another, different state of consciousness. The door is not the door anymore. It’s transforming in front of your eyes into space, into void, into cosmos.” To make the most of the deck, she advises, “Blindfold yourself, pick up any card, and do the exercise, so you’re not making a rational choice. You’re making a chance operation, like John Cage.”

Vanity Fair: What prompted the cards?

Marina Abramović: The cards are such a playful thing. The exercises are difficult, but they have to be playful, and you have to have the attitude of joy doing it. Cards have always been playful. Historically, for centuries. I always remember His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he said to me, Every time you want to tell really deep truths, you always have to start with a joke. You have to start with something that opens people, the soul. They have to laugh. First they laugh, and then you tell them the terrible truth.

Some of the exercises, like going out in the middle of a snowstorm to be in my pajamas and stand with my feet on the ground, or walking backwards with a mirror, I felt so nervous to do because of how other people might perceive me.

If you are the only one walking on the street backwards, looking in the mirror and seeing reality as a reflection, this is really strange. People think you’re totally out of your mind. If you invite your friends for the weekend and say, “Let’s walk backwards with a mirror all together,” that’s kind of fun. I totally understand that being a black sheep, it’s strange and uncomfortable. We have to always figure out the best circumstances, and how we can adapt each exercise.

But to me, my entire work—now 50 years into my career—I dedicate to doing the things I don’t like, the things I am afraid of, the things that I don’t know anything about. The function of all this is to get to the other side of your own fear, and to liberate yourself from the fear. This is an incredible experience to share with all the people. I am kind of a mirror to you. If I can do this in my life, you can too.

I always like to mention this wonderful commitment that Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, when they met, made to each other. The first thing they said was, We have to have a very good detector of bullshit. To see when you’re doing bullshit in your life, and you see when people are bullshitting you. Number two, you have to be not afraid of yourself or anybody else or anything. And the third thing, which is the most wonderful, don’t forget to be tender. That’s it. Three things. No bullshit, not to be afraid, and be tender. If you never dare to do things, you never actually grow. You never experience something else. You never get out of your own little box that you create. So fear...it’s something to confront.

Many of your performances have confronted, very viscerally, a fear of death, from your recent opera, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, to having a stranger pick up a loaded gun and hold it against your head. After, as you say, 50 years of work, is death still a fear for you?

I would be lying to say, “No, I’m not afraid of death.” Right now, I don’t think I’m afraid and I really think I can confront it because so much of my work is based on this. Every day I think about dying and I always live like it’s the last day of my life. But at the same time, if I’m in a plane and there’s turbulence, I’m afraid. I’m so afraid. I’d like to die without anger, without fear, and consciously, and not in a car accident, a plane accident—in some stupid shit—or being sick. I’d like to experience the passage from life to death in a waking way.

If somebody tells me I can go backwards and be young again, or be in my 20s or 30s—hell, no. Absolutely, no. This was such a confusing time. So many problems. So much emotional drama. One thing with getting old, if you are healthy—because getting old and being sick, it sucks—but being healthy and getting old, you have this wisdom that life gives you. It’s so much more happiness. I’ve never had more fun and had a better time than right now. I’m 75. In five years, I’m 80. This is a serious number, but I don’t see it. I think, Wow, it’s a great time.

One of the cards that I have been trying to work on, but I have not succeeded at yet, is one where you notice your anger, hold your breath, and release both your breath and the anger.

This exercise is fantastic, because when you are angry, if you are suppressed, it’s not good. If you express it, it’s not good. So you have to figure out how to change the pattern of anger. When you’re angry and you stop breathing, you really have to stop breathing. You really have to get blue to the point that you say, “If I don’t breathe this moment, I’m going to die.” When you breathe these full lungs of fresh air, the enjoyment of that air and enjoyment of being alive and being in your body diminishes the anger. But what happens if someone is angry with you? You can't tell him to stop breathing. So here’s what you can do: you just tell him, “Before we start the conversation, please, can you just change places?” That is so unexpected. It’s so confusing. You confuse his anger.

The cards instruct that the exercises shouldn't be done under the influence of alcohol or narcotics or nicotine. I know that you’ve been sober throughout your life. I would love to hear your thoughts on how that plays into the work that you do.

I don’t like to drink. I don't like the taste. But it doesn’t mean that people could not have a glass of wine and enjoy themselves—not to be drunk every night… When I look at my photographs from the ’70s, in every single photo I have a cigarette in my hand. I didn’t inhale them and I didn’t buy them, but it was so cool to have the cigarette. So I always asked my friends, “Will you take a photograph and I will hold the cigarette?” It’s hilarious, but I really look at them and think, God, the kind of posing idea of a cool artist in the ’70s.

When you do these exercises, you have to have clarity of mind, without being influenced by anything. One of the things that I exercise in my life, instead of taking drugs, is not eating. When you don’t eat for a long period of time, you have incredible effects on perception, the almost existential perception, seeing reality as it is, feeling luminosity, feeling all of these things that you can actually feel under drugs: expanding consciousness, whatever we do, ayahuasca or whatever the new things are on the market. But the next day, your mind is polluted by the idea that this was influenced by the mushrooms, or by this or by that. If you don’t eat, the next day your energy is higher and the next day it's higher. It’s my trip, basically.

Of course you should not push it. The longest I didn't eat any kind of food was 16 days. I would not suggest anybody do 16 days. But one week, I suggest to everybody. One week is perfectly fine. How old are you, by the way?

I’m 30.

Oh, my God. That is so complicated. Thirty is not easy because you just finished your 20s and now you’re getting an all new set of problems.

What’s your suggestion to get through my 30s?

My suggestion is don’t control anything. Just take things as they are. Follow your intuition. Listen to your body, because our mind really fucks us up so much, because our mind is manipulative. Our mind is always imagining things that don’t exist.

Have you ever struggled with the criticism you’ve received throughout your life?

Listen, if I read the criticism of the ’70s, when I made my major performances, I would not even leave the house. Everybody was against me. My family was criticized in Communist Party meetings because they thought I was ready for the mental hospital. My professors at the art academy thought it was absolutely disgusting, what I was doing. Everybody was against it. Those pieces are now in every book of the performance art as very important pieces. For me, the only thing that matters is that when I do something, that I do not 100, but 150 percent. That 50 percent extra is everything. If I give my 150 percent, any critic in the world can do whatever they want, I don’t care. Because I’ve done my best. And the more revolutionary, the more different you are, the more criticism you have. Now, I’m criticized that I am a trendsetter, that I sold myself to fashion, that I’m involved in conspiracy theories. I mean, you name it. Who cares?

My own country, which is now Serbia, they say, “How can she sit on the chair, do nothing and have all this attention? This is not art. This is ridiculous. This is bullshit.” But you can't rule your life by what other people are thinking, ever. I don’t care. I really don’t. Otherwise I would be nowhere. You have to do things that change you. And to change, you have to go to the territories that you don't know. You have to take risks. You have to not be afraid—and also to not to be afraid of failure, because if you go to places you’ve never been, you can fail. But failure is a part of it. You fail and you stand up and you go home and then you fail again.

If you don’t fail, that means you are repeating yourself, and repeating yourself, it’s terrible. You have to always surprise yourself. This is a lesson. A lesson of Dr. Abramović.

What are you excited for next?

I’m touring my opera, the 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, in different countries in Europe, and hoping to come to the Armory here in New York around 2024. I am having the biggest show of my life at the Royal Academy in London in 2023. It has been postponed for three years because of COVID. It’s called Afterlife. What is interesting about that show is that I am the first woman in 250 years to show in that space. It’s only been the big muscle guys. We are talking Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley. It's a huge responsibility. Huge. And I wanted to make an impact. I have projects right now to 2027, and I’m thinking, “Okay, when do artists go to pension?” Never. I work till I die, I’m sure.

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