Marina Abramovic Institute: ‘A kind of spa for what used to be called your soul’

Marina Abramovic at breakfast in Miami on Wednesday, December 3. Courtesy of Klaus Biesenbach's Instagram feed.

Marina Abramovic at breakfast in Miami on Wednesday, December 3. Courtesy of Klaus Biesenbach’s Instagram feed.

by Seth Rogovoy

(HUDSON, N.Y.) – It’s always interesting to see how performance artist and impresario Marina Abramovic talks about her proposed Marina Abramovic Institute in Hudson, and how it is presented by writers who presumably are paraphrasing, to some extent, what Abramovic says about it.

In its December 15-28, 2014, issue, in “Marina Abramovic Wants to Slow Down the Mad Art World,” New York magazine catches up with Abramovic at Art Basel Miami. While as you might expect, much of the article is taken up with that annual celebrity art-world extravaganza –which seems to cause Abramovic great distress, down to posing for a photo as if she’s suffering from an onslaught of too much art world commerce – there is some significant discussion in the article about Abramovic’s thoughts and plans for Hudson.

In fact, Abramovic was in Miami with Serge LeBorgne — described as “the amused director of her Marina Abramovic Institute, a ‘performance and education center’ planned for an old theater in Hudson” – ostensibly on behalf of the institute, “fund-raising and awareness-lifting.”

The author writes that the “institute in Hudson will be not just a performance space for her ‘long durational’ works of art but a retreat from this busy-bee art world, a kind of spa for what used to be called your soul, in a world gone mad with technology.”
You can read the entire article online here.

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