Marina Abramović (born November 30th, 1946 in Belgrade, Serbia) is a New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the "grandmother of performance art". Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body and the possibilities of the mind.
Background
The first, so to speak, meeting of Lady Gaga with Marina Abramović, which became the starting point of their further warm friendship, occurred when the singer attended on May 6th, 2010 to Marina's exhibition "The Artist Is Present," which was held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York from March 14th to May 31st of 2010. According to sources inside of the MoMA, the singer did not sit down with the performance artist for an emotional stare down. Lady Gaga reportedly arrived around noon and leave the museum within the hour. She was escorted by MoMA director Klaus Biesenbach and plastic artist Terence Koh. Two years later, in 2012, Abramović recalled Lady Gaga's visit to her performance in MoMA in several interviews, even in her autobiography Walk Through Walls: A Memoir, published on October 25th, 2016.
In an interview with IndieWire (published on January 23rd, 2012) Marina Abramović talked about how HBO and Lady Gaga bring performance art to a new audience and also told about how Gaga attended her exhibition "The Artist Is Present":
| “ | Television is completely another medium. For me, Lady Gaga and HBO are bringing us to mass culture. It was incredible, Lady Gaga came to see the piece. She didn’t sit with me, but it was all atwitter. Every single kid from 12 to 18 ran to see Lady Gaga and then Lady Gaga left and they stayed. And they stayed another day another day and it created a completely different culture, a different audience that I never had before. | ” |
—Marina Abramović on IndieWire | ||
In an interview with Celebs.com at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival (published on January 31st, 2012) Marina said that Lady Gaga helped make her exhibition "The Artist Is Present" recognixable though not intentionally:
| “ | The main thing was Lady Gaga. She really helped all thing. I could not believe. I'd never met her yet but she came for the show and then every single kid from the age 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 run to the museum [MoMA], and they never saw the performance, they never even went to a museum contemporary art. But because of Lady Gaga they went there and they look this thing and they stay[ed]. And they come again and again and become a new public. | ” |
—Marina Abramović on Celebs.com | ||
After attending the exhibition "The Artist Is Present" Lady Gaga described in great detail her admiration for Marina Abramović in an interview with Alexander Fury for In Camera interviews series by SHOWstudio recordered on May 30th, 2010 where the singer answered Marina's question "Who creates limits?" by saying:
| “ | We do. We create our own limits. I am a huge fan of Marina Abramovic. She is a limitless human being! She is so incredible! I went to see her exhibit at MOMA and she is limitless. I look at her, and she is so free. It's when you are around someone like Marina when you realise she is so boundless. I think we are the ones who create our limits. | ” |
—Lady Gaga on SHOWstudio | ||
Lady Gaga and Abramović made their first public appearance on July 27th, 2013 attending 20th Annual Watermill Center Summer Benefit in Water Mill, New York.
Lady Gaga expressed her admiration for Marina Abramović on Twitter on August 16th, 2013 writing:
Marina Abramović talked about Lady Gaga's impact at "artRave," a Brooklyn event celebrating the release of the album, "ARTPOP" on November 10th, 2013:
| “ | I'm very impressed by her because she's very determinated, and she have a talent, and she go for it, and she doesn't really have the limits. She's fearless and she's free, what is very important and inspiring. I really think she was my best student because she never cheats and she [does] whatever I told her to do. She made exercises as it supposed to be. | ” |
—Marina Abramović at artRave | ||
According to MTV, a lot the performance in the ARTPOP short film directed by Inez and Vinoodh seems to be inspired by Lady Gaga's friendship with Marina Abramović.[1] About teaching Lady Gaga her philosophies on performance art Abramović told MTV News the following:
| “ | You know it was wonderful because she's a good student and she really like to learn and she's very open to art and she also gives credits to artists, which is very generous. And I think it's a completely new collaboration of artist and pop musicians. Before everyone would stay in his own category, but we're in the 21st century, we have to blur the borders. And I think it's so important to go into each other's area and learn from each other and that is what's happening. | ” |
—Marina Abramović on MTV News | ||
When asked what does 'ARTPOP' really mean, Abramović revealed MTV News the meaning of this word from her artistic point-of-view.
| “ | You know [Lady Gaga] turned 'ARTPOP,' 'pop art' [around] and I think it's very amusing how she sees it. And I really think the idea of collaborating with someone so extreme like Jeff Koons or me as a performance artist or [director] Bob Wilson [does] actually explain 'ARTPOP,' 'pop art' [to people]. | ” |
—Marina Abramović on MTV News | ||
In her book Walk Through Walls: A Memoir, released in 2016, Marina Abramović told about her very first meeting with Lady Gaga:
| “ | One day in the early spring of 2013, the phone rang in my office and Giuliano [Giuliano Argenziano, director of Marina Abramović LLC] picked it up. I saw a look of amazement pass over his face. “It’s Lady Gaga,” he mouthed to me.
They’d never met, but since they’re both Italian, the conversation seemed to go on for half an hour, with lots of screaming and laughter. After Giuliano hung up, he reported to me that she loved my work and wanted to do a workshop with me as soon as possible. She wanted me to be her teacher. I’d known ever since she visited the MoMA show that she was a fan. We decided first to have lunch at my apartment, just the two of us, with Giuliano doing the cooking. Gaga arrived at my door alone and very humble. There were tears in her eyes as she embraced me. Giuliano made a beautiful meal, which she hardly touched. Instead we talked and talked about her life, and why she felt she needed this workshop. “I’m young, and there are three teachers I want to learn from,” she told me. “Bob Wilson, Jeff Koons, and you.” |
” |
—Marina Abramović in Walk Through Walls: A Memoir | ||
Work with Lady Gaga
TechHaus
On July 11th, 2013, after Inez and Vinoodh Gagosian Gallery, Gaga announced "ARTPOP" dates (single, pre-order album/app and album/app released). On her LittleMonsters post, Gaga named to Marina; who will work with her in TechHaus.
Reading marathon
On August 6th, 2013, Lady Gaga attended a reading marathon in New York, on a science fiction novel published in 1961, entitled "Solaris" by Stanisław Lem. She also recorded a video, 15 minutes before starting the marathon, where read the first chapter. The purpose of this event was to sensitize participants and get a donation for the Marina Abramović Institute, which lasted 8 hours.
- Transcription
At nineteen hundred hours ship’s time I climbed down the metal ladder past the bays on either side into the capsule. Inside [Lady Gaga read this word as "Indeed"], there was just enough room to raise my elbows. After I attached the end of the cables into the port jutting from the side of the capsule, my space suit filled with air and from that point on I couldn’t make the slightest movement. I stood, or rather hung suspended, in a bed of air, all of one piece with my metal shell.
Raising my eyes through the convex porthole I could see the walls of the bay and higher up, leaning in, Moddard’s face. It quickly disappeared and everything went dark as the heavy protective cone was put in place from above. I heard the eight-times-repeated whirr of the electric motors tightening the screws. Then the hiss of air entering the shock absorbers. My eyes were getting using to the dark. I could already make out the pale green shape of the only gauge.
“Ready, Kelvin?” I heard in my headset.
“Ready, Moddard,” I replied.
“Don’t worry about a thing. The Station’ll bring you in,” he said. “Bon voyage!”
Before I could answer, there was a rasping sound overhead and the capsule shook. I tensed my muscles instinctively, but nothing else happened.
“When do I take off?” I asked, hearing a rustling noise like fine grains of sand falling on a diaphragm.
“You’re already in flight, Kelvin. Be well!” came Moddard’s voice in my ear. Before I believed it, a broad gap opened up in front of my face, through which I could see stars. I tried in vain to spot Alpha Aquarii, towards which the Prometheus was now headed.
August 1-3, 2013: The Abramović Method
WARNING: The video may be inappropriate for some users. Viewer discretion is advised.
The video was uploaded on the Marina Abramovic Institute channel on Vimeo on Wednesday, August 7th, 2013 at 4:22 PM EST titled The Abramovic Method Practiced by Lady Gaga.
Background
This video was announced via Lady Gaga's Twitter at same day of uploading of it (August 7th, 2013):
Marina Abramović instructed Lady Gaga in The Abramović Method – a series of exercises designed to heighten participants’ awareness of their physical and mental experience in the present moment. The Abramovic Method is Abramovic’s adaptation of her Cleaning the House workshops for the general public. The method helps participants to develop skills for observing long durational performances through a series of exercises and environments designed to increase awareness of their physical and mental experience in the moment. Abramovic will install this method at MAI (Marina Abramović Institute) via a series of chambers, each dedicated to one of these exercises.
Performance artist Marina Abramović told MTV News about what it was like teaching Lady Gaga her method, and why the singer wanted to film a short video showing her practicing the techniques. When Marina Abramović launched a Kickstarter campaign for an institute (MAI) she was building in upstate New York, she called Lady Gaga, and got a buzz back from the her a few minutes later. "Three minutes later she sent us an amazing cake," Abramović said. "I was very impressed with how humble and how incredibly determined and hardcore this kid is. She said, 'I want you to teach me. I want to be your student.'"
Lady Gaga spent three days at Abramović's studio in Hudson, New York, completely immersing herself in the artist's rigorous, challenging method in a way Abramović said she's rarely seen in any of her students. The performance artist said Lady Gaga went even further than anyone expected.
| “ | She is a hardcore student. I had to blindfold her and she was in the forest for three hours, eaten by mosquitos and spiders, scratched by the bushes. It was quite incredible. Whatever I told her she met the exercise absolutely to the end, never complaining. And my exercises are pretty tough. [...] She never said it was too much, she said, 'I want more,' every time." Lady Gaga was totally committed, giving up her cellphone and all outside communication to focus on the training. [...] The idea was that artists, even blindfolded, have to have vision like a blind man. To feel with their entire body ... She was in the fields and then the forest and by her pure intuition she had to find her way back home ... During this exercise, completely of her own initiative, she took off her clothes. She just wanted to be in nature and to feel the elements. | ” |
—Marina Abramović on MTV News | ||
To be honest, Abramović said, she was worried about Gaga getting Lyme disease from the ticks in the area. At the same time, though, she was also blown away by how "fearless" and dedicated the singer was.
"I felt like she was my daughter," Abramović said of the scene in which she and Gaga are seated, facing away from each other, in a river and taking in the natural beauty around them. "It was not about looking at each other, it was not about the forest. It was about being in the present. Two human beings."
"I respect no compromise ... [she has] everything it takes to make it," Abramović said of Gaga's tenacity. "I found somebody who can really be a spokesman for something that means so much to me."
Lady Gaga told in an interview for the British gay magazine Attitude (published on November 8th, 2013) how much she adores Marina Abramović and how The Abramović Method had effectively forced her to stop smoking marijuana. The singer also told how everything happened during the exercises and making of the video for MAI.
| “ | She [Marina] is a lifesaver. I don't know if you're a big fan of hers but I adore her. Her whole performance art mantra is to create this interactive relationship between the art and the audience, that the art in front of you is actually having a reaction to what's around it as opposed to a Matisse that's not reacting to you. I'm the soberest I've ever been in the past five years right now and it's all down to her. [...] I was smoking 15 joints a day. No tobacco. A day. [...] I would break the habit and it would sneak back in and I would break it and sneak back in. It wasn't until I was with Marina and she said "Ok you're coming to my house. No television, no computer, no marijuana, no nothing, no food. For three days, art only. You eat only art." I'm a hardcore bitch and I will do anything she tells me. She put me in the woods for three hours blindfolded and said "I need you to find your way home. We will be here silent to make sure you don't fall off any cliffs," because there were cliffs, all around. Blindfolded. So I was walking and I started to cry under the blindfold and it was because I hadn't felt so connected to the Earth for so long. I know that might sound like some hippie granola stuff but you know, I'm indoors and on stage a lot. Just being me, with the forest and the sound of the trees and the birds and the running water, but there was nothing but me and my pure talent to save me. I didn't fall once. I stumbled but I didn't fall. Climbing over rocks, climbing over trees, ripping up my flesh, mosquito bites everywhere but I couldn't feel a thing because it was for the art and it was for Marina and it was for me. When someone tells you you have to give up your addictions for you, or you have to give up your addictions for your family - even though I love my family more than anything, they wouldn't even ask me that because they understand how I feel, being isolated a lot. They understand that it's stressful, and that the pot sometimes calms me down and makes it more fun for me, to be fair; not so stressful not so constantly paranoid. But when I was in the woods, and it was “do it for your art”, I cold-turkeyed. For weeks and weeks I didn't smoke at all. And now I smoke a little bit at night, just you know, for fun - but not to cope. That's the difference. Marina was the only person who could get me to do that and it was not intended to be rehab. Meanwhile I'm having withdrawals standing in a freezing cold river for an hour. [Laughs, does camp Serbian accent] “Don't move a muscle. Gaga, don't move nothing. You stay. Amazing shot, we film". I'm sweating, I can feel the shaking, the muscle spasming, the nausea from not smoking, the sweat dripping down my face. My determination as an artist is so much stronger than any withdrawal, it's so much stronger than any drug, I can do this and I did it. | ” |
In her autobiography Walk Through Walls: A Memoir, Marina Abramović revealed some details about preparations and the whole process of practicing The Abramović Method by Lady Gaga:
| “ | We decided on a four-day workshop at my upstate house, and we set the date and the time. Gaga volunteered to have the workshop filmed, so the clip could be used for the Kickstarter campaign I was planning for the institute. [...]
I prepared for the workshop by going to Walmart and buying a nurse’s uniform — white pants and white shirt, very good cotton — for $14.99. Then I went to a John Deere tractor store and bought a pair of overalls for $29.99. I also purchased a bottle of organic almond oil, a large bar of scentless soap, and a wooden comb. I laid out all these things in her room at Star House, and, with Paula, awaited Lady Gaga’s arrival. She showed up on the appointed day at precisely six A.M., all business. No makeup, no wig. She went right to her room, put her phone and computer away, put on the overalls, came downstairs, and said, “Let’s start.” As the photographer Terry Richardson’s two-person crew began filming, I told Gaga the ground rules: For the next four days there was to be no food and no talking. She could drink water only. And she would do the exercises I gave her to the best of her ability. Her best was very good. She did every exercise I assigned her, from the first (a three-hour slow-motion walk) to the last (finding her way back to the house from the middle of the woods while wearing a blindfold) with complete precision and seriousness. Not speaking or eating or using a computer for four days was not a problem for her. That last exercise worried me. Not only was she blindfolded, but the forest was full of thorns, poison ivy, and Lyme disease–bearing ticks. And not only did she find her way out, but in the middle of the exercise, in the midst of thick bushes, she took off all her clothes and completed the walk naked. Later on, when Gaga received the Young Artist Award from Americans for the Arts, she said that the workshop with me was the best rehab she’d ever had. [...] [...] We wound up with $620,000 [for Kickstarter campaign] — in large part due to Lady Gaga posting the video of her workshop online. Her forty-five million young followers on social media paid close attention. Of course the immediate focus was on her nudity. But the strange beauty of what she was doing in the exercises was even more interesting to the kids who were watching. "What is performance art?" they wondered. And "What is this institute that this strange woman Abramović is talking about?" The video drew many thousands of young people to our Facebook page, and it soon would attract many of these same young people to my museum events. These were kids who wouldn’t come to a museum for any other reason. I was so grateful to Lady Gaga for bringing them to my work. |
” |
—Marina Abramović in Walk Through Walls: A Memoir | ||
Lady Gaga's video was a part of the Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the Marina Abramović Institute, a $31 million living museum and workspace in Hudson, New York, that the artist planned to build to warehouse her works and foster new generations of artists. Since it kicked off in late July, 2013, the Kickstarter has raised more than $250,000 toward an initial $600,000 goal, with more than $70,000 of that coming in since the Gaga video went live on Wednesday, August 7th, 2013. Among the incentives Abramović was offering is a live hug from the artist at a TBA location for $1 and instructions on one of the methods, via livestream, for $25. However, at the end of 2017, Marina Abramović abandoned the plans to set up a performance art institute and didn't return the funds to those who financially supported the implementation of the project, for example, to the Kickstarter users. She used the money to pay the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas for a preliminary design to convert the former theatre into a 33,000 sq. ft space to serve as a venue for performance art and multidisciplinary collaborations.
Synopsis
The footage contains scene where Lady Gaga is seen laying on a gallery floor in an all-white jumpsuit while singing a single note, focusing on the "A" sound, for nearly 30 seconds (doing a lengthy vocalization meant to help create the right cleansing vibrations in the body by focusing on a certain part of the body), then standing in the rain in the middle of a river with her head up doing the same while wearing a pair of yellow horns over her eyes and grey jumpsuit, sitting on a tall stool in the river with her knees drawn up and her back to Abramović, also seated on a tall stool, with both wearing matching grey jumpsuits. Lady Gaga's one-note vocalization continues in the background the entire time, including a bit in which she walks, horse-like, through the woods completely naked wearing only a black mask, her arms up in the air. In the next scene Lady Gaga is seen still naked standing bent over in a forest holding a stick while wearing only boots and a black wig. The video ends with a shot of her hugging, and then sitting on, a gigantic white crystal and then laying on a white bed with smaller crystals arrayed all round her head and lifting her head up to the camera.
Deleted scene
During the artRave, on November 10th, 2013, on a large display that was attached to the wall, visitors could see a scene that apparently wasn't included in the The Abramovic Method Practiced by Lady Gaga video, where Lady Gaga was walking in the woods in a white jumpsuit. Gaga's hairstyle and clothing in this scene are identical to the first scene of previously mentioned video, where she was laying on a gallery floor in white jumpsuit while singing a single note.
V85: The Icons & Ingenues Issue (Fall 2013, September) Interview
On August 16th, 2013 Lady Gaga shared via her Twitter account the link to the interview with Marina Abramović.
For this edition, V magazine released four different cover and editorial with Lady Gaga. A special box edition was also sold on their official webite and Gaga's official web store.
The special edition box set is a translucent acetate box that can house the 4 magazines. "V85 Special Edition Box Set" is written in caplock in white on one side and " V magazine + Lady Gaga" on the other. The magazine logo is also printed in white on the front.
The New Artist
- Interview by Marina Abramovic, photography by Inez and Vinoodh
Paws up! Mother Monster is back with multiple personalities and a brand-new sound. In an Icon-to-Icon exchange, she sits down with performance art pioneer Marian Abramovic to explain the ethos behind her impending album, her elvolving state of being, and what valuable information she is storing inside her brain purse.
The Art of Pop by Lady Gaga
Interview by Marina Abramovic
Photography by Inez & Vinoodh, fashion Brandon Maxwell
THE NEW ARTIST
This is the me I was most afraid to ever be again. The me I’d left behind. Through the work, each time over and over with Inez and Vinoodh, there is a challenge I am facing with myself. The person they want to see is dead, I think. I have an ability to endure physical and mental pain for long durations, months or years of time. But I’ve learned that eventually the brunt of that anguish finds its point of impact, and although I was able to withstand a challenge for that period of time in my youth, the results were destructive. I was left a shell. Why would I ever want to feel that again? And then a bigger question: Does anyone really know what I went through to get here? Then somehow, with Inez’s seductive artistic way and Vinoodh’s calm sense of confidence, in the process I am inspired to allow the emotions to pass through me as they photograph me. And then I hear “Beautiful, Gaga! Yes! Yes! Look at that girl!” And I’m reminded that my sense of self within the world I create provides an element of honesty and gravity to the work. And it’s okay that I’m broken. I can be broken in the Cubist or Surrealist sense. Like a Picasso nose, or a Dalí clock—ahead of its time, not pathetic or shameful. Plus I’m wearing a custom Saint Laurent sequined jacket from Hedi Slimane. Impossible to be sad! Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga: Ciao, Marina!
Marina Abramovic: Oh, you’re there, baby. That’s nice. I am in the countryside. I’m preparing everything for our workshop, by the way.
Lady Gaga: You are? I can’t wait. Where are you? Are you at the place?
Marina Abramovic: Yeah, I’m in the country, and then I have to go the next week to Aspen, and then I come back and everything’s ready. Honestly, it’s very serious.
Lady Gaga: I’m so excited for the things we’re working on, because I think it’s important to show my fans what it means to be devoted and committed to something. And to show them the process of that. And I feel like you’re the person that will really bring that to life.
Marina Abramovic: This is much more different in many different layers because I want to do something special. And new! Anyway, I have some questions. My Lady Gaga, ARTPOP…How did you think of it and what does it mean? This is the first question. It’s important, because we’re talking about your new album.
Lady Gaga: For ARTPOP, I instantly had an initial cosmetic experience with words, so I spent some time reflecting on exactly what it is that I wanted to say. When I’m thinking about the title for an album, I think about the marketing, I think about the cultural implication of the words, what the words mean. How the words will change the meaning after the music has been put out as well as the visuals. I spent some time and I kept seeing those two words, “art” and “pop,” put together in a reverse way, instead of Pop Art, which is the way I had always seen it. And then quite quickly, the more work that I did, ARTPOP became something that had a nice ring, you know? Like, Marina, when you said to me it has a good ring.
Marina Abramovic: Totally. It just kind of sounds right. Right vibration.
Lady Gaga: Exactly, I had the right vibrational experience with the words and the way they sounded when I said them, with the way the work was coming out. Then I started to repeat them like a mantra, which I find so interesting, because I know that when we do this workshop I’m sure I’m going to be so focused on the things that you are saying, almost like a mantra. It’s the same way I experience my creativity, as a vibration. When I was working I was thinking, What does ARTPOP mean? And then I started with the basic sense of it. Well, it could belong together. I thought about Pop Art and how the dominant subject matter was always the celebrity or the pop-culture icon on the canvas, and then I thought to myself, But what I have tried endlessly to become through my work is a celebration of my differences through art, with myself as the canvas, as opposed to me as the subject matter, being put on the canvas. I don’t want to be an icon in just one form. I want to be an icon in many forms. So that’s where it began.
Marina Abramovic: I’ve been looking at these four covers of V Magazine and I can tell you that they really work. My favorite is the one with the black hair.
Lady Gaga: That’s my favorite too, Marina!
Marina Abramovic: It’s kind of a touch of something from the old days of Patti Smith. There’s some kind of innocence, but then you also go for it, a real warrior.
Lady Gaga: That look was very hard for me because that is how I looked when I was 19 until I was 21 years old…Maybe longer. I got my hair cut like that when I was 18 and all these really painful things happened during that time.
Marina Abramovic: I can read through to this suffering. It’s an interesting mix. It’s a kind of fragility mixed with strength.
Lady Gaga: Yeah, I’ll tell you what that’s from. It’s because it was so hard for me to go back to that place. I was telling you about this when we were talking about everything that we’re going to be working on. I told you how I have an ability to experience pain for long periods of time—to endure it, whether it’s mental pain or physical pain. I think it’s because of my discipline as a child. I studied piano and then theater and then dance, so I have this ability to endure long periods of pain. But as a result, when I became an adult at 18, I allowed myself to stay in bad situations because I was able to take the pain. Does that make sense?
Marina Abramovic: Makes perfect sense to me because that’s exactly why we have lots of things in common. It is so important to find a way to transfer the pain and elevate it into something else.
Lady Gaga: I was so naive, in a good way. The art was—and still is—the thing that drives me, you know? Pop is sort of my medium, the medium that I’m good at. But art was always the thing that drove me forward in these challenging and painful circumstances. I would always have the wings of high art kind of flying high above my back, lifting me up, and I could feel no pain, because I could feel the adrenaline of the future, of my artistic experience, and that was more important. I had some sort of transcendental experience with art. And I was going to do anything for art at a young age.
Marina Abramovic: It is very interesting that you believe you found something that you were good at, pop, and you put art at the front. So now you have ARTPOP—it makes total sense.
Lady Gaga: I wanted to bring it all the way to the front, yes.
Marina Abramovic: And your references to art. For me, what’s always been very interesting is that you make clear references to art. Other musicians, I don’t want to name names, they make garish references to art, but they never really give the ownership to art. But you do.
Lady Gaga: I think that the world has fallen into a very interesting trap, where people look at visuals in such a rudimentary way, they are not approaching them in a complex way. So what happens is that everything becomes nothing. Everything that we review means nothing anymore because nobody is able to look at anything with any sort of artistic eye, to find the complexity behind it. It’s like, They both wear a hat, so it’s the same, They both wear a bra like this, it’s the same, Their hair is both this color, so it’s the same. But if you were to show someone like Matisse a huge board full of colors, he would probably tell you why they’re all different.
Marina Abramovic: What is also interesting is that everybody is looking to the same things. It’s getting the same information. Reading the same books. The television tells you what to do. The fashion tells you how to dress. There is no freedom. What you are doing is claiming your territory, you’re claiming the freedom. And that’s so great, because you have to create space. And to create space you really have to break the rules.
Lady Gaga: And that’s where I feel like you’ve been an inspiration to me for so long. Especially when I was younger, and the more that I got to understand your work. The older that I got, I was able to look back. What you experienced at that time was more painful than maybe you realized, but that’s why you’re capable of these things now. It’s like, maybe instead of doing this, you should channel your pain like this. Put it in here and experience it like this in your work. And when I watch what you make, Marina, there’s no limitation and there’s no boundary to your art, because you are willing to trust it implicitly. That’s what your work means to me. The piece especially, was it in Germany? I think it was in Berlin that you did the piece where you were lying on the table with the knife and the gun and the condoms and the sleeping pills…
Marina Abramovic: [laughs] Let’s get back to these questions, because this is serious. I’m into numerology myself, so why are you releasing your album on 11/11? There could be so many significances with this date.
Lady Gaga: We arrived at that date after speaking a lot about the music and going over the different territories. The most important thing for me is that every fan has the ability to access the work at the same time. If they can’t experience it together, it deflates the meaning of the work, which is that art and pop belong together. So the moment for me is only explosive if art and pop are together in one instant and the fans get to experience it together in one instant for the first time. It’s like an ultimate explosion of experience for them—where they get to touch and feel the music and art—with a philosophy and framework behind it that really allows them to understand the kind of shape-shifter performer that I am. I’m someone that wants them to view me not only as a figure with many wigs, but as a figure with many wigs who has a skin tone of many colors, with nails of many paints, and the shoes of many people, with the heart of many thieves and many wise men, and an ability to transform emotionally as well as intellectually as well as humanly. I create the work so that they can have a physical and virtual representation at once. That is what ARTPOP is all about, to bring the technical aspects of being a performer together with the metaphysical, and to ask the fans to look and experience both of them at the same time. I don’t know about the date.
Marina Abramovic: It doesn’t need an answer, it can just be intuitive that you want this date and that’s it.
Lady Gaga: The date was the day that all of the fans in all countries around the world would be able to get access to the music at the same time. It had a lot to do with delivering copies and making sure we had enough time to upload the music to all the servers worldwide. I was trying to think of everything. When would be the best time in my fans’ lives? And if I tell them two to three months before the album comes out, it gives them a few months to save their money as well. You know, I care about that too. I want them to have time to save their money so that they can buy it. I don’t expect them to be rich. I don’t expect them to just have the money to buy the music. In this age, buying music is sort of an old thing, and the app is the new generation of a physical experience with music through digital interaction.
Phase One
- Interview by Marina Abramovic, Photography by Inez and Vinoodh
Paws up! Mother Monster is back with multiple personalities and a brand-new sound. In an Icon-to-Icon exchange, she sits down with performance art pioneer Marian Abramovic to explain the ethos behind her impending album, her elvolving state of being, and what valuable information she is storing inside her brain purse.
The Art of Pop by Lady Gaga
Interview by Marina Abramovic
Photography by Inez & Vinoodh, fashion Brandon Maxwell
PHASE ONE
I see this girl as the first incarnation of me. Of Gaga. The Bowie superfan, playing with glitter and reflective materials, like doing a jigsaw puzzle. How can I paint with this palette in a way they’ve never seen? How can I remain loyal to my glam roots and soar with an artistry that is still forming? I have always felt comforted in my ability to learn as a performer. When I care to no longer learn or research, I am then an occupant of my own ego. Bowie is a scholar, and it is this part of him that I’ve kept with me. If I allow myself to really delve into and analyze the thing I’m making, I feel a sense of control. A sense of belonging. I belong because I must create. I must transform. And I must believe that my ability to evolve is infinite. Lady Gaga
Marina Abramovic: I was just looking at the photographs for V Magazine. I know what it takes to create these kinds of shots. You work day and night, it’s crazy. People say, “Oh, how easy it must be to become what you’ve become.” But it’s enormous discipline and sacrifice. Can you describe your normal day?
Lady Gaga: Normal working day…they’re always different. I wake up—recently, a bit earlier—and I usually smoke and sit in bed and read. I put out all of my notebooks, computers, the music, pictures, art books, and I just sort of lie there and I smoke a bit. I look at everything and I really just look at it, Marina. I always think about the work a lot, but on this album I really spent a lot of time gazing, you know? Really gazing into the work and really thinking about what it means. How can I make it better? How can it become more original? How can I inspire them to see something that I don’t even want them to see? And so I wake up, I do that, and then I start to make my calls—kind of like a serial killer—to everyone in the HAUS. Each one has a different thing that they’re good at. And while I’m sitting there and gazing at the work, I just start to call them and say, “Okay, I need you to do this,” and then “Okay bye.” And then I call the next line and say, “Can you do this? Okay bye.” It’s sort of an editing process, but instead of it being a painting or just music, it’s everything. My team calls me the atelier, the couturier at the end, when they put the dress together and the couturier comes in and sews the dress at the last minute and makes it all come together perfectly. That’s what I do. I put it all together and I’m there at the inception of it. So I’m really the one that understands every single piece. In a typical day, I would do that for three to four hours in the morning. Then I will run or figure out a way to sweat, and then I’m usually at the studio…
Marina Abramovic: You forgot the breakfast. When do you have the breakfast?
Lady Gaga: [laughs] I don’t eat breakfast.
Marina Abramovic: I knew it. No breakfast. You have coffee, tea? What do you do?
Lady Gaga: I drink Pellegrino, I’m a good Italian girl. I have Pellegrino with lime and a smoke. And I just lie there. Sometimes maybe green tea. I just sit there and look at everything. I get mad at the work, I get frustrated, I start getting really sweaty. I have a very emotional experience when I’m creating.
Marina Abramovic: What time do you go to sleep in the evening? Late or it depends?
Lady Gaga: It really depends. I can fall asleep at any time, at any place. In a strange way it’s because my mind is always so exhausted.
Marina Abramovic: That’s how you know when you’re really an artist. When you’re an artist, it’s a thing like breathing, you don’t question breathing. If you don’t breathe, you just die. So if you have this urge, it’s almost like you’re diseased, you have a fever, you can’t do anything else that way, your mind is occupied, you’re pretty much an artist. But then the question is what makes you a great artist? Because you could just be an artist, but you can be mediocre too. What makes you a great artist is the few steps more. It’s really sacrificing almost everything around that actually can fit into this image that you have to construct, and that’s a real thing.
Lady Gaga: When I shot with Inez and Vinoodh, it was the same thing. You have to stare at the image, you have to stare at the work. You have to have an intense connection with it all the way to its core, and then push, push, push yourself and then say Okay, and you have that instant adrenaline feeling of Let’s go.
Marina Abramovic: That is what is making this thing pop. I want to know a little about this piece for the new album that you played…“Pig”? I love this work. Do you have a favorite song? Also tell me a little bit about the pig one.
Lady Gaga: Actually it’s interesting that you said that you love “Swine.”
Marina Abramovic: “Swine” sounds so much worse in English. Pig is almost sweet, but swine is really dirty.
Lady Gaga: Yes, swine is dirty. And in European culture, it’s not very nice to call somebody swine. It’s like the worst thing you can say. So when we were making the cover that you mention, with the dark hair…Each cover was designed with a custom outfit by one designer. That’s the one that Hedi [Slimane] did—the one in the sequined jacket with the high-waisted jeans and the hair. That was the time in my life when I was the new artist. I wasn’t a fully formed artist, I was 19, I was young. I was on my way. I was willing to do anything for art. It got me into so much trouble because when you’re willing to do anything for art but you don’t even know what your art is yet or what your music is or what you’re making, you’re willing to do anything to understand it or to experience something that will charge it or inspire it. And because of that I was really troubled. I was really sick all the time in my head, in my heart. I felt trapped, but I was free. And then it was like a slow death. A slow death of my innocence and my youth. And I had to climb through a lot of swine, and that’s where that song came from. This idea of something so dark and something so awful and perverted that at a young age you don’t really understand. And you don’t want to know and understand it. And then, as I’m older, I understand the intenseness of the experiences that I went through. They have affected and changed who I am now. So this song became a liberation, because I’m now saying that if I am to be truly great at this transformation, I have to understand. It shows on stage before people’s eyes. And that’s really what these covers are about. It’s not just the hair, it’s the whole life.
Marina Abramovic: Each one is different.
Lady Gaga: It’s a whole life-form.
Marina Abramovic: How you would describe these characters?
Lady Gaga: The dark-haired one I wrote as the New Artist. It reads like this: “This is me, the me I was the most afraid to be again. The me I had left behind. Through the work each time over and over with Inez and Vinoodh, there is a challenge that I was facing with myself. The person they want to see is dead, I think. I have an ability to endure physical and mental pain for long durations, months or years at a time, but I’ve learned eventually that the brunt of that anguish finds its point and impact, and although I was able to withstand the challenge for that period of time, the results are destructive and I’m left a shell. Why would I ever want to feel that again? And then a bigger question, Does anyone really know what I went through to get here? And somehow with Inez and Vinoodh’s calm sense of confidence, their seductive artistic way, in the process I am inspired to allow the emotions to pass through me as they photograph me and I hear, ‘Beautiful, Gaga! Yes! Yes! Look at that girl!’ I’m reminded that my sense of self within the world I create provides an element of honesty and gravity to the work and it’s okay that I’m broken. I can be broken in the Cubist or Surrealist sense, like a Picasso nose, or Dalí clock—ahead of its time, not pathetic or shameful. And then I am transported back to a time I wanted to forget, I somehow still arrived at what I have become, an artist that celebrates our differences.” So what I’m saying is I realized that if I wasn’t able to become her again, then I was in essence afraid of something, which felt like a big, padlocked chain.
Marina Abramovic: That means that you’re freeing yourself from that.
Lady Gaga: Exactly. I felt it at the shoot, then we shot for the video, and I became the same girl again in the film. Then there was another level that came out and it was the joy of me as a young Italian-American girl from an immigrant, blue-collar family that just wanted to be a performer with that drive and love of music. It became this really beautiful film of me lying on a mattress and singing this song as if I was writing it in my bed for the first time. The hour that we shot was like ten years of a good sneeze or something. A really good sneeze.
Donatella
- Photography by Inez and Vinoodh
Paws up! Mother Monster is back with multiple personalities and a brand-new sound. In an Icon-to-Icon exchange, she sits down with performance art pioneer Marian Abramovic to explain the ethos behind her impending album, her elvolving state of being, and what valuable information she is storing inside her brain purse.
The Art of Pop by Lady Gaga
Interview by Marina Abramovic
Photography by Inez & Vinoodh, fashion Brandon Maxwell
DONATELLA
There are very few people I’ve met since my debut that have truly become friends. Donatella Versace and her daughter, Allegra, occupy a space in my heart so wide, with their ability to love and give. Donatella was there for me in difficult times, and for that I will never forget her. She took the girl sobbing with tissues into Gianni’s apartment. Tears falling on the floor, champagne pouring, she escorted me to his room, where she left me to play with his books and sketches. I studied the notes and drank and smoked until I could barely see. Running around the house with her and Allegra as she said, “Never cry, Gaga! You are a star, a REAL star!” And this cover commences the newest transformation in my long love affair with Versace. Donatella opening the Gianni archives for me during the campaign for my album Born This Way was just the beginning of a dream that seems to never end. And today it’s c-thru plastic, with my custom shoulder, Medusa pins, and a wrong blonde. Donatella approved. Lady Gaga
Marina Abramovic: You have said, “Nobody knows how much it takes to get there, nobody can even imagine.” People think that things are easy. But the amount of work and sacrifice and pain…
Lady Gaga: That is essentially the switch, Marina. The difference between what people were feeling about Pop Art and where I want to take ARTPOP. To say something is Pop Art for some artists was as simple as putting something in a museum or a gallery—it became art if it’s there. But that’s not what my feeling is about art. I don’t believe that trick works anymore. I think the real challenge is, How do I take a place that is not an artistic space and transform that space and make it into an artistic space?
Marina Abramovic: This is totally interesting. This is why I’m interested in bringing some complete new structure, like this institute I want to make, for the long duration of performing arts, which is for everybody. The point is that if you make art elite, then you kill it. You kill it immediately. You have to live really through everybody, through the normal people, through the farmer that is listening to your music, or the student…
Lady Gaga: It’s unfortunate, Marina, that people don’t see the difference between the words elite and disciplined.
Marina Abramovic: Wait, this is very interesting. Elite and disciplined, explain to me.
Lady Gaga: Elite and disciplined are so different, right? But in society, with the young generation, they associate them with the same thing. If you are viewing young people the way they are right now, I feel like there’s a tremendous sense of lack of responsibility, as well as a lack of interest in working hard for a common goal. And working hard in the space of art seems almost futile, like how would that be lucrative for a young person, to focus on their art? Where’s the page in the book that’s telling them that focusing on their work will be lucrative? For example, if someone were to come to your school, you don’t have to give the impression that the art is elite, but you do have to give the impression that it requires discipline. How do you then challenge a young person to see your art in a way that has discipline but not a tone of elitist knowledge? Does that make sense? It’s such a beautiful experience to go into the space of performance art, the long duration of work from it being a conceptual idea and then actually doing it and it becoming a reality. That’s a transition. What you’re saying is that it belongs to everyone, but what I’m saying is everyone shouldn’t feel that it’s easy to acquire.
Marina Abramovic: It’s the time now to really break the difference between the different media. There were all these strict borders on how it was done in the ’70s and ’80s. Before, if you were an artist you were not supposed to love fashion or go into pop culture. If you were a performance artist, you were supposed to hate theater. It is important now to go from one medium to another and look for the essence—the really good material that can actually create awareness for the audience and change their mind to see the world in different ways.
Lady Gaga: Yes, exactly. I see my fans and how they become so excited by music. They are obsessed with what I’m creating and then in some way they find an inspiration in their own life, where they’re creating something that they become obsessed with. And they’re no longer obsessed with the icon, they’re obsessed with themselves.
Marina Abramovic: You’re showing them the way to themselves, you know.
Lady Gaga: I want them to experience that self-love through creation and in the way that your art can give back to you. That’s ultimately what I care mostly about, our collaborations, and establishing a line…Intellectualism doesn’t also have to be elitist. You don’t have to have money or know people to be smart. I feel that in my heart. If anyone were to become obsessed with you, for example, and what you create, in the way that I was, and if they were to find your school and find your program and find that discipline…I’m sort of like an addict or junkie that will never go to rehab, you know?
Marina Abramovic: But you always do your research.
Lady Gaga: Yes, I do the research, exactly. You’re my rehab, and the research is my rehab. And me coming out to the country with you and starving and waking up at times that you choose and walking long distances with no sense of direction or purpose, these are the things that challenge me. That is the rehab. That is the research, that’s the work. And what I was trying to get at is this idea that you can have money, or that you can pay your way into the art world, but it will ultimately destroy the art world. It will be run only by money and commercialism and a sense of artifice. Money is a fake representation of value. I want my fans to know the importance of putting in the work and the discipline. To me, you’re the most hard-core of them all; I always call you the don of the art mafia. That’s what we call you when you’re not around.
Marina Abramovic: When the students come to me and they say “I want to be rich and famous,” I tell them to go to hell, because being rich and famous is a side effect of lots of good work. That’s not the aim.
Lady Gaga: The money is just there to make more things, and to make the work bigger. I don’t spend it on myself. I’m like sitting here on the couch with my wig on my lap, I have bruises all over my legs. I’ll take a picture for you. I must have at least 50 bruises on both legs.
Marina Abramovic: [laughs] I have a spider bite on my stomach and I’m sitting on my bed too.
Lady Gaga: It’s like nothing changes except that I just become more excited and more hungry to make more and to challenge my mind. When I see my friends all together, we’re all making our work together; I really believe that it’s something. Like you said, Marina, you have to trust your ability to know at some point, that’s what makes you good. If you’ve done the research. We’re not in the age anymore where you can put the shovel in the wall and call it art. It’s over.
This is ARTPOP
- Interview by Marina Abramovic, photography by Inez and Vinoodh
Paws up! Mother Monster is back with multiple personalities and a brand-new sound. In an Icon-to-Icon exchange, she sits down with performance art pioneer Marian Abramovic to explain the ethos behind her impending album, her elvolving state of being, and what valuable information she is storing inside her brain purse.
The Art of Pop by Lady Gaga
Interview by Marina Abramovic
Photography by Inez & Vinoodh, fashion Brandon Maxwell
THIS IS ARTPOP
In this custom Balenciaga, I felt full passion, and fearless, like my hair and body were on fire. I am preparing for my workshop with Marina. I am so excited. She will starve me in the woods for days, with no clocks, no speaking. Cleansing me before my first performance on stage and beginning my training for a performance piece in Paris we are doing with Robert Wilson. I told her I wanted to reveal my total creative self to her. With complete trust, openness, and freedom to be an artist, instead of “making” or “designing” for the public to love. What I am is enough. My talent is enough. But the wigs and the makeup, I need them, I tell her—and she understands that. Marina understands my art, and in my understanding of her art we have made an exchange. When an exchange occurs between two auras, there is a formation of trust and an impulse of love—perhaps...we could belong together. ARTPOP! But this is not my “look” or “reinvention” for this album. I will be all of these women forever. I am a shape-shifter, a pop-cultural magician. I am not just one ICON. I am every icon. Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga: In this custom Balenciaga, I felt full passion, and fearless, like my hair and body were on fire. I am preparing for my workshop with Marina. I am so excited. She will starve me in the woods for days, with no clocks, no speaking. Cleansing me before my first performance on stage and beginning my training for a performance piece in Paris we are doing with Robert Wilson. I told her I wanted to reveal my total creative self to her. With complete trust, openness, and freedom to be an artist, instead of “making” or “designing” for the public to love. What I am is enough. My talent is enough. But the wigs and the makeup, I need them, I tell her—and she understands that. Marina understands my art, and in my understanding of her art we have made an exchange. When an exchange occurs between two auras, there is a formation of trust and an impulse of love—perhaps…we could belong together. ARTPOP! But this is not my “look” or “reinvention” for this album. I will be all of these women forever. I am a shape-shifter, a pop-cultural magician. I am not just one ICON. I am every icon. LADY GAGA
Marina Abramovic: I have three questions. Number one, are you more relaxed now than you were two years ago?
Lady Gaga: Relaxation is so futile. I understand relaxation in only one way. I’m only relaxed when I’m on the stage.
Marina Abramovic: That’s a great answer. You are completely in your own element in the presence of giving, that’s why.
Lady Gaga: When I’m on the stage, everything begins to fade and I relax. I feel the applause. I feel the energy of the room. When I walk onto the stage, the first thing I think is, Find the energy.
Marina Abramovic: This relation to the audience is very important. Do you feel them? I feel my audience. When I give a lecture, if someone goes to the bathroom I look to see if they come back, because I feel every single minute.
Lady Gaga: Absolutely. I notice if they’re crying, if they’re laughing. I notice if they’re taking a picture, so I’ll smile. I notice everything, but I notice more something that’s much more visceral. It’s a feeling that they’re looking at something that they know is real, but that feels too impossible to be happening. That is the real rush that I want to give them, and that is what people did not understand about my work in the beginning. I know I’m still giving them that feeling. The feeling is a rush of adrenaline that could not possibly be real, but it is. It’s the magic of the fantasy of the performance of being a musical shape-shifter that goes from one song to the other. It’s like the ultimate magic trick, but it’s not actually a magic trick at all. I’ve spent hours and hours rehearsing and choreographing the garments as they come on and off my body with the wigs and the lipstick. And then the hours I spend in the studio. Oh, Marina, ARTPOP was like a long love affair. And it’s not over, it’s so wonderful. I have this endless experience with the music, where I’m so proud of it throughout its growth and duration. Even though I have moments with it where I’m disappointed, they glaze over. Then I give it some more time and I hang out with you, and I give it some more time and I go see Jeff [Koons] or I go see Robert Wilson to talk about the Life and Death of Marina Abramovic and have coffee. I have this incredible opportunity each time I am in your wake, and in the wake of these great artists that I’m so lucky to be friends with. I really feel that there is a transfer of wisdom when I speak to you. It’s like I truly am listening to everything that you’re saying when you’re talking. So it’s not so much that I’m excited that people will know that I was with Marina Abramovic—I mean, that alone I could go to sleep on for 10 years in happiness—but what they don’t know is that while I’m with you I’m writing down everything you’re saying. I’m keeping it in a log in my brain purse. And in my brain purse I’m putting everything that you’re saying. Last week I stood at the studio and we were mixing the record and I said, “More and more of less and less, please.”
Marina Abramovic: I just want to say something about this magic and how the audience doesn’t know how this happened or that happened. When you put so much work into something, the result has to be like without any effort. As if you’re standing on the waterfall and it just happened. When you see the effort, the public is tired, then you lose it. The public is gone.
Lady Gaga: I didn’t get to see you when I was injured, but I was in a wheelchair for three whole months. Before that I was basically on a cane and in a wheelchair on the tour in between the shows, trying to rest my body. It felt like my humanity was leaking on the stage, like gas out of a car or an oil leak. As my hip was breaking…and you know I didn’t know it was my hip! Fuck if I know which part of my body it is that hurts the most. I don’t know. I can’t tell you that my hip hurts more than my back or my shoulders or my ass or my ankles in these fucking shoes or my tits. You know, after that “Scheiße” routine, at the end, where I’m bouncing all over the place? I was on tour for basically five years once I was on the “Born This Way” bus. It was the brunt of so many years of long-duration performances. The center [of the audience], where all the stands are, inside the runway, they know me like I’m their family. And they would just look at me and they’d know. They were whispering to me from the front row, “Are you okay? I love you. What’s wrong?”
Marina Abramovic: That’s the real deal.
Lady Gaga: It is the real deal because they know what I’ve put in each time of my life and they knew what I was capable of, and when they saw my humanity start to leak, they didn’t punish me, they didn’t say, “Oh, you look human, we don’t like it.” My fans have always stood by me, but they let me know that they could see and it killed me. For them to see my humanity, which is something I think is not magical, as opposed to the work that I spend hours putting in the time—that’s the magic—that’s what I want them to experience. I don’t want them to see that.
Marina Abramovic: Wait, now I don’t agree with this. You have to learn to embrace this and you have to actually show your vulnerability to the public. When you show both sides, it’s unbeatable. They have to learn through you, you are actually a medium to them if you can show your fragility so they can accept their own. It’s a completely new level of working. You have to embrace that part, it’s a big deal.
Lady Gaga: It’s so funny because in my own work, when I create it, if there’s an imperfection that was put there, I love it, so it’s not an issue for me. My humanity, since I’ve put out my first music into the public, is something I’ve been desperately hiding. I’ve been trying to figure out why I do this. What is it about my past that terrifies me? What I realized is that I just never settled the score with myself about some of my painful durations. Some of the things that I experienced with men, with the music business, with how they treat women, being a woman in a business with a lot of men, it was terrifying. It was terrifying. It was something that I truly don’t wish upon anyone. And it was my naïveté in thinking that my provocation or my sexuality was artistic because of the people that I looked up to. It was that which kind of led me into my greatness, but it also led me through a darkness that at one particular point I had to endure. Like I said, I wouldn’t change anything, but I suppose that time did make a much deeper impact on me than I had initially thought. I woke up one day and there were wigs everywhere. It was the silence of the wigs. I was a serial killer of my own self.
Marina Abramovic: A serial killer of oneself with the landscape of the wigs. That’s already a good start to a movie.
Lady Gaga: Each wig represented a different day in my life when I had to be something else because I just could not go back to that place. In order to become a better artist, at some point I was going to have to go back to the nucleus of the work, and I didn’t want to go. And “Born This Way,” that whole era, was me not wanting to go. I just did not want to face any of it. I didn’t want to talk about it. You should see me try therapy, it’s like a nightmare. I hate it, Marina. I don’t understand talk therapy. It’s like, it’s so confusing, the questions that they ask me.
Marina Abramovic: It’s not therapy for us! It’s totally the wrong way, because we put everything in the work and turn it around and heal ourselves, and this is the magic we have. Therapy is for other human beings, but not for us, ever. Are you happy?
Lady Gaga: Am I happy? Oh, yes. I feel so happy about the process. Speaking with you today and doing the interview this way, this has been such a treat for me, because I hate doing interviews and I love you so much and I just love hanging out with you anyway.
Marina Abramovic: The next question, Are you in love?
Lady Gaga: Am I in love? I don’t want to answer that question. I think that the world judges the work based on whether you are in love or not. I don’t want to be judged on that.
Marina Abramovic: That’s totally right. My last question really is, What is the song on this album that summarizes ARTPOP? All of them talk about different things. This is a tough question, I never have a favorite work, but go ahead.
Lady Gaga: “ARTPOP” is the song with the lyrics, especially I say, “a hybrid can withstand these things / my heart can beat with bricks and strings / my art pop could mean anything / we could belong together art pop.” It’s all about the strength of coming together and having an exchange with someone through an artistic process. And in this sense this artistic process can ultimately lead to a pop-tistic process.
Marina Abramovic: You know, if you transcribe all of this, it’s almost a book. I enjoyed this so much. These conversations are really important. It’s how we can mix things together. And another thing, I really trust you.
Lady Gaga: I know. I really trust you too. You’re wonderful.
Marina Abramovic: And now, by the way, you have to sleep, and maybe it’s not a bad idea to start eating breakfast. Now I’m talking like Mother Abramovic.
Lady Gaga: I know, but I never know when I’m going to be sleeping or awake. I never know when I’m going to get an idea, and if I get an idea I have to work.
Marina Abramovic: That is the diseased artist!
Lady Gaga: If I don’t have an idea, then I’m probably asleep or else I have to be somewhere.
Marina Abramovic: But then there’s another interesting exercise when you have to remember the moment before you’re really awake—the transition from the sleep state to the wake state.
Lady Gaga: I have a lot of ideas during that time.
Marina Abramovic: I had this recurring dream where it was always a house somewhere in the woods and there was a party in this house. And the people I knew, I knew only from the dream. And they’re there with all of their friends and they’re very happy, but I don’t know them in real life. And then I dreamt again and it’s the same party, and everybody has gray hair. I could not believe in my dream you can actually get old.
Lady Gaga: Did you have a conversation with the dons of dreaming? You said, “Listen, dons of dreaming, you are not allowed to get old in dreams?”
Marina Abramovic: I couldn’t tell them. They were all gray. I don’t think I really dream anymore. They’re gone, maybe they died. They’re gone forever. Now it’s late and I’m going to sleep and you’re going to get a new idea and this is the end. But I really love this. Something really caught me when you said, “Nobody knows how much it took to get there.”
Lady Gaga: I know what it took for you to get there. I mean I might not totally know, but…
Marina Abramovic: I know that you know! It’s a lot of work. And these photographs, they’re really disturbing. Really strong. They’re amazing. They stay in your memory. I love the position of the hands. Strong, strong, strong. The energy was there. I mean, it was like, Oh my god, this one is going all the way. Okay, I’m going to sleep now. We’ll go for dinner. We don’t even need to eat.
Lady Gaga: [laughs] We’ll eat, it’s fine! I don’t eat breakfast. My gosh, you see? A lack of discipline in one area and you’re already reaming me about dinner!
Marina Abramovic: Three meals a day. It’s a mechanical element, like a car. You have to put the gasoline. Anyway, that’s a different topic. I’m not going to give a lecture now. Totally not. Love you!
Other
![[1] (May 6, 2010)](/wiki/File:5-6-10_Arriving_at_Museum_of_Modern_Art_in_NYC_001.jpg "5-6-10 Arriving at Museum of Modern Art in NYC 001.jpg (117 KB)")
![[2] (December 21, 2013)](/wiki/File:12-21-13_Out_and_about_in_NYC_002.jpg "12-21-13 Out and about in NYC 002.jpg (873 KB)")
- Lady Gaga attended Marina Abramović's exhibition "The Artist Is Present," which was held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York from March 14th to May 31th of 2010, but there was no meeting.
- Lady Gaga attended Marina Abramović's show in New York City with Taylor Kinney.
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