Is Marina Abramović’s “Longevity Method” a Business, or a Performance?

Could Marina Abramović be the wellness guru we needed all along? It could have been Gwyneth Paltrow, she of the jade eggs and bone broths and chugging Mountain Valley water, who seemed, for a while, like the prophet we were promised. But her company, Goop, has become more of a place to buy $900 jersey dresses and titanium cooking pans. Anyway, Goop has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs in the past few months alone.

If Goop isn’t your thing and you’re in search of a more out-of-the-box approach, consider Abramović, who once told the New York Times “I like baby food.” Want to learn to live like her? The Marina Abramović Institute offers €2,450 (~$2,600) five-day Cleaning the House workshops in various locations—Brazil, Thailand—taught by people (not her) trained to lead guests “through a series of long durational exercises to improve individual focus, stamina, and concentration.” Their cell phones, laptops, watches, and electronic devices will be collected, and “during the workshop, participants should refrain from eating, speaking, and reading.” (Herbal tea and honey are permitted.)

For those wanting to micro-dose the longevity method, she even markets 99£ ($125) longevity drops with a Swiss doctor (one for immunity, one for allergy, one for energy) to achieve inside-out beauty via active ingredients such as pollen, cranberry, lemon, and garlic. They are packaged beautifully, not unlike similar tonics one can purchase at a health food store.

Her commitment to wellness courses through not only the products and experiences she offers, but through her art as well—although Abramović would surely say those are all the same thing.

HER LATEST SHOW, “Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy,” at the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai, boasts 150 works over three floors, including many crystal-based sculptures nodding to her interest in Eastern medicine. Some of the pieces resemble a cross between furniture and something more ominous. There are wooden beds with large crystals pointed at the head; copper tubs with crystals pointed where a faucet might be; deck chairs facing metronomes; doorways with crystals mounted on every surface.

Wellness has always been a theme in Abramović’s work, only now, it’s become more explicit. The show is inspired by, and is a sort of addendum to, one of her most famous durational performances: The Great Wall Walk (1988), where she and her former partner, Ulay, walked from opposite ends of the wall toward the center and toward each other. “Me from the Yellow Sea, which is water and female energy… he will walk from the desert, which is the fire and the male element, and we will meet in the middle and we are going to get married,” said Abramović over Zoom from Shanghai back in October, while she was setting up the show.

For someone who is nearing 78 years old, she looks incredible: smooth, even skin; thick hair; and seemingly infinite energy. Shai Baitel, the Shanghai show’s curator, noticed too: “Marina is beyond generation. She’s beyond age.” Whatever she is doing is working: sign us all up for the drops, the workshops, whatever it takes.

Back to the Great Wall in 1988: She and Ulay loved the concept, and hated the negotiations and organizing required to make it happen. It took about 8 years, in which “our relationship completely fell apart,” she says, laughing. They did not get married.

She found symbolism and spirituality in the Great Wall. “We discovered the Great Wall was actually not only this kind of fortress to keep enemies out of China in those days. It was like a metaphysical structure. It was seen as a replica of our Milky Way,” she says.

While she was walking, she’d sleep every night in a different village and try to meet the oldest people who lived there, asking them about healing techniques, recovery, and their myths. They often told her stories about dragons: green ones and white ones and red ones. The wall itself, she was told, was a dragon too. Its head was with the dead buried in the Yellow Sea, its tail in the Gobi Desert, its body the mountains. What Abramović took away was that these dragons she was hearing about were all related to the ground she was walking on. “I realized there was aqua, there was iron, there was copper and so on, and I noticed how the state of my mind was changing,” she says.

After Abramović completed the journey, she went to Brazil, where her interest in minerals persisted. Her “transitory objects,” works “in which you trigger the experience of these minerals and the feelings they have,” spanned much of her work in the 1990s. During her 2010 retrospective at MoMA, she performed The Artist Is Present. Between March 14 and May 31, she spent 736 hours silent and unmoving while museumgoers took turns sitting opposite her.

NOW ARGUABLY THE WORLD’S most famous living artist, she has returned to China 36 years later. Using quartz, amethyst, tourmaline, copper, iron, and wood, she made objects for the audience to interact with. She doesn’t consider them sculptures because the object is not the point; the energy is. For example, there are concave stones mounted on the wall, inviting visitors to press their heads, hearts, and stomachs against them. “And then you actually don’t even see the work because you just see people facing the wall,” Abramović explains. In her ideal world, everyone would have a transitory object at home. “You do this before you make your espresso coffee, before you open a computer, before you look at your emails on the telephone,” she says. “That’s really something.”

The show’s title, “Transforming Energy,” refers to the ways that the materials are able to transform our own energy, but also to how that energy is constantly changing. “Because if you think about Marina’s philosophies, what is she all about?” asks Baitel. “Focus, disconnect from interruptions and the surrounding noise, discipline, disconnect from cellular phones, from social media, from focus on yourself, being in the present, be in the moment,” he replies. “That’s what we’re doing with transitory objects. Which means I curated energy, I curated the metaphysical. This is an entirely new concept. It’s the first time that an exhibition is curating energy.”

WHAT DOES ABRAMOVIĆ actually do for her own wellness routine? She swims. Every morning, for at least an hour. “I have to,” she says. While in Shanghai, she eats congee in the morning and a lot of tofu, which she fell in love with in 1988. She sees a qigong master for stomach-focused body work, and frequently does supplementary exercises at home. “I am always looking how I can balance all this,” she says, waving her arms. “Then taking long showers. It’s really important because water is giving energy, but then you have to get energy back. And then sleeping. I need to sleep eight hours a day.” Jet lag, she says, has only gotten harder to cope with as she ages—she’d been in China for two weeks when we spoke, and still felt it.

But here’s the most relatable thing about her life and routine, something anyone can take away from the rarefied and wacky world of Marina Abramović. Beyond the alleged baby food diet (she doesn’t mention it, and asking is useless; to talk to her is to submit to her own torrent of ideas), beyond the crystal healing, beyond the longevity tonics: she just wants to relax at home.

What she’s looking forward to is a knee replacement. “It’s a little bit fucked up. I tried the plasma shots, I tried everything,” she says. “I went to the doctor, he looked at my knee. He said to me, What kind of opiates are you taking? I said, Nothing—I never take anything. He said, What? And you’re walking on this?” So this past fall, she scheduled one. “I’m going to do physical therapy religiously,” she says. “And I’m not going to travel for three months.” She smiles at the thought.