In the lead-up to Marina Abramovics historic retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, we asked Laurie Anderson to visit with her old friend at Abramovic’s SoHo loft and discuss the recent evolution of performance art. Their conversation quickly wandered to such subjects as the aesthetic merit (or lack thereof) of C. G. Jung’s paintings, the difficulty of mastering Mongolian throat singing, the humor in boiling milk, and the art of stepping in and out of celebrity. These seemingly unrelated threads formed a tapestry that reveals much about the artistic wellsprings of both these extraordinary women.

Laurie Anderson: When did you do your very first performance?

Marina Abramovic: For the public, 1971. It was not called performance. I did not have the knowledge of what performance was. I made lots of concepts that were never authorized by the Yugoslav government. One of the concepts was "Come and Wash with Us." The idea was that people would come and take their clothes off, and there would be a line of really strong Slavic women washing the clothes and ironing them. And at the end, you would stand naked and get fresh, ironed clothes.

LA: Did you do that one?

MA: No, the government refused. It was an unrealized piece. So I have plenty of unrealized pieces that you could say are performance but are not.

LA: That’s absolutely performance.

MA: And you?

LA: In 1972.

MA: And what was that?

LA: It was a concert for cars. I was living in Vermont, and there was a concert every Sunday night in a little gazebo in the middle of the town square. No one got out of his car. And I thought, "This is so strange." I mean, I know it’s a car culture . . .

MA: But it was like going to the movies.

LA: A drive-in theater. After each number, they would honk their horns for applause. The applause sounded better than the concert. So I made a show for the cars. I learned a lot about working with people from that. When I was trying to get people to be in the show, no one wanted to beep his car’s horn. But here’s the secret: If you make it competitive, suddenly people are interested. So we said, "We have an audition for the cars in the supermarket parking lot this Saturday, and if your car wins, we need you." They said, "OK!" So that’s how we got people interested. We only did one show because it was so difficult to organize.

MA: Now it’s so much more structural.

LA: You can still go to someplace rural like Vermont and do something like that. It’s still the kind of place where you can reverse the situation. What about if you did that in Yugoslavia?

MA: Yugoslavia was always a problem. In that time, performance was something totally outrageous. They would laugh about it, especially the real painters, the established artists. They are still critical of me in Yugoslavia. They say, "She was not a good painter; that is why she is a performance artist."

LA: Now?

MA: Yes, still, now, just recently.

LA: When did you do your last painting?

MA: In school. For them performance was a failure.

LA: Were you a bad painter?

MA: I didn’t have time to become a good painter. I lost interest.

LA: What did you paint?

MA: My first painting was dreams. And after dreams, I was crazy about traffic accidents — really, these big communist trucks colliding.

LA: Wow! Do any of these paintings exist?

MA: After my mother died, I was looking at them and thinking, "Oh, God! They’re really bad." (Laughs)

LA: Maybe they’re not so bad.

MA: Then it was the bodies, lots of bodies. Then it was clouds hitting the bodies. Then it was just clouds. And then I stopped.

LA: You know, bodies and sky are still part of your work.

MA: It’s true.

LA: How big are they?

MA: Some paintings are as big as this wall. The worst part was the only way to make money was to paint to order. They would say, "I want flowers as the central part of the painting, and I want a window and a sunset and two lamps on the right side." And then I would paint them, and they would give me money. I would sign these paintings with a huge blue Marina — Marina ’63, Marina ’64. I would like to collect them and burn them all. They were the worst things in my life. They were just for pocket money. My paintings were made just for money and made with the purpose to be very bad.

LA: I was so glad that you said that at the Rubin Museum of Art during your Red Book Dialogue [a recent series of evenings at the Rubin in which various personalities responded to and interpreted a folio of The Red Book of C. G. Jung]. It was a hilarious confrontation. We were looking at this image by Jung of an egg and little animals, kind of like fourth-string Surrealist paintings. And you said, "I’m sorry to say, but this is really kitsch." And everyone was like, "Yes! Thank you for saying that Carl Jung is a kitschy painter." It was refreshing, because [people] paint for so many different reasons, and he painted, I guess, because those were his dreams, or what he saw in himself, certainly his internal moments. But, you know, it was so funny. Someone else was doing this. Who was it? Billy Corgan [of the Smashing Pumpkins]. There was a big painting of Nut, Egyptian goddess of the night, in her boat with her sign of the big disk. Below was a huge sea monster with a mouth like (Anderson opens her mouth wide), so Billy Corgan spent the whole time talking about the monsters under his bed and how his work was about confronting his monsters and the terrible things that they would say to him, and why he wrote songs that were about suicide and depression and death. And one woman at the end raised her hand. She was sort of shy, and she said, "But there’s an eye on the boat, a big open eye. And the monster is not actually attacking. He’s escorting the boat going in the same direction." And everyone was like, "Oh, my God. That’s true. We’ve been seeing monsters because Billy Corgan said there were monsters in the painting. It’s a beautiful way that your monster is taking you, and they’re all going the same way." It was the power of words over image that was really crazy. Because people stare at things, and they have to be told what it means, often. That’s what I love about words. I made a lot of bad paintings too. And then sculpture. And it went from that to talking.

MA: But it’s so wonderful how with the words and this abstraction that you can really project and create images. When the image is fixed, you don’t have the same feeling. That’s why the sound and the words for me are such wonderful tools, because of that abstraction.

LA: When you were talking about the complexity of the Tibetan mandalas, it was really interesting, because for some people, those are kitsch. I was hoping that you could say more about that — about the imagery in those kinds of things, because I almost get a brain hemorrhage looking at them because they’re so complicated.

MA: There is such a long tradition, and so much deals with so much knowledge. The position, the symmetry — each symbol is so imbued with the . . .

LA: Cosmology?

MA: Yeah. Because we have a predisposition to remember images, even if we don’t remember the meaning. And somehow that works, and other things don’t work. I can’t explain, and it’s complicated. You can say it’s kitsch, but it’s not. The same with overtones. When Tibetans do overtones, they do them with mathematical precision. Each has a certain function. When [composer] Glenn Branca does overtones, he’s just doing them.

LA: Overtones are very hard to control. When I was working with throat singing and overtone singing, only the masters could really control where the voice went because the overtone series was so complicated. These guys have a playful approach because their music really is out of control. So they’re going to hit a note that they hadn’t imagined could exist or an overtone they hadn’t planned, and then they have to go into another overtone series. I tried to learn that several times, but it was a very different world. People who do that are nomads. They come from big empty spaces. The guys I worked with I met at the Rubin, where I was working on overtone singing. [They were] from Mongolia, and you forget that it takes 11 hours to go to Moscow. It takes a five-day train ride, a two-day car ride, and a one-day hike to get home. The world is not home. And I invited them to come to the studio in New York to play with New York musicians. Incredible! They didn’t speak a word of English. They had their old horse-head fiddles and banjos that they made from scraps of wood. And they played erhu [a two-string Chinese violin], and then the purity of their overtones. I invited them to tour with us. These electronic New York musicians and these Mongolian musicians — what could have been a culture collision was amazing. So they came and played with us in Lisbon. It was a couple hours north of Lisbon in a castle, a summer night, and we were all playing. It was a fantastic night, a fantastic show. After the show they started to pack up their instruments, and they were starting to walk off. And I was like, "You guys, where are you going?" It was really dark, and their Russian manager had forgotten to get transportation for them after, so they were going to walk back to Lisbon. It’s a two-hour car ride. It would have been a 10-hour walk! But they’re nomads.

MA: That was a totally normal thing, to walk 10 hours!

LA: I learned so much from these guys about music and time and the world. And I often thought of you when I was playing with them, because you make such an effort to get out of this box. And you can really see that in your work — what other mentalities you are open to. It changes you to work with different cultures, like Tibetans.

MA: The first time I worked with Tibetans it was 1983. It was the worst work in my life because it was so pretentious. It somehow went totally wrong. But the experience was incredible. We took six Tibetan lamas and four Aborigines to make this piece. But in the middle of the performance, I knew that it was really bad. And I couldn’t stop because I knew that we had four days to perform. I had a high fever for all four days. But this is my point: The money from that performance was enough for [their monastery], 2,000 monks, to live for four or five years. And the last day before they left, they got all the money, and they wanted to shop with the translator. They left first thing in the morning, and all day there was no sign of them until 10 p.m. We thought, "Oh, God. The money is gone." They came back terribly happy, and I asked, "What did you buy?" And they bought two umbrellas. It was something so touching. I remember training with them. They woke up at four in the morning and were cooking their tea, and they were laughing and laughing. What are they laughing at? I asked, and they said they are cooking milk for the tea and the bubbling of the milk is so funny. You learn so much from these people. You never see the world and how humble and how pure and how simple it is. This really changed me. Most of us have that kind of encounter and it changes how we see the world and how we deal with things. How spoiled we are is frightening. How wonderful it is for them to say, "It’s 10 hours to walk." The normality of it. It is touching.So talking about how performance art was in the ’70s and how it is now: It has changed and not changed. Performance has always had a strange function. It’s not here, not there. It’s not that performance changes; we change. We are much more conscious of what we’re doing,at least me.

LA: Also you didn’t have to fit into this category of "this is painting," "this is sculpture." That category wasn’t there. And that’s the biggest difference. Now it fits into that category because it’s there. And then there’s a lot of debate over what should be in that category, and that’s when I check out. It’s so boring.

MA: And then it was, "This is body art. That is body art." In the ’80s the market wanted to have goods to sell. Body art wasn’t something you could sell. The movement stopped, and you’re dead with the movement. And that’s really important — how you survive. Joseph Beuys was always connected to Fluxus and Happening, but when they died, Beuys survived. And this is what has happened to you and me. We have survived this categorization. We have become the persons we are, with independent work and not being labeled with a movement.I wanted to ask you — this was a really incredible time in your life, when you signed the contract with Warner Brothers [after the 1981 single "O Superman" reached number two on the British pop charts]. You were the only artist in that period to get from the art stream into the mainstream.

LA: I got a lot of shit for that: "You’re selling out!" Then two years later they were like "How do I sell out?" The way it happened was that I made 500 copies of the record for four or five hundred dollars and I was selling it mail order out of my loft. People would call me on the phone, give me their address. I would write it down. I would pack a record, and I would go to the Canal Street post office and send it to someone. So then I get a call one day from London: "We’d like to order some records." And I said, "Good, how many?" And they said, "Forty thousand this Friday and then 40,000 more this Monday." And I say, "What?! OK, I’ll get right back to you." I called Karen Berg. She was someone from Warner who had been coming to my shows and saying, "I want you to make a record, I want you to make a record for Warner Brothers," and I said, "I don’t want to make records. I am an artist. I’m not a pop artist." Anyway, I called her up and I said, "Can you help me out? I need some records pressed pretty quickly." And she said, "This is not the way we do things at Warner Records. There’s a contract, eight records." I approached it as an anthropologist. Because suddenly to be in a car and get out of the car and there are a hundred people screaming your name — it was just ridiculous. I was like, "This is so stupid." But you know that you will be passing through. So I enjoyed it without depending on it.

MA: Talking about the crossing over, I was part of Sex and the City [in episode 86, an artist displays herself in a gallery without food or water, as in Marina’s The House with the Ocean View] — did you ever see that?

LA: No.

MA: I was in India, and Sean [Kelly, the gallerist] called me and said, "They want you to be a part of a Sex and the City episode." I had no idea what Sex and the City was. I said I’m not going to do it, but if they wanted to use [my] art, they would have to pay me for the rights. So they paid for the rights. It’s so funny how they portrayed me, sitting like a witch, black under the eyes, and then Baryshnikov defending me. It’s the worst. But it was the first time that a woman selling vegetables on the corner, who never said a word to me or gave me a hello, starts saying, "Oh, would you like some strawberries? They’re fresh. You don’t need to pay, just take them." I really felt what the power of the masses means. Amazing. Free strawberries, but also hello. It compared [to your fame] in a very small way, because when you had "Superman," this was a hit. It was really crossover, and in a way you actually went crossover, and then you went back. But that experience is different. Damien Hirst is a good example of crossing over, especially his diamond skull — the vanity of the artwork, what it means. It’s an amazing example in a very different way of what we had done. It was really a great piece. In a way it jumped to the other side. For Laurie, it wasn’t an effort. For Damien Hirst, he’s making this entire effort to be in mass culture, with the money, with the investment, with the whole mechanism, with a very different story than I’m always investigating, and with 220 assistants. Jeff Koons has 86! I have just one. It’s totally fine. I need at least one more, but this is it. The idea of how your own establishment goes from one man into this huge manufacturer. You have this. You have to provide the job, then you have to produce. Then you overproduce. Then you ask yourself, "What’s going on with the meaning of art?"

LA: One thing I remember [the American painter and sculptor] Eric Fischl saying is: "I don’t feel like I’m part of an art world; I’m part of an art market."I thought, "I really will make records, because they’re cheap and I can make shows that are only $20, and I don’t have to meet the people who are collectors and those kind of people, because they make me crazy."

MA: I went once to an auction to see. It was incredible. Marcel Duchamps work went so much cheaper than someone whose name you don’t even remember.

LA: It just became another currency. That’s kind of fascinating. But when you go to those big fairs, then you get into selling yourself. And this is one of the reasons I promised myself not to have my photograph taken for a year, because I just can’t stand it. It’s so freeing for me not to have my picture out there. Yet I want to participate in things that I care about. Images can be there, and I love photographs of people. It’s not that I have anything against it. Just for my own self I sometimes think, "Let me just step out of that for a while."Are you ready [for the MoMA show]?

MA: I’m not. I have so much fear, Laurie. I am really fearing.

LA: What are you afraid of?

MA: I’m afraid that there are so many millions of things that can happen: that I get sick, that I have a terrible back pain, that I have to pee — all this kind of stuff. And the only thing I can compare to this is the three months walking the Great Wall of China. But it’s a strange kind of situation. The Chinese Wall was walking to meet, to say good-bye. It was emotionally difficult and physically difficult. Then comes this. Every time, a huge task comes as a part of purification. That was part of the personal reason. Then there is this huge task. I really feel that I have almost the historical function to put the performance into the museum and then other people after me can really understand performance in mainstream art. I’m also worrying about every one of the 36 performers.

LA: Who are they?

MA: They’re different people, some young performance artists and dancers. It’s very different, the difference between a dancer’s body and a performer’s body. The dancer’s body is a trained body. The performer’s body is not a trained body, but they have willpower.

LA: Did you have a Marina boot camp?

MA: (Laughs) Exactly. I took them to the countryside — no eating, period, swimming in the cold river, all sleeping in the barn — in the beginning of September to create the community, to see what the strengths are, what I can do and what I cannot do. It’s OK to change your mind. But I’m talking about 36 people changing [their] minds, so they really have to have the stamina and dedication and mental health to stay there for three months. Anything can happen. This is unknown territory that we have to explore.

LA: You really have to give people mental training.

MA: The piece we’re going to redo is the walking in the door of the museum in Bologna [in the 1977 work Imponderabilia, Abramovic and her partner, Ulay, stood naked within the portal to the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna so that visitors had to brush by them]. Four couples we have for this. Every two and a half hours, like guards, they come in their coats, take their coats off, and stand. And then the next two come and take their coats off, and [the others] go back. That piece was not easy. There were so many visitors. And one of the biggest problems, apart from closeness and the rest, is the visitors step on your feet. (Laughs) But you see, it’s one thing to do for three hours and you never do it again; it’s another thing to do it for three months. We’re facing incredible simple, practical problems.

LA: But isn’t this great that you have your army with you this time. You never had that.

MA: No, never. And this is another interesting thing. At the same time — I don’t know if this is a coincidence — the Guggenheim is giving the entire museum to Tino Sehgal for performance in January. It’s just before my show. There are going to be 400 people in this show. The piece he’s doing will start with very young people, and as it spirals, they will get older and older and older and just standing there. It’s really amazing. It was unthinkable a few years ago. I always believe economic crises and performance are connected: The more economic crises, the more performance. It’s a reaction.LA: Every time I’ve seen a dip, art gets better, whether it’s painting or music or whatever. Everybody all of a sudden has to go, "I’m going to make this next one in my garage," and then it’s got some dirt in it.

"Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present," Mar. 14-May 31, moma.org; Solo exhibition, May 8-June 19, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, skny.com. Anderson’s upcoming album, based on her 2007-08 performance piece Homeland, will be released next month on Nonesuch Records, nonesuch.com; she will be touring her performance piece Delusion, which debuted at the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad last month, throughout 2010.

"Marina Abramovic and Laurie Anderson" originally appeared in the March issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2010 Table of Contents.