In the lead-up to Marina Abramovic’s 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.