“I’m so nervous!” offered Marina Abramović yesterday, calling in from London. “There is not one artist, and I’m not talking about singers, they’re a different category, but visual artist, who [has] ever done something like this before—250,000 people. I’m freaking out completely.” In less than 24 hours, Abramović was to take the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, the festival’s iconic main stage, and ask for seven minutes of silence. “I know that I’m doing something that is important, and I love risk. I’m also ready to fail.”
The theme of this year’s festival is “Peace,” but even given that concept, what Abramović did tonight was something unconventional. Music festivals are where we go to escape, but Abramović turned Glastonbury into a temple of reflection. “People come to have a good time. They’re drinking, taking drugs, the weather is good. But I’m asking them to be silent and to reflect on the state of this planet, which is really hell right now,” she said, pointing to issues including global warming and the wars in Ukraine and Palestine. “So much can go wrong, but I’ll stand there, with my arms open.”
Abramović has made silence the most powerful of tools in her work—think of “The Artist Is Present.” But tonight was more ambitious. Abramović was to have only five minutes onstage in total, which turned into around 10 when Glasto mainstay PJ Harvey, whose performance was to follow Abramovic’s intervention, gave up a song in her set to extend Abramovic’s time on the pyramid, giving her some wiggle room to set up.
The artist was speaking on Zoom from her hotel room, where she had just finished fitting her look for today: a custom kimono-style silk robe made for her by none other than her close friend Riccardo Tisci. “I have journalists who ask me, ‘As an artist, what are you going to do?’” Abramović reflected. “I know what I’m doing, but what are you doing as a journalist, as a filmmaker, as a worker? All of us have the function of [enacting] change.” That includes fashion, despite the industry’s seemingly blind eye to the catastrophes unfolding around it.
