Karen Archey: We thought it was a really wonderful opportunity to welcome Miles Greenberg to the stage, since he has worked with Marina before, and as recently as 2022 presented a work during No Intermission at the Royal Theatre Carré. Miles, could you tell us how you met Marina and explain what your relationship with her has been like?
Miles: Hi, thank you. My mom’s in the audience tonight. She brought me to The Artist is Present when I was twelve. That was sort of my first initial contact with performance art. I grew up as a kid in the theater, because at the time my mom was an actress. I grew up on tour with this company, and I think theater was something that I never really connected to very much. This format of sitting in front of people and having this sort of singular point of view never really touched me much. Then, when I got to see Marina’s work at MoMA—we traveled down from Montreal, where I grew up, for a weekend and saw her work,—it really shifted something in my brain about how you could still use the body, the immediacy of the body, and the things that were familiar to me and familiar to all of us here, which I think is why the work is so touching. It doesn’t necessarily have this same prescribed relationship.
Marina and I met in New York when I was seventeen, while she was beginning to establish the Marina Abramović Institute and the concept behind it. At the time, it was a building; now it’s more of a roaming idea. I ended up at her house for dinner, and the rest is history.
Marina: It’s really interesting to see somebody who is seventeen years old and already so interested in performance art, and shortly after, they begin performing, and you start doing work together.. What was the first performance you did?
Miles: It was in 2015, so I was seventeen. It was right before we met.
Marina: When you really feel that this is your medium, you are so lucky to find that out early. Sometimes artists spend years finding what is right to do, be it drawings, paintings, or whatever. However, if you really understand what your right medium is, this is a blessing, and you immediately find it.
Miles Greenberg at the conversation series Artist Talk at the Stedelijk Museum on March 17, 2024. Photo: Maarten Nauw.
Miles: Well, you very much helped me find it. It was very important for me to see somebody fundamentally teach me that, without even having met, you immediately already have everything that you need. I dropped out of school very young. I left, and I didn’t know how to do anything, but I already had something to work with. I think performances are something that are really liberating in that way because you get the result of the work very instantaneously.. Before you’re even finished making it, your audience has already consumed it. There are no barriers between you and the public. I felt like I learned how to learn in public through you.
Marina: What you chose right away is incredible: something of long duration. When you start with performance, people are performing for twenty minutes, one hour, or three hours. You started right away with six hours, which is the most difficult thing to do, ever. Then you went into performances of twenty-four hours. For that, you need stamina, concentration, and incredible physical practice. This is why it’s so special to me, and I’m very happy to talk to you today here, on this stage.
[audience claps]
Rein Wolfs: This morning I read a quote from you on the Buro Stedelijk’s Instagram account. You say that the piece really starts when, as a performer, you go into that space of automation that usually happens around hour four, because three hours is just as long as a movie. Four hours is getting there, but upwards of that, it becomes your whole life. This durational aspect bias, can you share something about it?
Miles Greenberg, TRUTH, 2023/2024 Buro Stedelijk. Photo: Peter Tijhuis (above); Anne Lakeman (below).
Miles: For me, duration actually started a bit differently. Obviously, I was inspired by Marina. I think the thing that really initially drew my interest was that I wanted to be a sculptor. I always wanted to be a sculptor. The relationship that the audience has with the sculpture is what I wanted people to have with my work. I felt—looking at the sculpture, Greco-Roman statuary—for me, it was a question of accessibility. It was a question of creating something that was up all day, where you didn’t have to squeeze into a concrete box for forty-five minutes and sit, or stand uncomfortably around—something that was going on with a start, a middle, and a finish. You could just consume something in perpetuity that felt infinite. Of course, that choice and format led to a really profound experience in me.
Then, as I started to work with other people, it grew into more of a pillar of the concept of the work. However, I think initially it was just because I didn’t want to dictate the experience of the audience. I thought it would allow the audience to be more open. It was convenience. I was like, if the opening hours are five hours, I’ll do five hours. If the opening hours are seven hours, I’ll do seven hours to avoid having this beginning, middle, and end.
Karen: Could you describe your practice and tell us about your Buro Stedelijk exhibition?
Miles: This is the first time that Marina and I have shown at the same time, in the same place. It’s a really special moment for me. Also because Buro Stedelijk and the Stedelijk Museum are two separate entities, with different teams. No one actually told us until about a month and a half ago, when we called each other.
In my work, I’m really interested in seeing what happens in the body when you break through certain barriers or certain limitations that are automatically programmed into our biology. I really like looking at ecstasy, agony, deep pain, panic attacks, orgasms, and things that are thirty seconds or ten minutes long, maximum. Then our body sort of finds a way to deprogram that, and then shut it down and move on. I’m very inspired by the idea of taking those rapid sensations and seeing what happens, like putting them in a petri dish and expanding them over seven hours, ten hours, twelve hours, and just seeing what happens, because we don’t know.
Usually, it’s a very poetic answer. I look at it through a lens of the African diaspora and through sort of the histories of Black thought, looking at formats like jazz and African sculpture and things that look at abstraction from a very intuitive, spiritual, and ancestral place, and then processing those rapid sensations in these laboratories over very extended periods of time and seeing what happens to them.
Marina: You start first by just performing by yourself, and then you start involving more and more people. I think in Carré last year, there was this long-duration work that you made with… how many people?
Miles: There were three people a day in Carré. We had, I think, in total a cast of fourteen over the several days.
Marina: Can you talk a little bit about this idea, how you decided to start alone and involve more people during the performance, making it more sculptural?
Miles: I mean, we performed, I think, six hours a day until the last day, which was twelve hours. Every day, this cast of three people would stand on these kinds of mirror surfaces. I turned the ballroom into a desert, covering the whole floor with sand. Shout-out to Carré for saying “yes” to that. Shout-out to the Stedelijk for saying “yes” to flooding their floors. It was three people, and they were all holding these boulders, these small stones that were very heavy. I had an idea of this very non-verbal feeling about wanting to hold something precious and close, like an infant. However, it was also very heavy and burdensome, and then repeating it three times. I wanted to sort of see how each of these performers felt this tension, all blinded by contact lenses and dripping with castor oil from the ceiling, like amniotic fluid. I wanted them to feel like the mother and the embryo at the same time.
Marina: You can explain this and these incredible images you create, but at the same time, behind the scenes, it’s an enormous amount of stamina, training, and being incredibly precise about what you eat. What your body looks like. That’s another part that is interesting for the public to see. Because if you just say anybody can do this, that’s impossible because of the effort you have to make. This long-duration work, it’s really supernatural in many ways.
Miles: I think of it like a painter cleaning their brushes; like, it’s just as important. It’s maintaining the material. We’re staying together right now. You’ve seen my vitamins. When you do performance, the work goes into your real life, I think arguably more than a lot of other mediums, because you never leave it at home. You’re always living in the thing that allows you to do the thing that you do.
Miles Greenberg, Rein Wolfs, Karen Archey and Marina Abramović at the conversation series Artist Talk at the Stedelijk Museum on March 17, 2024. Photo: Maarten Nauw.
Karen Archey: That’s really beautiful. I hadn’t thought about performance in that way, and the kind of upkeep of the tool, so to speak. We had just spoken a little before we came on stage Miles, and you mentioned that you had participated in the Cleaning the House workshop. Of course, you’ve been through the Marina Abramović Institute. I’m not sure how many people are familiar with MAI. Marina, could you explain what it is, and why you founded it? I find it interesting also that you work with other artists’ work as well through MAI.
Marina: It is really simple. When I finally stood up from The Artist is Present chair after 715 hours of sitting motionless, I knew instantly that I was transformed. Something had changed, I was different, and I also knew that the people became more than my audience. I knew that I absolutely had to make my own institute and my own legacy, because performance art was for so many years nobody’s territory. The fact that it went to the MoMA and became mainstream art. We are in the museum here and we are talking about performance, which was unthinkable in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and so on. Then I felt that my generation of performance artists stopped performing a long time ago, because it takes too much energy, and very few people have the stamina to continue this for such a long time. They went on to do other stuff. They make sculptures, they write books, or they die.
For me, this institute had a few things. One thing that I discovered in my practice is that long-duration works of art are really transformative. There’s nothing else that can be more transformative than this long duration. If you perform one work for one hour or two hours, you still can pretend. You can still act. You can still not be your true self. However, if you do something for eight hours, let’s say three days or six days or three months, you survive. There’s no difference between you and life. You become vulnerable, but with so much pain, with so many emotions, and that vulnerability and those emotions actually connect you with the public, who are also vulnerable, who are also emotional, and then it becomes a really strong bond. To me, it was important to teach young artists long-durational performances, because I believe that this is an incredible tool. And secondly, to read about performance, because the performances of the old pieces are totally forgotten.
Some should be re-performed, even if the piece is changed. Even if the new performers give their own charisma and change the piece, it is better than ever before, because they have new experiences. A third thing that I find important is the public. In order for the public to see something that is long durational, they have to be prepared and trained. This is why I invented something called the Abramović method, because when you come across a long-duration work of art on the street, you see there is absolutely nothing happening—there’s no drama, there’s no storytelling. It’s maybe just one image, maybe a light across the room, maybe the person who lifted a hand or turned their eyes in a different direction. Very little happens, but at the same time, in this minimalism, everything is happening. You have to be prepared. You have to be aware of your breathing, your concentration, and how you think about what you’re thinking.
You have to switch off your phone, and you have to detox from your technology. You have to not look at your watch. You have to really get into the space of the performer, which is here and now. That moment of here and now is important. Then you can connect with the performer. This is actually what I teach at the Marina Abramović Institute, which is located in Greece. We do eight workshops per year. Absolutely everybody can come. It’s very simple. You get there, you have to give up your watch, your telephone, and your computer for one week. You are given only one vegetable soup in the evening when you arrive. The next day, you can’t talk and you can’t eat for five days. During these five days, you have to do exercises to strengthen your energy, power, concentration, and so on.
After that, you eat one meal at the end and your technology is returned to you. It’s amazing how people come back and do it over and over, because we really have to go back to simplicity. Our technology completely makes us invalids. We’re not using intuition, we are not using telepathy. We are not using any of our abilities, because we just Google everything and we are constantly busy with the false. There is nothing wrong with technology. It’s our addiction to technology that is wrong. This is the point of my institute, which really deals with long-duration performance, with the Abramović method, and, most of all, gives a platform for young artists to show their work everywhere. My whole institute is in Adelaide right now, at a festival showing eight Asian artists. They’ve just been in London’s South Bank, with my performance there. We were in Cardiff and Oslo last year. We went to Brazil, we went to Ukraine, and we went literally around the world. It’s very simple. We go somewhere. Mostly local artists have been asked to make a proposal, and we choose proposals and give them a platform like a museum to show the work in the real context of the museum, to the real public.
I was in Greece, so a Greek girl came. She’s a painter. She’s never done performance art. She said, “I would like to do a performance.” I said, “What you would like to do in Greece is to perform for two months, eight hours a day, because every museum is open eight hours.” We take eight hours in real-time. We ask her what she would like to do. She says, “I would like to count seconds.” I say, “Eight hours a day, for two months.” She says, “Yes, this is almost impossible. This is so difficult. This is like hell.” How can you do that? She tried and she did it. It was incredible. She was counting seconds all day long, eight hours a day. What happened? The public came in disbelief. More start coming. Friends would bring another friend, and then other friends. At the end, the last month, the entire public was counting seconds with her, and this became something else completely. It became really a question of the temporality of life, of consciousness, a vessel of time, of another dimension. Everything was transformed into something else. The performance is a life-form of art. It’s not something like you come to the museum, you see the painting, and the next time maybe you won’t come anymore. You see it maybe once more. Performance, you have to be there. It’s a life-form of art.
Miles: I highly recommend it.
[audience laughs and claps]
Karen Archey: I also think there’s a professionalization of performance happening. There are different kinds of rules, workshops, and guidelines that you’ve created together with the MAI employees, which enable institutions to show works that are historical. Of course, together with our producer, Anouk van Amsterdam, and my co-curator, Nina Folkersma, we’ve learned a lot about how to responsibly show a performance that is very challenging for the performers, the visitors, and the museum alike. For example, we have a doctor on call and a psychologist and various safety protocols.
Marina: Which, in my time, never existed, not any of this. Miles, what do you think about this? All this protection or maybe overprotection? And how much risk you take yourself, doing what you’re doing?
Miles: I think it depends on the institution that we’re inhabiting; whether it’s at Carré or South Bank, different places have different rules. It’s crucial to consistently consider whether performance, as a medium, will become mainstream and integrated into spaces such as museums or galleries, where it can be held to the same standard as painting, sculpture, photography, or video.
Karen Archey: That’s the other thing I think is really clear about Marina’s work and how you relate to each other: her great advocacy and paving the way for younger performance artists to get paid.
Miles Greenberg, Oysterknife (2020), 24-hour livestream. Courtesy of MAI and Phi Centre.
Miles: It also taught me professional standards. Marina was the first person and MAI the first institution that ever paid me to do a performance. People need to think about how to give performance artists a livelihood, and how it can be sort of sustainable. I really have to thank Marina for that. It also taught me that I can ask for the same things that a painter gets in a space. I think that’s of vital importance for the continuity of the medium, because preservation is another thing. You have to make it first. I’ll just quickly mention one work that we did together, that MAI put up on its platform during the lockdown. That was also the most viewed work, that I think really changed the paradigm around my practice. It was this piece to walk on a conveyor belt for twenty-four hours straight, with no breaks. It was live streamed through the MAI’s YouTube channel and website. It was the largest audience I’ve ever had, even though they weren’t there in person.
We were in Montreal and it was co-produced with PHI Centre, where they had an empty theater where we did this, and I think, quite similar to a lot of what Marina is saying, that piece really changed my life. It rewired my brain. I often think of the pieces that we as artists do when we’re doing performances, when we’re putting ourselves on the line. For us, at least, there’s always a before that piece and after that piece, which for me was called Oysterknife. What I really want when I’m thinking of advocacy in the future of performance, and the preservation of it, is allowing it the respect and the honor and the sort of sacred ground that it is for each of us as people. How much it changes in us. I really have to take my hat off to all of us for the vulnerability and the openness to put on shows like this, because I think that’s a really big part of it.
Marina: I need to just say one thing. You know, like what I was for you, when I became a performance artist there were two institutions who actually opened it up for me. One was the Cultural Center in Belgrade, where we really started doing performances, which was really difficult with the communist background. Then coming here to Amsterdam and being confronted with the De Appel, which was one of the only galleries in Europe doing radical performances. I met other active conceptual performance artists from the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as James Lee Byars, Terry Fox, and Chris Burden. I think about the people I was not even dreaming of in this world, that they’re actually part of the family of performance artists. For every one of us, there is always something that has to be triggered, that actually blows you away with the possibilities.
Rein Wolfs: You spoke about sacred ground. We hope to be a sacred ground, also as a museum—as the Stedelijk Museum—during the next months for Marina’s retrospective exhibition and for Miles’s Truth at Buro Stedelijk.
Question 1: Is there a connection between performing and meditation?
Marina: Meditation is done at the temples. Performance is a different story. Again, we are talking about content. It was one of the tools that we used to train, to meditate in order to do the performance, but performance and meditation are not the same thing.
Question 2: I’m from Sarajevo. I can relate to some of the Balkan issues and things you’re talking about that are in your performance. Have the 1992 and 1995 happenings in Sarajevo had any kind of reflection in your work?
Marina: Of course. Balkan Baroque is a typical work that took me three years to actually make. You can’t just close your eyes with this happening around you. Especially when it’s happening in my own country.
Question 3: How do you personally navigate performance being at points too much?
Miles: For me, it’s like if you feel the need to do something and if you feel the compulsion to make a work of art or be in a spotlight or make something happen, such as putting an idea outside of your body into the material, then that’s the be-all and end-all. You’re in service to that. Personally, I feel like artists are artists because we don’t really have much of a choice. I don’t think that there’s a question, I think there’s a fear to overcome, but I don’t think there’s a question as to whether or not you have to do it.
Marina: You have to be yourself and you have to be sure that what you’re doing comes from your heart. That’s it.
