Annalisa Burello – Art as Spirituality: The Paradigmatic Case of Marina Abramović

By analysing the artist’s description of anomalous experiences in early childhood, a blood disorder, a difficult and life-threatening birth, and several other physical ‘signs’ pointing to shamanic constitution, Burello conjectures that the artist would have been designated a shamanka, a female shaman, if she had been born in a shamanic culture. However, Marina was born in 1946 in communist Yugoslavia during Tito’s dictatorship, from war hero parents. Hence her more mystical and spiritual abilities could not find full expression until much later in life. Performance art became her ritualistic shamanic practice.

Contemporary performance artist Marina Abramović is an example of a post-modern, spiritual figure rooted in the artworld. Her relevance for a secular age is that of a contemporary artist who has developed her own brand of art-based spirituality. Although nonreligious, she does not conform to a materialistic worldview. She holds many so-called ‘New Age’ beliefs which place her among the growing SBNR demographic. She has developed her own ‘spiritual’ method to teach people beyond the elitist artworld, and has created the immaterial Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) to carry on her legacy.

Arguably, therefore, she has effectively transformed herself into a ‘spiritual’ teacher. Drawing on Denita Benyshek’s construct of artist-shaman, scientific explanations about the relieving of pain, and Victor Turner’s concept of spontaneous communitas, I conclude that Abramović is a spiritual charismatic figure who is generating countercultural communitas through her performances, her institute and her teachings, providing an empirical case that art can indeed function as a spiritual but not religious context. Sadly, like many powerful spiritual women burnt at the stake before her, she has been accused of Satanism by fundamentalist Christians and the American alt-right. Misogyny still looms large in the spiritual realm.