It took me around 30 seconds to make up my mind to buy Star House,’ the performance artist Marina Abramovic says of her home in Malden Bridge, New York State. The house, which is in the shape of a six-pointed star, had languished on the market for five years before she snapped it up for $1.25 million in 2007.
Too avant-garde for American sensibilities, it spoke to the artist on many levels. ‘I was brought up in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, a communist country, so the star is a potent symbol for me,’ Abramovic, 68, explains. ‘It is on my birth certificate; it was on all my textbooks in school.’
It has also been a recurring theme in her work. Performances have seen her lying in a burning star (nearly dying of asphyxiation in the process), and carving a star in the flesh around her navel in what she refers to as an anti-communist act. Abramovic, whose work explores the boundaries of the body and mind, has spent four decades putting herself through trials most people would pay to avoid.
She became a cultural sensation with her 2010 show Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York. The show involved Abramovic sitting motionless and silent for up to nine and a half hours a day (no eating, no toilet breaks) for three months while members of the public queued up to sit opposite her. It broke attendance records at Moma, attracting 850,000 visitors – including Björk, Isabella Rossellini and Sharon Stone. Most recently Abramovic art-directed Givenchy’s spring/summer 2016 fashion show, last month.
It is the physically and emotionally demanding nature of her work that led Abramovic to seek refuge in the country, away from her apartment in Soho, New York City. ‘I moved to Manhattan from Amsterdam, and knew within two years that the place would kill me if I didn’t have somewhere to escape to,’ she says. The 26-acre plot that Star House sits atop, complete with woods and a river, was a perfect salve. ‘The river is a life force. The house has an unbelievably peaceful energy. It’s a place to rehearse, rest and think between projects.’
That said, the decor and gardens needed paring down to comply with Abramovic’s minimalist aesthetic. She contacted the New York architect Dennis Wedlick, who designed the original 3,400sq ft house for a heart surgeon in the 1990s so that he and his three adult children could all have an equal and private space. (Each of the four bedrooms on the third floor occupies a different point of the star; the two bathrooms are in the remaining points.) The family’s taste was fussy, and Abramovic tasked Wedlick with stripping everything back: columns that were not supporting walls or ceilings were removed; interior walls were painted white; and the wooden floors were refinished in a natural colour.
The clean white interiors are brought to life with pops of colour provided by sculptural vintage furniture Abramovic picked up in Hudson’s antique shops. ‘I find that colours like red, blue and orange make me feel happy,’ says the artist, who often uses colour to punctuate her performance pieces.
Now Abramovic uses the house as a retreat, a work space and the headquarters of the Marina Abramovic Institute – or MAI – where she workshops ‘consciousness-raising exercises’ that range from slow-motion walking and sitting in the forest blindfolded to counting grains of rice and meditating inside a ‘crystal cave’. A few years ago Lady Gaga came to stay and immortalised the MAI experience in a video.
When we speak, Abramovic has just been training the performers she has chosen for the Givenchy show, who will be standing on high platforms for four hours. ‘If you want to perform somewhere for four hours, you have to really train. Where is your body? Where is your mind?’ Abramovic spent two years training for the Moma show and believes strongly in the positive power of changing consciousness. ‘I have a hut by the river where I can retreat. I sometimes go there for six days without any food and I never come to the house. I wash in the river; I don’t read, just write. The transform-ation is amazing,’ she says. ‘I could change my apartment in New York easily, but not this house. I feel incredibly peaceful here.’
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaKGeqbKztc6rqmihnqi2pbGMppiroZ6WeqKu0ZqkqK6ZmMButM6mnGg%3D