In the flesh | Marina Abramović at the RA

What do Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgois, Barbara Hepworth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Berthe Morisot, Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley, Tracey Emin, Leonora Carrington, Tamara de Lempicka, Angelica Kauffman, Artemisia Gentileschi, Yoko Ono, Gwen John, Yayoi Kusuma, Sarah Lucas, Cornelia Parker and Cindy Sherman have in common?

Marina Abramović, The Hero, 2001. Single Channel Video (black and white, sound); 14 minutes, 19 seconds. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives. © Marina Abramović

None of them have been given a solo exhibition in the main galleries of the Royal Academy, that’s what. In fact, NO woman has ever been given that honour in the 255-year history of Britain’s most prestigious venue.

Until now, that is.

Take a bow Marina Abramović, who breaks that shameful cycle with an eponymous self-curated retrospective, which opens to the public today, and runs until January 1.

The 76-year old Belgrade-born performance artist has made her name by turning her body into her art medium, and the show is largely composed of photographs, videos and props from her greatest hits, from the seventies to the present day. Sadly, after suffering serious health problems last year, she has chosen not to appear in the flesh, as it were. Instead, she has trained up a group of young artists to take her place, generally with no clothes on.

There’s an arc to Abramović’s work over the five decades she’s been active. In the 70s and 80s she put herself through the most gruelling, and humiliating, experiences: burning and slashing herself, inviting punters to rip off her clothes and point loaded guns at her head, and doing a lot of screaming and face slapping, with her lover and collaborator Frank Uwe Laysiepen, aka Ulay. In the nineties and noughties, once she had split with Ulay (in the middle of the Great Wall of China, as the culmination of a performance piece) her work became more thoughtful, political and tangible. Her latter years have been more about her mind, than her body: calmer and more meditative. 

Happily, most of this show is dedicated to her early and mid-career. Footage from 1974’s Rhythm 0 is particularly gruelling. Abramović laid 72 items on a table, including whips, knives, a loaded gun, a jar of honey, some grapes, a black hat and a newspaper, and invited audience members to use them to do what they wanted with her: for three hours, she was a mere object. People were nice to her, and then they weren’t. The experience proved so traumatic, some of her hair turned grey overnight.

Three years later, Ulay and Abramović performed Imponderabilia, in Bologna. Both naked, they flanked the gallery’s narrow doorway, so anyone who wanted to enter had to squeeze through the narrow gap shoulder first, thus being forced to make a choice which of the unclad artists to look in the eye as they rubbed against their fleshy parts. After an hour, the police turned up, and closed the place down. You get to see this piece reprised at the RA, with two of the young performers taking the place of Abramović and Ulay. I watched ten people go through before I plucked up the nerve: interestingly each one, male or female, went past facing the girl. I did the same: believe me, this was an oddly powerful experience. (Perhaps it’s important to say that there’s a side door, unencumbered by naked performance artists, for those who want to move from room to room in a more conventional fashion).

My attention span at galleries normally starts flagging after about an hour. It took me around that long to get through the nine rooms, and when I came to the end, I went through them again, backwards. And then another time. This isn’t always art at its most sublime, but there’s a lot to see: ladders with scimitars as rungs; skeletons brought to life on the bellies of naked actors; volumetric alabaster self-portraits; a huge pile of bones (left over from her 1997 Venice Golden Lion-winning show, Balkan Baroque). And, of course, countless photos and videos of Marina Abramović. The performance artist par excellence may not actually be performing – not live, anyway – but her unique legacy is powerful enough to carry this show.

And bravo to her for smashing through one of the art world’s thickest glass ceilings, in true Marina Abramović style. But will it open the floodgates for future female artists at the RA? Sitting on the step of the Joshua Reynolds statue in the courtyard, after exiting the show, I check out on my phone what’s on in the Academy ’s main galleries after Marina. And it’s this: Entangled pasts, 1768-now, Art, Colonialism and Change. Hmm.