“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.
“Fashion is in a state of crisis,” offered Abramović. “It’s recycling different designers for different brands; everything is about content. But there was just an auction yesterday for Vivienne Westwood’s clothes, and I was looking for stuff and thinking how revolutionary, how incredibly progressive she was at the time by reflecting on society and giving a message. Then I thought about Riccardo and how he changed the world bringing couture to the street, having the gay and transgender community in the world of fashion. At that time nobody was doing any of it.”
Tisci and Abramović have collaborated often. There was the time he made the costumes for her opera 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, and the time she art-directed his spring 2016 Givenchy, held on the 14th anniversary of 9/11 in New York. “It’s such a beautiful dress. Riccardo made an incredible concept,” Abramović said of tonight’s ensemble. “I was thinking of how to present this idea, and he made this symbol of peace. When I stand there, it doesn’t look like anything special, but when you open the arms, it’s a peace sign. It’s going to end in a museum.”
Tisci weighed in via email: “Because the message was peace through silence, we thought of what silence actually means: It is always the follow-up to a really strong emotion. That’s what this dress had to embody. The inspiration came from the great art of the Japanese kimono. We loved the idea to turn that into a peace sign. We’ve played with darkness a lot in our fashion journey, so it felt really good and on message to go for a lighter ethereal creation for this special moment.”
Tisci is currently a free agent, having left Burberry in late 2022. “After losing my mother, who was always the most important figure in my life, I’m happy to take a break for a while. I’ve worked my whole life! So I’m taking my time to enjoy it before stepping back into the light,” he said. “Because of our relationship, Marina and I often call each other for support in the big milestones of our lives. She asked if I had time to do this for her. I will always make time for Marina.”
Over the years, Abramović has embraced fashion like few visual or performance artists of her generation. In the ’70s, she said with a laugh, artists “only wore dirty jeans…. Fashion was the enemy, red lips and red nail polish and you were trying too hard. It was seen as terrible,” she said. “I always felt really ugly as a woman, and I never felt secure as an artist. I never had confidence as a woman.” But then, she recalled, she found fashion as a tool. “It’s not wrong to feel empowered, to feel actually good in your clothes. I discovered this and stopped feeling guilty about fashion.”
A pivotal moment, the artist remembers, was hearing something attributed to the designer Issey Miyake. “I was so impressed when they asked him, ‘Why are your clothes so big?’ And he said something that made me understand how important this is. He said, ‘Because I like to have enough space for spirits to live.’” She realized, she said, that designers can be spiritual people. “And then Riccardo came, and he made me feel secure as the woman I am—that I can embody the clothes and still be a vocal artist.” Ever since, she said, fashion and art have melded into each other for her.
Abramović’s intervention at Glastonbury could go down as a new pinnacle for the artist. “There is so much anger everywhere in the world, and there are wars everywhere, and there is global warming and poverty, and the messes in Ukraine and Palestine,” said Abramović, “but before this was Afghanistan, and before it was Iran, and before was my own country, the Slavic wars, and before that was something else. I look at this big picture, that human beings are continuously killing each other, and we never learned a lesson of forgiveness,” she said. “What I can communicate to people is that, if you change yourself, you change others.” She cited Mahatma Gandhi as an example of revolution through peace. “We are dismissing that possibility. Silence is not something that is resistance, it is not about protest. Silence is about creating a connection with yourself and others to figure out what I can do—not what they can do, what I can do. We always criticize someone else, but we never look at ourselves.”
