Latest news with #MarinaAbramović
Time Out
23-05-2025
- Time Out
The 11 best day trips from Los Angeles
2hrs by car A visit to Palm Springs is better as a weekend trip, but those who don't mind waking up early and getting home late will find that it's an excellent place for an action-packed day trip. Start with a couple of bagels from Townie Bagels or an early meal at Cheeky's, one of the only brunch options in town that I think is actually worth waiting for. In the winter months, I love the area hikes; there's the beginner-friendly two-mile loop with a waterfall at Tahquitz Canyon, which requires an entry fee and a full water bottle (trust me, it's for your own good). For more of a workout, look to the longer, more challenging trails nestled in the Indian Canyons, some of which lead to a breathtaking palm oasis. If you want to avoid getting sweaty altogether, you can escape the heat and take the Aerial Tramway ($35) to the top of the San Jacinto Mountains for gorgeous views of the desert and, sometimes, enough snow for sledding in the winter. For a full day of relaxation, there's nothing more luxurious than the Spa at Séc-he. Located in the heart of downtown, the spa draws from the original water source that gave Palm Springs its name and offers bodywork, mineral baths and more. For more budget-friendly options, drive half an hour to Desert Hot Springs for a day pass at the Spring Resort & Spa or Azure Palm Hot Springs. Of course, the touristy downtown area offers incredible shopping, as well as the Palm Springs Art Museum, which features a sculpture garden and a permanent collection that includes works from world-renowned contemporary artists like Marina Abramović and Anish Kapoor. The Palm Springs Air Museum and quirky Moorten Botanical Garden also make for kid-friendly, fairly educational afternoon activities. For vintage clothing lovers, the estate sales in the desert are gold mines—but if you'd rather let someone else do the bulk of curation, shops like Melody Note Vintage and the Frippery offer beautifully curated racks of midcentury clothing for easy (though pricey) browsing. By the time sunset rolls around, you'll probably be hungry. Avoid the glut of middling, touristy eateries downtown by planning ahead (even by a few days!) and making a reservation. There's the unassuming, fairly casual appeal at Johannes, a longtime Austrian locals' favorite; the seasonally inspired menu at Workshop Kitchen + Bar, which also offers a charming patio; and if you can snag a reservation at Bar Cecil (which drop on Resy at midnight, 14 days in advance), you should absolutely go. If you're not able to plan ahead, you can also try your luck for a seat or two at the bar right before Cecil opens. For classic steaks and bona fide retro vibes, look to Mr. Lyons and Copley's on Palm Canyon. Other great, more spontaneous walk-in options include Chef Tanya's, one of Southern California's best vegan restaurants and Alice B., a new seasonal restaurant from the longtime culinary duo behind L.A.'s award-winning Border Grill. Time Out tip: Peninsula Pastries. Just note they close in the summer, when the extreme heat makes it impossible to keep the ovens on.
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Gilbert and George go to hell and back while Marina Abramović sexes up Manchester – the week in art
Death Hope Life FearProvocative and personal, public yet intimate pictures created by Gilbert and George in the 1980s and 90s – including their first naked self-portraits. The Gilbert and George Centre, London until end of year Joseph Wright of Derby: Life on PaperDrawings by the brilliant 18th-century artist who painted Derby Museum's masterpiece The Orrery. Derby Museum and Art Gallery until 7 September Sussex ModernismJacob Epstein and Ivon Hitchens are among the modern artists associated with Sussex in this show that tells an ambitious local story. Towner Eastbourne until 28 September Elisabeth Frink: A View from WithinThe realist yet mythic world of this modern sculptor of people and animals. Salisbury Museum from 24 May until 28 September Impressions in WatercolourVisionary watercolours from the Romantic age, by the likes of Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman and – you guessed it – JMW Turner. Holburne Museum, Bath, until 14 September 'In our culture today, we label anything erotic as pornography.' So says Marina Abramović, whose immersive artwork Balkan Erotic Epic will have its world premiere in Manchester this October. Seventy performers will re-enact ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals such as Women Massaging Breasts, pictured above, at Aviva Studios. Those who squirmed and cringed at her earlier interactive nude works will want to make alternative plans. David Hockney's early work was hip and horny but in search of a style A new exhibition at the Barbican uses sound to shake you to your core Physique magazines showing finely muscled men had a gay following for decades Nnena Kalu is the first learning-disabled person to make the Turner shortlist Grayson Perry isn't bothered by AI using his work Aubrey Williams, part of the first abstract art to hit the UK, is getting a reappraisal The joyous art of married artists Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely is on joint display Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Eva, one half of performance art duo 'from the future' Eva & Adele, has died A Musical Party in a Courtyard by Pieter de Hooch, 1677 The contrast between the shady courtyard in the foreground, where people chat and play music around a table, and the sunny canal seen through a dark stone gateway, gives this painting a haunting, heart-catching subtlety of mood. But it's even more nuanced and poetic than that: a deep blue sky and bronzed clouds above reveal that we're seeing the last gleam of the day. This explains why the courtyard is already so dark while the buildings across the canal are bright. It also gives a moral unease to the scene. There's flirtation going on: to the sweet sounds of string music, the man and woman at the table laugh over drinks and snacks. His face is positively sinister as he looks at her from shaded eyes. Meanwhile, the man in the doorway is a devilishly dark figure against the light. It will soon be night, and all our sins will be upon us. National Gallery, London If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Manchester to host world premiere of Marina Abramović's Balkan Erotic Epic
Marina Abramović is an art world superstar well known for challenging visitors' awkwardness at sex and nudity by, for example, asking them to squeeze through a doorway between a naked couple. This year, she will take it to a new level in what she is calling the most ambitious work of her long career – an immersive erotic epic featuring performers re-enacting ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals. Manchester will be the venue for the world premiere of Abramović's Balkan Erotic Epic. It is, Abramović says, a reflection on how 'in our culture today, we label anything erotic as pornography'. There will be a cast of 70, including dancers, musicians and singers, with the production unfolding across 13 scenes. Anyone flustered by the closeup sight of breasts, bottoms, vaginas and penises should probably start drawing up alternative plans for October. The scenes will include Scaring the Gods, a recreation of a centuries-old ritual in which Balkan village women would try to keep the rain away by running to the fields, lifting their skirts up and baring themselves to the heavens. Fertility Rite will re-enact a fevered ritual where naked bodies writhe against the ground in 'a desperate call for fertility'. Massaging the Breast explores a ritual where women do just that, gesticulating over graves to awaken the earth. Abramović has described the work as the fulfilment of a long-term dream. 'Balkan Erotic Epic is the most ambitious work in my career,' she said. 'This gives me a chance to go back to my Slavic roots and culture, look back to ancient rituals and deal with sexuality in relation to the universe and the unanswered questions of our existence. 'Through this project I would like to show poetry, desperation, pain, hope, suffering and reflect our own mortality.' Belgrade-born Abramović, 78, is one of the world's most distinguished artists with a career spanning five decades. She is seen as a boundary pushing pioneer of performance who has regularly used her own body to test the limits of physical and mental endurance, often having to be rescued from peril by audience members. She has explored Balkan erotic rituals in film before, but the project premiering in Manchester is a new, much more ambitious work. In an interview last year, Abramović acknowledged that British people have a peculiar sensibility about certain things. 'You're so puritan about everything, about nudity, about sexual organs,' she said. She revels in challenging that. At her blockbuster retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2023 she re-staged a work called Imponderabilia featuring a naked couple in a doorway it would have been rude for visitors not to squeeze through. The question for many was whether to face the naked man or the naked woman. Some went through, apologising. Others were nonchalant, as if it was something they did all the time. Balkan Erotic Epic is produced by Factory International and will be staged at Aviva Studios. The artistic director and chief executive, John McGrath, said it was an honour, describing Abramović as 'one of the most influential artists of our time'. He added: 'This new performance work offers an unmissable opportunity for audiences to experience the next chapter of her creative life – bold, immersive and on a scale that's totally unprecedented.' Audiences will be invited to navigate the performance as they wish with the possibility of 'pop-up encounters' of 'intimate performances, feverish dances and haunting songs'. It is based on folklore and ancestral traditions from regions taking in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Montenegro as well as Roma and Traveller cultures. The idea is that 'erotic' is not something that should be seen as taboo, but more as 'a vital spiritual and life force'. After Manchester, the production will be seen in Barcelona, Berlin, New York and Hong Kong. Balkan Erotic Epic is at Aviva Studios 9-19 October. Tickets currently on sale for Factory International members and will be available for the general public on 29 May
Daily Mail
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Artist who had multiple orgasms in public museum reveals the 'exhausting' effect it had on her
An artist who had multiple orgasms in public gallery revealed the 'terrible' effect it had on her in the following years. Marina Abramović, from Serbia, is a performance artist who spent over five decades pushing the limits of art through controversial performances, including switching places with a prostitute in the red light district in Amsterdam in the 70s. Among her controversial stunts is a performance in the 2005 series, Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, in which she masturbated for eight hours straight. The series, which comprised of several performances, took place across a number of days at the museum and was dedicated to the artist's late friend, Susan Sontag. But the performance that stood out was the second, in which she recreated another famous performance piece from 1972 by Vito Acconici, and masturbated underneath a stage for several hours. Reflecting on the controversial performance several years on, Abramovic told fashion designer Bella Freud it had been an 'exhausting' experience. Speaking on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, the artist said: 'I had to do this for seven hours, I think I had more than five orgasms. It was really difficult because the next day I had do another performance. I was exhausted.' Marina took inspiration from another artist named Vito Acconci, who developed a performance called 'Seedbed' where he hid underneath a ramp at the Sonnabend Gallery in NYC and masturbated while speakers played him talking about his fantasies of people walking above him. She said she wanted to recreate 'Seedbed' from the perspective of 'female energy', which prompted her to add the performance into the Seven Easy Pieces series. Her conversation with Bella Freud follows comments Abramovic made to New York Magazine in which she said she'd 'never concentrated so hard in my life'. 'The problem for me, with this piece, was the absence of public gaze: only the sound. But I heard that people had a great time; it was like a big party up there! I ended with nine orgasms,' she said. 'It was terrible for the next piece - I was so exhausted!' The Seven Easy Pieces series isn't the only work of Abramovic's to have made waves in the art industry - after her 1970s stunt shocked the world. However the 79-year-old is most famous for her 'Rhythm 0' piece, a now notorious six-hour performance which tested her will - and the self control of audience members. Carried out in 1974, Abramović lay prone on a table surrounded by 72 objects which included matches, saws, nails and a gun loaded with a single bullet. As audience members interacted with her, they were invited to use the objects in any way they desired. She'd been stripped of her clothes and had her skin slashed with blades, one person even held a loaded gun to her head and put her finger on the trigger. She later said she was 'ready to die' if that was the consequence of that performance. In the 1970s Marina swapped places with a prostitute in the red light district in Amsterdam for six hours for a performance called Role Exchange. She said: 'I asked her to go to the gallery at be me and I sit in the window and become her. 'It was pretty scary stuff to do, but this was in 1975, I did it for six hours, it was so fascinating. 'It was my first time in Amsterdam and my first time to do a performance there. 'This was logical for me to do because in that time my education was always that being a prostitute was the lowest thing to be and my mother would just die when found out I done this work, so all the reason to do it.' On her website, she spoke about the exchange, saying: 'She give me only the instruction that I should never go below her price because I will ruin her business. 'So I had the two customers; one asked about her, and the second one didn't want to pay the price. 'She said to me that I would starve if I will be prostitute because I don't have any talent for that role.' One of her most celebrated artistic performance, known as The Artist Is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2010. The exhibition featured Marina's performance piece, where she sat at a table in the atrium gallery and invited visitors to sit opposite her for silent contemplation. The performance lasted for 736 hours, and over 1,500 people sat opposite her during the show. She said: 'Anything I do before I start I have enormous fear, I have cramps in my stomach, I got the bathroom, I just sit there, but if I don't have fear I will panic that I don't have fear. 'Fear is incredible, it is an indication that I am here 100 percent, but the moment that I am in front of the audience it disappears. 'Then I just there with them, I have to be with my mind and my body and the public, they feel the fear, they feel the insecurity, they feel everything so you really have to be present for them.
The Guardian
23-02-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
I am a tweakment holdout. When will wrinkles, bad teeth and big pores be back in fashion?
Totally neutral question, no right or wrong answer: how do you feel about salmon sperm? It's not a Nordic culinary microtrend or a sex thing, but a beauty treatment, in which 'Polydeoxyribonucleotides (PDRN) derived from purified fragments of DNA extracted from yes, 'salmon sperm'' are injected into your face. It does seem to work: proper research has found PDRN has wound-repairing properties in hard-to-treat contexts such as diabetic ulcers and deep burns. Good news (unless you're a male salmon). But what is it doing in healthy faces? I learned about salmon sperm in a Sunday Times article on the 'skincare secrets' of '26 tastemakers', which I read, increasingly aghast. It was a litany of lasers, microneedling, injectables and proprietary treatments with silly names that left me shouting crossly at my laptop: 'But what does it do?' The only treatment I related to at all was Marina Abramović recounting how a friend of her mother's put hot mashed potato on her face to temporarily erase wrinkles; Abramović herself uses 'thermage radiofrequency'. No wonder a salmon sperm practitioner says it's 'an exciting time in the aesthetic industry.' Some contributors were celebs, regularly running the unforgiving gauntlet of high-definition television, and the rest were at least very interested, if not professionally involved, in beauty, so they probably aren't typical. And there's a certain honesty to it, at least. No one is making out their dewy glow is 'just good genes' and 'loads of water'. But I also think this newfound willingness to talk about 'tweakments' (a jaunty portmanteau that makes me queasy) is a product of them being absolutely everywhere. Because they are everywhere, for everyone. According to researchers at University College London, the UK injectables market will be worth £11.7bn by next year, with Botox and fillers available anywhere from Harley Street to high-street hairdressers. Writing in Grazia last week, the Guardian beauty columnist Sali Hughes described how 'women in teaching, policing and the civil service' ask her advice on where to get 'good injections'. In the US, Botox use by 20- to 29-year-olds has increased 28% since 2010, with gen Z buying into 'prejuvenation' (another awful portmanteau), fuelled by the poreless perfection offered by filters, staring at themselves on pandemic screens and social media skinfluencers (argh). I shouldn't be surprised – actual children are buying expensive anti-ageing potions and fretting about their nonexistent crow's feet now. But still, this dramatic normalisation of invasive beauty procedures is unnerving. For one thing, tweakments are so expensive! It's none of my business how people spend their money – my disposable income is dedicated to becoming the Joe Exotic of decorative poultry – but will we end up with an attractiveness inequality gap? Or will the democratisation of HD face mean almost everyone will be smoothly immobile soon? I suspect there will always be better and worse tweakments: that UCL research also points out how alarmingly unregulated the industry is. It's also uncomfortable feeling so out of step. My only foray into tweakment territory is getting my brows, lost to alopecia, tattooed back on (which demonstrates how central frowning is to my character, so Botox is out). It's not that I'm smugly delighted with my 50-year-old face: the baleful crone in my new passport photo appears, inexplicably, to have a single black eye (actually just a dark circle), adding to the 'pensioner arrested after brawl outside bookies' vibe. It would be nice to feel better about my neck, but not nice enough to actually do anything painful and expensive about it. I suppose we tweakment holdouts will have to wait, and hope, for the tide to turn. As Ozempic and shiny veneers may make thinness and Hollywood teeth look boring and basic, perhaps perfect faces will fall from fashion? I mention the veneers, because when I was watching the Bridget Jones movie, I become fascinated by Chiwetel Ejiofor's teeth. They're absolutely lovely, yes, but sort of … normal? One lower one peeps out from slightly behind the others. It only added to his charm. Hugh Grant's 64-year-old face looked charismatically crumpled too. Maybe when everyone has been homogenised to a glazed sheen of perfection, sagging, bumps, gaping pores and rough patches will be the height of desirability. At that point, I'll be ready for my closeup. Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
