In view of the upcoming Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy of Art (London), running from September 23rd to January 1st 2024, Annalisa Burello presents a reading of the artist’s career and personal life through a psychological and anthropological lens. In this artist’s ethnological study, Marina is the first-person informer through her autobiography, Walk Through Walls (2016), and several recorded interviews and talks that she has released over the years. 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, were she 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 healing 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, the article concludes that Abramović is a spiritual charismatic figure who is generating countercultural communitasthrough 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.
BIOGRAPHY
Annalisa first attained a master degree in Financial and Monetary Economics at Bocconi University in 1993, followed by a fifteen-year career in investment banking. Since 2008 she has retrained as a visual artist, achieving a BA (Hon) Photography at the University of Westminster in 2019. Her tryptic Impermanence from her degree project The Seeker was accepted by the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition in 2022. In the same year she also accomplished a MSc in Anthropology of Religions in the Contemporary World at the London School of Economics.
Since 2018, Annalisa has been researching the role of Art in Spirituality and how spiritual experiences and practices relate to creativity. Her goal is to articulate a secular spirituality for the Spiritual-But-Not-Religious person, to include artistic practices. In this role, she has published articles in both the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (2020) and the Journal for the Study of Spirituality (2023) as an independent scholar. She is also co-chairing the Spirituality and the Arts (SASIG) initiative for the International Network for the Study of Spirituality (INSS).
Currently she is enrolled in a training course to become a certified Holistic Integrated Creative Arts Therapy practitioner with the Soul School.
Links:
Academia: https://lse.academia.edu/AnnalisaBurello
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annalisa-burello-9584383b/
Join our Facebook Group called Spirituality and the Arts using this link.
For more details, see https://spiritualitystudiesnetwork.org/Spirituality-and-the-Arts-SIG
The SIG Chairs: the Rev. Prof. June Boyce-Tillman, Dr Lila Moore, Annalisa Burello.
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