‘Nothing just because it’s beautiful’: Performance artist Marina Abramović on turning her hand to furniture design

In 2010, Marina Abramović sat on a chair in the atrium of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art for 736 hours and 30 minutes as part of her performance piece, The Artist is Present. As she sat, members of the public were invited to sit opposite her and, quite simply, stare into her eyes. In a fast-paced world, and an even faster-paced New York, it was radical, and often moving, to simply sit, stare and acknowledge.

One of the most captivating things about The Artist is Present was its simplicity. There were no fancy props or special effects – just two people and two chairs. This functionality is a recurring theme in the work of the Serbian conceptual and performance artist.

Perhaps it’s not altogether surprising, then, that Abramović has now turned her hand to design, and specifically the design of chairs, unveiling her debut furniture collection at Mexico City Art Week this month (February 2025). The collection, called Elephant in the Room, has been created in collaboration with woodworking design studio La Metropolitana.

Abramović is late to join our video call to discuss the collection, calling me to apologise from the back of a cab in Mexico City. When she finally appears on-screen, she assures me that, in Mexico, arriving 10-to-15 minutes late is normal, so much so that there’s an idiom for it which translates to ‘I am already there, but not yet’.

Naturally, I'm keen to understand what attracted the 'grandmother of performance art' to the medium of design: 'There's actually a lot of crossover between the two in my work, because I constantly use objects that people can sit, stand and lie on – that they can use,’ she says. I’m reminded of Abramović's 1974 performance, Rhythm 0, where she laid out a series of objects, including scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, a gun and a bullet, and stood still while the public was invited to do whatever they wanted to her.

‘I love functionality,’ continues Abramović. ‘I hate coffee table books with a passion. I hate that no one ever reads them and they’re purely decorative.’ She is inspired by the approach of the Japanese: ‘It's not that they don't have stuff, it’s that their stuff is always fit for purpose. In spring time, they will put the spring vase on the table. When winter comes, they bring out the winter vase.’ Abramović also admires the philosophy of the Shakers, the Christian sect who live by the mantra ‘beauty rests on utility’. Spatial minimalism, she says, allows for a ‘free mind’: ‘I have enough going on in my head. Emptiness is something that I like. Emptiness and void.’

Sure enough, the chairs that make up Elephant in the Room are minimal and unadorned. They are made of wood and copper, with what look like little shoes on the ends of the legs.

Despite this, the collection represents a domestication of Abramović’s work that feels incongruous. Functional objects have usually acted as a prop to her art, with the exception of her 1988 collection Transitory Objects, a series of objects that ‘were there for the public to interact with’: a copper bed to lie on, a quartz cushion to lean on, an iron chair to sit on.

Abramović made these as a reaction to a previous performance, The Lovers, an epic adventure where she walked half the length of the Great Wall of China (roughly 2,000km) to meet her partner, German performance artist Ulay, in the middle, where they planned to get married. (Organising the walk, however, turned out to be a maze of red tape which took five years to navigate. By this point, the pair had grown apart and, while they agreed to go ahead with the walk, they decided that they would meet to break up rather than to marry.) ‘When I got back from China, I realised that the public had not been present – we’d been completely alone in nature,’ recalls Abramović. ‘I started thinking about creating something that the public could participate in.’ The result was Transitory Objects.

Elephant in the Room may represent a domestication, but, for the artist, ‘domestic’ is not an insult: ‘My grandmother’s kitchen table was the centre of my world. Now, in America, you have these enormous, super-luxurious kitchens, and nobody even cooks. You just pick up the phone and order a pizza. People don’t have that domestic life anymore, and that’s so sad. Our lives have become so complicated that we forget about the power of simplicity.’

Just because something is minimalist or mundane – stripped back to its most essential components – it doesn’t mean that it is devoid of meaning, says Abramović. Take her performance art: while some may see it as simply existing for shock value, the artist insists that she ‘never [makes] art to provoke’. ‘To me, that’s cheap and vulgar,’ she continues. ‘I create work that makes people think, and if you’re just shocked then you’re not thinking about it.’ Similarly, Elephant in the Room, says Abramović, is ‘all about the content, what I want to say. Not about decoration’.

What does she ‘want to say’ with Elephant in the Room? This was where La Metropolitana, and its founding trio Rodrigo Escobedo, Mauricio Guerrero and Alex Gutiérrez, came in. ‘They think about the history of the wood, which ties into the history of Mexico. They work with indigenous people, local artisans and disadvantaged people. They also use traditional techniques and ethical craftsmanship,’ says Abramović. ‘La Metropolitana wants to tell the stories of their objects. It’s not just about production for hotels and so on, which is why it was so important for me to work with them.’

The materials used in the collection range from precious wood sourced from government seizures to copper recovered from coins and industrial waste. This copper, according to Abramović, represents nervous and energetic systems. This is something of a full circle moment: the Transitory Objects were functional, but the materials they were made of, to Abramović’s mind, also made them vessels to ‘trigger physical or mental experiences’.

Elephant in the Room was inaugurated with a piece of performance art, further imbuing the pieces with meaning. When they were launched, a dinner was held at the La Metropolitana factory. The chairs all had different words written on the back – ‘risk’, ‘love’, ‘adventure’, ‘insecurity’ , ‘harmony’ – and guests had to pick one to sit on. One of the chairs was labelled ‘elephant’, and the person who sat on this wasn’t allowed to talk (as one doesn’t discuss the ‘elephant in the room’).

‘Nothing just because it’s beautiful, it has to be functional,’ Abramović says. Design and art doesn't have to be beautiful, according to Abramović and La Metropolitana, but it does have to have meaning.