The Abramović Method After the Body

Marina Abramović has spent decades making presence difficult.

It has never been enough, in her work, simply to appear. Presence had to be prepared, endured, restricted, purified, exposed. The body had to sit, stand, walk, fast, remain silent, submit to time, or become available to others under conditions that could not be mistaken for ordinary spectatorship.

That history now enters a different form.

Taex and Abramović have announced METHOD, a new iteration of their avatar project, planned as a series of 125 avatar-based performances drawing directly from the teachings and methods developed through the Marina Abramović Institute. The avatars are described as performing actions familiar from Abramović’s language of attention: walking backwards with a mirror, opening and closing a door, and other durational gestures transferred into digital form.

The announcement can be read as another movement of performance into technology. But the more difficult question is what happens to the Abramović Method once the body no longer has to suffer it.

Abramović’s practice has always worked through a charged exchange between instruction and vulnerability. In Rhythm 0, the audience was given power over the artist’s passive body. In The Artist Is Present, presence became almost architectural: a seated body, a chair, a stranger, time held until it altered the room. In 512 Hours, the public did not merely look at performance. The public entered procedures of slowness, silence and attention.

The Method grew from that shift.

It is not only a set of exercises. It is a structure of deprivation. In the current Cleaning the House workshop model, participants surrender phones, laptops, watches and electronic devices. They refrain from speaking, reading and eating. They enter five days of guided exercises designed to sharpen focus, stamina and concentration. The workshop is not framed as entertainment, nor simply as wellness, but as preparation: a way of placing the body under restrictions so that attention can become possible.

The Method has therefore become more than an artistic vocabulary. It is now a teachable structure, a workshop model, an institutional programme and, increasingly, a transferable system. What began in the extremity of the artist’s body now moves through facilitators, certificates, schedules, fees, digital partners and platforms. None of this automatically weakens the work. But it changes the conditions under which the work is received.

That matters because the Method is often softened when it circulates as an image.

Silence looks peaceful from outside. Stillness photographs well. White clothing, headphones, slow walking and closed eyes can easily become an aesthetic of calm. But Abramović’s own accounts insist on something less decorative. Presence is produced by labour, not mood.

In conversation with Clare Harris around Gates and Portals at Modern Art Oxford, Abramović described the portal as a changed state of consciousness, and the body itself as something that can become a gate through physical conditioning. The body is not incidental to the transformation. It is the material through which transformation is attempted.

That is why the digital turn is not neutral. The avatar can repeat the gesture. It cannot get hungry.

It cannot become impatient, ashamed, exhausted, frightened or physically depleted. It can perform duration without enduring it. It can appear indefinitely without ageing in the same way as the artist. It can transmit an instruction without sharing the human risk that made the instruction necessary.

Abramović understands this distinction more clearly than many narratives around the project. In a 2025 conversation with Taex, she said that performance cannot simply be translated into the digital world by the same rules. It requires another angle, another medium and another form of encounter. Her stated message for the avatar is not speed, spectacle or technological novelty. It is to slow down.

That answer keeps the project from becoming only a technological gesture.

Abramović is not trying to make the avatar behave like a live body. She is trying to use the digital environment against its dominant rhythm. The world of the avatar is usually a world of acceleration: instant access, constant circulation, endless display, frictionless repeatability. Abramović’s proposal moves in the opposite direction. It asks whether technology can be made to carry slowness.

This is where METHOD becomes more than a release. It exposes the difference between access and presence.

Access can be widened. A digital avatar can reach viewers who may never enter a museum, attend a workshop or sit inside a long-duration performance. It can circulate globally. It can outlast the artist’s physical capacity to perform. Abramović has spoken directly about this afterlife, describing the avatar as a way for her performance experience and artistic knowledge to continue after the physical body is no longer there.

That is not a minor point. The avatar is partly an archive. It is also a succession plan.

Abramović is approaching the limit that all performance artists eventually face: the body that made the work cannot remain indefinitely available to it. Performance has always struggled with this problem. Documentation preserves evidence, but not the event. Re-enactment preserves structure, but not origin. Teaching preserves method, but not presence. The avatar offers another answer: not documentation, not re-enactment, not student transmission, but a digital body designed to carry the artist’s gestures forward.

The promise is obvious. So is the problem.

Abramović’s strongest works do not only contain gestures. They contain conditions. The danger of the avatar is that it may preserve the image of the condition while removing the condition itself. Slow walking remains visible. Silence remains legible. Opening and closing a door remains symbolic. But the live uncertainty is altered. No one in the room has to wonder whether the artist can continue. No one has to negotiate the ethics of watching a body under strain. No one has to feel the pressure of shared exposure in the same physical space.

The body has been protected. It has also been removed.

This reversal becomes clearer beside Rhythm 0. Mimo Warto’s earlier Art of Darkness reading of the 1974 performance centred on what happens when the artist gives the audience power over a live, defenceless body. The terror of that work lies in the fact that freedom was not abstract. It touched skin. It moved through hands, objects, hesitation and escalation. The audience could not hide behind spectatorship because its actions produced the work.

METHOD asks almost the opposite question.

What happens when the body is no longer available to harm, but the demand for attention remains?

The avatar does not surrender itself to the audience in the same way. It cannot be cut, exhausted or endangered. It cannot meet the viewer’s gaze with the same biological consequence. Yet it may still ask the viewer to slow down, breathe, wait, repeat, attend. The risk shifts from the artist’s body to the viewer’s willingness to remain with the work.

That shift is not empty.

Abramović has long insisted that the audience is not secondary to performance. In the Taex conversation, she described the audience as something that must learn to perform and have its own personal experience, connecting that trajectory to 512 Hours, Glastonbury, and now the avatar as a tool for reaching a larger public.

If the Method is ultimately about training attention, then the avatar does not need to replace the live body. It needs to produce a condition in which the viewer becomes aware of their own. The question is not whether the digital Marina feels presence. The question is whether the viewer does.

Still, the loss matters.

Abramović’s work has never been only about instruction. It has depended on trust in the reality of the situation. The chair was real. The hunger was real. The time was real. The body’s limits were not symbolic. They were the medium. When Abramović speaks with Harris about “offering labour,” she ties the process to physical preparation, repetition, effort and merit, insisting that the result is not the point; the process is.

A digital avatar can represent labour. It cannot offer it in the same way.

That may be the unresolved truth of METHOD. Its importance may not lie in proving that performance has successfully become digital. It may lie in making visible what cannot be transferred without remainder.

The live body and the trained body are not the same as the transferable body.

The live body risks.

The trained body endures.

The transferable body circulates.

Abramović’s avatar enters that third condition with unusual clarity. It does not erase her history. It depends on it. Without the decades of endurance, danger, silence, boredom, discipline and public exposure, the avatar would be only an image in a new medium. With that history behind it, the avatar becomes something more unstable: a vessel carrying a practice whose deepest force came from the fact that it could not be fully separated from the body that performed it.

Seen this way, the project becomes more than technological novelty.

It belongs to a longer problem in contemporary art: how practices built on presence survive the systems that preserve, distribute and monetize them. Museums turn performance into archives. Institutions turn workshops into programmes. Digital platforms turn gestures into assets. Each step extends the work, but each step also changes the terms under which the work can be encountered.

Abramović has always understood that transformation requires conditions.

Now the condition has changed again.

The avatar may carry the Method beyond the artist’s physical life. It may introduce younger audiences to slowness through the very media that trained them into speed. It may become a guide, a disciplined image that asks the viewer to return to their own body.

But it also leaves the central question intact.

Can presence survive when it becomes transferable?

Any answer that settles too quickly would miss the force of the contradiction. Abramović’s digital turn is serious because it does not escape contradiction. It enters it. The Method after the body may preserve something essential, but it also reveals the body’s resistance to preservation.

Abramović has spent decades making presence difficult.

The avatar makes it available.

Between those two conditions, the future of the Method begins.

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