She is on a strict diet, and will shortly be leaving for Brazil to meet up with some sort of shamanic adviser. For her Serpentine show, Abramović has to be fit, both mentally and physically. Now here she is on a dull morning in a studio in Brooklyn, dressed head to toe in Givenchy, her favourite designer, and nibbling on what looks like a pellet of astronaut food. Fox News got very cross about what it all meant and referred to her as "some Yugoslavian-born provocateur," while a curator at the Whitney Gallery called her "one of the most significant artists of the second half of the 20th century." For her part, Abramović sat. For three months, Abramovic sat there, impassive, during which time The Artist is Present drew record crowds to the gallery and became one of the most famous and controversial pieces of performance art ever staged. At least one took off all her clothes and had to be removed by security. Then, Abramović sat in a chair in the gallery for eight hours a day, while visitors streamed in and, one by one, occupied the chair opposite her. This June, Abramović, who at 67 sometimes refers to herself as "the grandmother of performance art", will open an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London, her first original performative show in the UK, in which, she says, she will be more daring and more vulnerable than she was both in Belgrade and at MoMA in New York, four years ago. "How lucky I am," she says in her still heavy accent, and laughs. I was ready to die." At the end of six hours, she walked away, dripping with blood and tears, but alive. "I had a pistol with bullets in it, my dear. Some of the items were benign a feather boa, some olive oil, roses. At a gallery in her native Belgrade, Serbia, she laid out 72 items on a trestle table and invited the public to use them on her in any way they saw fit. In 1974, Marina Abramović did a terrifying experiment.
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