Artist who let strangers do anything to her for six hours reveals why she had nine orgasms during a public performance

78-year-old performance art icon Marina Abramović once stood motionless in a Naples gallery for six hours while complete strangers did whatever they wanted to her using 72 objects laid out on a table, including scissors, a scalpel and a loaded gun.

But in a newly resurfaced interview, she has opened up about a different performance entirely: one that ended with nine public orgasms.

What Abramović did at the Guggenheim
In 2005, Abramović took part in her Seven Easy Pieces series at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, during which she recreated a series of landmark works by other artists. One of them was Seedbed, a controversial 1972 piece by artist Vito Acconci in which he hid under a wooden ramp in a gallery and masturbated for hours while speaking his sexual fantasies aloud through speakers to visitors walking overhead.

Abramović’s recreation stayed true to the original. Hidden beneath the ramp, she masturbated for hours while pre-recorded audio played her own fantasies to the audience above.

She told the Guggenheim’s curator it was the “taboo element” that drew her to the piece, along with what she described as its “sculptural element.”

Speaking to New York Magazine after the performance, Abramović was candid about the experience.

“Having orgasms publicly, being excited by the visitors’ steps above me, it’s really not easy, I tell you,” she said.

“I’ve never concentrated so hard in my life. I ended with nine orgasms. It was terrible for the next piece, I was so exhausted.”

She also acknowledged the physical difference between recreating the piece as a woman rather than a man, noting that the experience of the body in that context is simply not the same.

A comment on performance art
Abramović said the Seven Easy Pieces project came from a place of frustration at how performance art had been absorbed into mainstream culture without credit to its origins.

“Everybody was taking from performance – even Lady Gaga – without really referring to the original material,” she told Art Monthly.

To reclaim that space, she obtained legal permissions and paid fees to ethically restage foundational works by the artists who created them.

On the subject of orgasm itself, Abramović has described the experience in almost spiritual terms.

“Such an important moment,” she said.

“It can make you feel life, connected to nature, birds, the rocks, the trees — everything becomes luminous and beautiful.”