Between music and Performing art.

They are both known for their transgressive attitude and the eccentricity in their performances. 

Lady Gaga, singer, producer and queen of dressing up, and Marina Abramovich, contemporary art’s pioneer, well-known for the intensity in her pieces, together in a common project.

But how did this cooperation start?

Lady Gaga and Marina Abramovich in "Cleaning the house".

Marina Abramovic’s career started in the ‘70s, when the serbian artist dedicated herself to experiment and research about the relationship between  body and mind. From the start her performances already develop two important elements: “the artist” and “the body”. One of her most famous performances is a video made in 1975 where she is strongly brushing her hair with an iron brush and a wooden one, and repeating “Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful” until she scars her face. She also recorded some videos where she’s screaming loud until she loses her voice and mind. The mind and its awareness are the centre of Marina Abramovic’s work: awareness of mind and body. 

Another important element in her artistic thought is her connection with the audience. Audience is so into her artworks and it’s part of them. The intercourse between those two influences, the awareness and the audience, achieves the top in her last big work, the Abramovich Method.  

Through her foundation, The Marina Abramovic Institute, she studied some exercises to develop the perception of the body. The Abramovic Method uses elements of the nature, minerals, , deep meditation, and are allowed to everybody would like to try this experience. They are real interactive installations that bring the audience, who’s also the protagonist, to isolation and inner peace. The target of the Method is to empty mind and body by  energies and pressures and bring them to a very high level of awareness. 

Marina Abramovich in "Art must be beautiful, artists must be beautiful".

In August 2013, the one who subject herself to the Method was Lady Gaga, who already cooperated with the Serbian artist in July 2013. She was disappeared from the scenes In February 2013 after a surgery intervention to the leg, and she decided to come back to the audience working hard on herself. In the video “Cleaning the house” she shows up naked, in a wood, focused in meditation exercises. She shows herself up hugging a big rose quartz crystal, standing up on the dock of a river, blindfolded, or sitting down closed to Marina herself, or laying on a wooden floor, modulating her voice.

Lady Gaga in "Cleaning the house"

This cooperation between these two women is age-old well-known, and it’s made of readings and charity shows. Their meeting perfectly reveals that art is made of two faces, the commercial one and the spiritual one. Through the notoriety of Lady Gaga and all the other public figures who took part in the Method and the nosiness for “Cleaning the house”, the Serbian artist and her work reached a very high level of fame all over the world. Her jump into the Method meant to Lady Gaga also a new rebirth after her recovery. She actually left her costumes and wigs that made her look so peculiar for coming back to simplicity, as her brand-new video “Applause”, that came out last August 19^th demonstrates. So that’s a new Lady Gaga, closer to performing art. She has never hidden her passion for contemporary art and her House of Gaga (a club of young designers and artists that she created) is a clear example of it. The couple Gaga-Abramovic is not just another link between music and art, but also another step on the way to a universal idea of art, made of a commercial and concret dimension, but a very deep on made of spirit too.

To watch the video.