Artist who let public do ‘whatever they wanted’ to her for six hours reveals why she had nine orgasms on stage

Marina Abramović has spent decades building a reputation as one of the most fearless figures in performance art. Now 78, she is still widely associated with extreme works that pushed the limits of what an artist’s body could endure in front of an audience.

One of her most famous pieces took place in Naples, where she stood completely still for six hours while visitors were invited to use 72 objects on her however they chose. The items included scissors, a scalpel and even a loaded gun. That performance became one of the defining examples of her willingness to turn vulnerability, danger and public reaction into art.

But a resurfaced interview has brought attention back to another performance from her career — one that was not about physical threat, but about taboo, exposure and the body in a very different way.

In 2005, Abramović presented Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The project involved restaging several major works from the history of performance art, including pieces first created by other artists. Among them was Seedbed, originally performed in 1972 by Vito Acconci.

Acconci’s version involved the artist hiding beneath a wooden ramp inside a gallery. While visitors walked above him, he masturbated for hours and spoke his sexual fantasies aloud through speakers, making the audience part of the work even if they could not see him.

Abramović’s recreation followed the structure of the original piece. She remained hidden below the ramp, masturbating for several hours while recorded audio of her own fantasies played for the people moving above her.

She later explained that what attracted her to Seedbed was not only its taboo nature, but also what she saw as its sculptural quality. The work was not simply about shock. It involved the shape of the space, the position of the unseen body, the movement of visitors overhead and the tension created between private acts and public presence.

After the Guggenheim performance, Abramović spoke bluntly about how difficult it had been. She said that experiencing orgasms in public while responding to the footsteps of visitors above her required extraordinary concentration. According to her, she had never had to focus so intensely before.

By the end of the piece, she said she had experienced nine orgasms. Rather than describing it as easy or glamorous, she called the aftermath exhausting, noting that it made the next performance in the series especially difficult because she was physically drained.

Abramović also pointed out that restaging the work as a woman changed the experience. A female body in that situation could not simply reproduce the meaning of a male artist’s original action. The physical reality, the vulnerability and the way the audience might understand the performance were all different.

The Seven Easy Pieces project also came from a broader frustration. Abramović felt that performance art had been absorbed into mainstream culture without enough acknowledgment of the artists who created its original language. She argued that many people were borrowing from performance art while failing to refer back to the works and artists that shaped it.

To address that, she obtained legal permission and paid fees to restage the foundational pieces ethically. For her, recreating them was a way of preserving performance art history and giving credit to the artists whose ideas had influenced culture far beyond galleries and museums.

Abramović has also described orgasm itself in unusually expansive terms. To her, it can become more than a bodily event. She has spoken of it as a moment that can make a person feel alive and connected to nature — to birds, rocks, trees and the surrounding world — with everything appearing brighter and more beautiful.

Her Guggenheim performance remains controversial, but it also fits the pattern of her career: using her own body to examine endurance, fear, vulnerability, intimacy and the boundaries between the private and the public. Like much of her work, it asked viewers to confront not only what the artist was doing, but why they reacted to it the way they did.