Except the power of the body.The literalism of the alt-right’s interpretation of the Spirit Cooking dinner recalls the culture wars of the 80s and 90s, where the line between representation and advocacy, between artifice and reality, got blurred… and apparently never got back into focus for some. Since the 1980s, Abramovic has spent months in retreat at Buddhist monasteries in Northern India—does that make her a Buddhist? It was delicious, but I was confident that I wasn’t going to become a Buddhist by eating it.Having known Marina for fourteen years now, and having written a biography, I don’t think she’s ever actually worshipped anything. Marina believes that spirits also need food, and since it cannot be delivered physically, the conversion into light, sound, or emotions can connect them to the food. In perhaps the most disturbing Wikileaks release to date, Tony Podesta (John Podesta’s brother) is invited to a “Spirit Cooking” dinner with performance artist Marina Abramovic. In the email, Abramovic invited Podesta’s brother John, now Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, to join them at a “Spirit Cooking” dinner in her apartment in New York. Not just for the paranoid conspiracy posited by the alt-right—Just to recap what happened: an email Abramovic wrote to her longterm friend and collector Tony Podesta showed up in a wikileaks stash. It’s all about the management of stimulations, deprivations, and aesthetics to achieve—in a down-to-earth cause and effect way—certain physical effects and mental states.

Abramovic also published a Spirit Cooking cookbook, containing comico-mystical, self-helpy instructions like: “spit inside your naval / until the lake is filled / lie motionless / listen to the heartbeat / of a dog.” You’re not really meant to actually do these things. Uczestniczą w tak zwanym „ duchowym gotowaniu ” i organizują imprezy poświęcone poświęceniu ludzi. She kind of believes in everything—and therefore, in a way, in nothing. I’ve had one, at the end of a “workshop” she gave to her students—I was her assistant at the time—in Andalusia in 2005. Spiritual leaders argue that people should refrain from rituals they unsure about, especially those that they do not understand why they are conducted and why they are performed. However, if it is conducted in a private setting, a home, institution, or an organization, then the ritual is more intimate and more of a spiritual ceremony. (Religion however, does not believe in this kind of a ritual and strongly argues against it with some religious leaders arguing that it is entirely satanic and people should not be associated with it. As Abramovic said at London’s Royal Festival Hall last night in a launch event for her new memoir Spirit Cooking later evolved into a form of dinner party entertainment that Abramovic occasionally lays on for collectors, donors, and friends. That’s where John Podesta comes in—or doesn’t, since he never actually attended the dinner, where anyway guests simply made soup, not out of blood or any other bodily fluid, while overseen by Abramovic in full-on comedy schoolmarm mode. The artist chose to make a cookbook, writing a series of “aphrodisiac recipes” that serve as evocative instructions for actions or thoughts. Marina has also published a book on the ritual, and you can well find more details on the spirit cooking recipes and procedures. Dinner with a famous artist might sound deeply mundane, but there is far more to this story. She habitually performs numerological readings on new people she meets, breaking down their date of birth to a single significant number—does that make her a Hindu mystic?