Reboot Your Life With Marina Abramović

Thomas Stewart, head of retail merchandising at Getty, is an art lover, and a fan of conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović.

On a cold January afternoon in 2020, Stewart had the opportunity to chat with Abramović when he met her by chance at Paris’s YOHJI YAMAMOTO boutique.

There, in the pristine white retail space, they talked about Abramović’s previous visit to Getty—a sold-out discussion in 2016 for her memoir Walk Through Walls—and fashion.

“I was wearing all black,” remembers Stewart, and Abramović gave him a word of advice about the palette: don’t wear too much black, it can make you feel sad. Two years later, when Abramović released a book of advice for art lovers who want to change the way they feel, Stewart—who advises Getty’s merchandising team on art books, toys, and other delightful objects that line the shelves—knew that it would have “a natural appeal for our visitor.”

The Marina Abramović Method: Instruction Cards to Reboot Your Life, available online and in the Getty Museum Store, is designed to change the reader’s mindset through a more personal kind of performance art. 

Each card features a photograph of one of Abramović’s performances on one side, and a directive on the other, like OPEN AND CLOSE THE DOOR FOR THREE HOURS. Follow the instructions, says Abramović, and “you enter into another, different state of consciousness. The door is not the door anymore. It’s transforming in front of your eyes into space, into void, into cosmos.”

“I did not make it for four hours,” says Stewart. But the exercise brought up a fond memory: “As a young child I made up my own version of this: using a hand mirror, I pretended that I was walking on the ceiling through my house.”