Marina Abramovic’s show is only of interest to diehard fans

‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?’ More than 30 years after the Guerrilla Girls posed this question on their feminist poster, the answer suggested by the Royal Academy’s Marina Abramovic retrospective – touted as the first solo show by a woman artist in the main galleries – is: ‘They don’t have to, but it helps.’

Abramovic achieved fame in the 1970s with a series of gruelling performances that tested the limits of her mental and physical endurance. But without the nudity, performances such as ‘Freeing the Body’ (1975), in which she danced till she dropped, and ‘Lips of Thomas’ (1975), in which she consumed a kilo of honey and a litre of wine before flogging herself, incising a communist star on her stomach and lying on a cross made of ice, would not have attracted the same degree of attention. 

It’s no accident that a performance involving nudity is the talking point of this show. Now 76, Abramovic no longer performs in person but has trained up a roster of young artists in her method to revive four signature works. Two of them are presented by nude women; a third, ‘Imponderabilia’ (1977), recreates a legendary performance in Bologna in which Abramovic and her then partner Ulay stood like human caryatids in a gallery entrance obliging visitors to squeeze between their nude bodies until the polizia arrived to spoil the fun. The boys in blue won’t be descending on Burlington House as the door in question is well within the gallery precinct, and embarrassed visitors are given the option of slipping round the side.

The whole exhibition is sanitised. The pile of rotting cow bones Abramovic scrubbed clean in ‘Balkan Baroque’ (1997), stinking out the basement of the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, lies clean and dry on the gallery floor.