Can We Live With Less?

Less of More and More isn’t about having a certain amount, e.g., a capsule wardrobe, or aspiring to some ideal state of efficiency by cleaning out your inbox (though I’m all for that).

It’s about having less, not necessarily fewer.

The adjective less is typically used for things you can’t count: less worry, less confusion, less indulging.

Fewer is for things you can count: fewer shoes, fewer oranges. (Grammarians, before you dive into the comments on this one—yes, there are exceptions, e.g., less than.)

It’s also about deciding what we’ll take lightly and seriously in our lives. 

Taking our work seriously and life lightly

This I learned from the great Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović. (Yes, I’m in awe of performance art when it’s not pretentious or attention-seeking, which is very, very rare.)

She’s been performing for fifty years. There are too many great works to name, but these will give you a sense of what she does.

• The Rhythm Series (1974) included five performances. In Rhythm 5, she set a wooden star on fire and lay in the middle of it (the lack of oxygen caused her to pass out).

  

• In Rhythm 0, she stood passively and allowed the audience to do whatever they wanted to her using a table of objects: honey, a feather, lipstick, a knife, a gun and one bullet.

  

• She performed many works with her lover Ulay. In Breathing in/Breathing Out (1977) they connected their mouths and breathed until they ran out of oxygen. (It took nineteen minutes).

• In Lovers (1988), each walked from one end of the Great Wall of China to (ostensibly) meet in the middle, where they would then marry. (Their relationship was deteriorating by then and they didn’t meet in the middle—Ulay made her walk farther—and they broke up instead of marrying.)

  

• In Balkan Baroque (1997), she spent four days in a stifling basement performance space at the Venice Biennale trying to scrub clean bloody cow bones as a statement about the ethnic cleansing taking place in the Balkans. She won the Biennale’s coveted Golden Lion Award.

  

• The House with the Ocean View (2002) required her to fast, drinking only water, and live on three open platforms in the Sean Kelley Gallery for twelve days. She showered and went to the bathroom in front of the audience.

  

• In The Artist Is Present (2010) she sat without moving or speaking in the atrium of the MOMA across from one audience member at a time for eight hours a day (ten hours on Fridays) for three months. Many described it as a transcendental experience. Abramović said that it forced people to look at themselves in a way we usually don’t.

  

Her work pulls me out of myself.

Each performance takes ordinary experiences and makes them extraordinary as in The House with the Ocean View. Or it spotlights the inhumanity and profound humanity in all of us as in Balkan Baroque, Rhythm 0, and The Artist Is Present. All while pushing the limits of what the human body and spirit can endure.

Taking ourselves lightly

Outside of her work, Abramović is funny and irreverent. I highly recommend her memoir, Walk Through Walls (though reading about her abusive childhood is tough). She laughs at herself and her life yet takes both utterly seriously.

In it, she tells of the month she spent in Bodh Gayā, India, painstakingly rehearsing with and training twelve monks for a performance she was doing in Amsterdam. She returned to Amsterdam to finish preparing. When the monks showed up to perform, it was twelve monks she’d never met before. She asked the person who arranged it, “Where are my monks?” He said, “Oh, those monks didn’t have passports, so we brought these.”

Before walking the Great Wall, she told her father that he’d been part of the inspiration for it. He was a Communist partisan and Yugoslav resistance fighter during WWII who’d been one of the few survivors of the Igman March.  He asked why she was doing it. She said, “Well, you survived the Igman March. I can walk the Great Wall.” He asked how long it would take. “Three months. Ten hours a day of walking.” He said, “Do you know how long the Igman March was?” She had no idea. To her, it had always seemed like an eternity. “One night,” he said.

Her ability to take her work seriously and herself lightly came from simplifying her life and being clear about what was important and what wasn’t. Her art was (and is) everything.

I admire how much she leaves out of her life, primarily trappings the rest of us fall into: no children being a big one—as I’ve never been drawn to heaving any.

She taught me that there’s so much to have less of. Here’s how she described her house in Amsterdam: 

“I had so much space in those six floors. I thought of the house as an extension of my body. I had a thinking room, a room just for drinking water. I had a room with just one chair facing a fireplace, for sitting and staring into the fire. All the living spaces were clean and spare, with perfect wood floors.”

Her current home in Upstate New York is shaped like a six-pointed star. She also has a stunning loft in Soho.

True, I romanticize her and her life. How could I not?

She never sold out her art for money yet managed to buy that derelict house in Amsterdam in the 1960s (complete with squatters and a drug dealer in residence) for 40,000 Guilder, transformed it into a beautiful home (with the drug dealer still in residence), and sold it for 4 million. 

She’s so sane yet has this profession that allows her to behave in ways that are utterly “crazy.”

I love that she went into the world and really experienced people, never sightseeing and instead immersing herself everywhere she went. She did a three-month retreat in Tibet where she repeated a prayer eleven million times.

And then there’s her twenty-five-year career as a teacher. Her workshops are legendary. In the exercise Blindfold, her students (of which Lady Gaga was one) go into the forest behind her house, blindfold themselves, and try to find their way back. In Complain to a Tree, students hug a tree and complain to it for a minimum of fifteen minutes (highly recommended).

And then there’s her life in New York. Years ago, when she first moved there, she attended a birthday party for MoMA PS 1 director Klaus Biesenbach in Biesenbach’s one-bedroom apartment. Only five people were there: her, Biesenbach, Bjork, Matthew Barney, and Susan Sontag. Come on. That’s a If you could have anyone for dinner, who would it be? come true. (She and Sontag became close friends.) 

Her whole existence has been about changing the expectations of how we live and should live, taking away the constraints most people put on themselves and employing others.

She questions humanity, our base natures, and the incredible extremes we can endure. And our incredible depth of empathy and caring—how we can sit across from someone and be moved to tears just by not speaking and not doing.

A Manifesto

Her “An Artist’s Life Manifesto” (2011) is equal parts serious and hilarious. She breaks many of the rules.

It outlines what an artist should do in their life and love life and in relation to the erotic, suffering, depression, suicide, inspiration, self-control, transparency, symbols, silence, solitude, work, friends, and enemies. Two sections talk about the artists’ death and funeral scenarios.

The part that drew me was section 14: An artist’s possessions. The first part is what we usually think of with minimalism and simplicity—fewer objects.

But I was taken by the idea that we each decide for ourselves.

And that the core is having “more and more of less and less.”

How Less saved my life

Given that most people live with too much—particularly intangibles like worry, work, and responsibilities—I flipped this.

I want less and less in a culture of more! more! Less stuff, yes, but we’re also supposed to have more happiness, more life and job satisfaction, more self-awareness—more, more, more.

Before I healed from serious mental illness, I was drowning in more. Not the usual more of stuff and money.

I spent too much of my life looking inward, too much of it looking for what was wrong with me.

I spent too much of my life trying to live like other people—mostly other artists.

I needed less: less therapy, less avoiding my emotions, less feeding my obsessive thoughts, less social interaction (including social media, which I’m no longer on), less trying to be part of a group.

I credit less with saving my life. My pursuit of less restored my personal health (physical, mental, and emotional).

This Substack, Less and Less of More and More, takes an irreverent view of the common ideas about what we might need a little less of in our lives.

If you google Abramović, you’ll likely stumble on the QAnon conspiracy theories she’s sadly been the target of. People have associated her with Hilary Clinton and called her a Satanist. She receives death threats three times a day and fears for her life.

You’ll also find her new skincare line that boasts ingredients like white bread and garlic. (I really want Jessica DeFino to write about it.)

No need to google her. No need for more googling, more understanding, more information. What you have now is perfect.

For those who want less and less of more and more. Readers like you make my work possible. Get the annual discounted subscription for $30/year—the equivalent of purchasing one hardcover book.

It’s Mental Health Awareness Month. Find more that I’ve written about it here. I’ve covered how we need to put less faith in psychiatric diagnoses in Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses and about how we need less of the maintenance model and more of recovery to be part of mental health treatment in Cured: The Memoir.