The Conspiracy Theory That Marina Abramovic Is the Ringmaster of the New World Order Is the Symptom of a Much Bigger Problem

Last week, amid all the other chaos in the world, something
startling happened: a Microsoft promo for the
HoloLens 2 mixed-reality headset featuring performance
artist Marina Abramović ignited a backlash so fierce that the
Seattle software giant evidently took it offline (the company
itself isn’t offering
comment). I set out to trace the origin of the backlash. What I
found is that, as they say, this rabbit hole goes deeper than I
expected.

The immediate cause of the Microsoft flame-up appears to be a
blog post on Alex Jones’s Infowars site. On his broadcast, Jones
referred to the HoloLens spot as “a two-and-a-half minute ad
literally worshipping the head of the Church of
Aleister Crowley,” referring to Abramović.

In any case, I find that the original Infowars post itself cites
another source for authority: Out of Shadows, a
one-hour-and-17-minute YouTube documentary featuring two former
Hollywood stuntmen talking about their beliefs that a Satanic plot
has infested the entertainment industry. That film reserves a
special place in its climax for Marina Abramović as the
puppet-mistress behind it all.

Before I continue, I want to lay out a simple formula: I think
you should not write about a fringe internet
conspiracy theory if the number of people talking about it is
smaller than the number of people who are likely to read what you
write.

But more than 9 million people have watched one YouTube version
of Out of Shadows since it was posted online
just one week, with a couple million more watching various mirrored
versions. For comparison, Abramović’s own 2015 TED talk has
accumulated 2.7 million
views. The New York Times “TimesTalks” interview with the artist has
been seen about 400,000 times. Art21, the PBS show, has a clip posted in 2012 about Abramović’s
love of fashion that has 250,000.

Conspiracy videos are, in effect, a major avenue by which the
popular image of art is being shaped. Their ripple effects are
likely to extend far beyond a Microsoft commercial.

Hiding in the Shadows

I won’t summarize all of Out of Shadows here,
but I will offer a sense of what it has to say.

First, you are introduced to earnest, likable former Hollywood
stuntman, Mike Smith, who, after
a tragic on-set accident in 2015, meets a physical therapist who
opens his eyes to the “spirit world,” helps him find his faith, and
makes him aware of the “Satanic people” controlling the film
industry. Out of Shadows then follows his
account of being converted by truth-seeking blogs, articles, and
videos online and discovering the “very small group of people who
influence all the content we watch.”

You’d think that the point of centering the video on someone
like Smith would be his first-hand testimony of evil doings behind
the scenes in Hollywood. Not really. “I’ve seen things at parties,”
is all he says. “I’ve seen artwork, I’ve seen statues, I’ve seen
things in some people’s houses that seem to be mimicking occult
stuff I’m reading about. So I’m just like, maybe there is something
to this.”

The “stuff he’s reading” is much more important than anything
he’s actually seen, and most of Out of Shadows simply uses
his narrative as a takeoff point for explicating a variety of
theories about an alliance between government, media, and the
occult.

In this Smith is joined by another stuntman, former George
Clooney double Brad Martin. At about
the half-hour mark, Martin explains how he came to realize
that Zoolander, a film he worked on, is actually
covert CIA propaganda. “In a movie like Zoolander,
when they are showing you that they are controlling Derek
Zoolander’s mind through mind control, you realize that they are
trying to desensitize you, and make you think that what you are
watching is fiction, because it is in a comedy,” he explains.

The rest of the film is essentially a series of long digressions
through the staging of the Gulf of Tonkin
incident, the CIA’s experimentation with
LSD for interrogation purposes, and Sammy Davis Jr.’s flirtation with the Church
of Satan (all of which are true enough, though tenuously
connected).

Marina Abramović first makes an appearance at the 46-minute
mark, shown briefly in a picture with Jared Leto as the film points
to the fact that the Suicide Squad actor lives in a Laurel Canyon mansion
that was once used as a military propaganda studio as evidence of
contemporary Hollywood’s infernal connections. By the end of the
film, though, Abramović will serve as a much bigger symbol.

Marina’s Role

Abramović first became the object of the fascination of the
online right during the final days of the 2016 election, when the
Wikileaks dump of emails from Clinton campaign chairman John
Podesta revealed a reference to
a “Spirit Cooking” dinner
with the artist.

In fact, the email was from John’s brother, Tony, who had supported
a Kickstarter campaign
for the artist’s now-aborted Marina
Abramović Institute in Hudson, New York. One of the prizes for a
large donation was a “Spirit Cooking” dinner that promised to teach
“a series of traditional soups,” as well as to serve an almond,
coriander, peppercorn, and honey “Gold Ball,” a recipe that she had used
previously to celebrate big moments in her work
like the conclusion of her MoMA show. The “Gold Ball” was something
Abramović claimed to have picked up while studying Buddhism in
Northern India.

Tony Podesta was asking his brother if he would like to come.
John never replied to the invitation. But old footage of an obscure
’90s Marina Abramović performance called “Spirit Cooking” contained pig blood
graffiti and occult slogans certainly looked spooky.

Out of Shadows rehashes all this but also views
Abramović’s role as extending far beyond dinner parties. Indeed,
the major contemporary smoking gun it finds of a massive,
hiding-in-plain-sight league of Satanists in the media is the fact
that Abramović tutored Lady Gaga in performance art,
back in 2013—thus making Gaga’s flamboyant stage shows Satanist by
extension. One performance-art exercise, in which Gaga was told to
enter the woods, strip, and then find her way home, is said to be
suspiciously similar to CIA mind-control exercises.

“We know she is a Satanist,” erstwhile journalist Liz
Crokin declares confidently of Abramović in Out
of Shadows.

I asked James Westcott, who authored the 2010
biography When Marina Abramović
Dies (and who previously wrote about the Podesta
“Spirit Cooking” brouhaha for the MIT Press blog)
how he would explain the often unsettling imagery of her work.
Here’s what he wrote:

Even a cursory Google reveals the panoply of religious practices
Abramović has experimented with, from Christian to Buddhist, Hindu,
Australian Aboriginal. But more than that, the spirit (no pun
intended) in which she does it all is pretty blatant too: the more
serious she seems, actually the more playful she is being. It’s
ironic that conspiracy theorists, who claim to be able to see
through the surface illusions of society, take so literally and
superficially one tiny component of a highly theatrical artist’s
massive body of work, and don’t dig deep enough to see how
un-serious it so clearly is. The interesting question is why their
approach is apparently so effective: is it basically leveraging
alienation and extreme social inequality? You can see why the
decadent elite gatherings Abramović organizes look sinister. But
it’s not because of the pretend occult baubles.

That seems about right to me: Abramović’s draws on a lot of
references from different rituals because she is looking for
whatever instrument works to fascinate—but its generally their
superficial magnetism and not their deeper systems of meaning that
interest her. (For that matter, contemporary “Satanists” generally
do not believe in a supernatural Devil but are just theatrical atheists
trying to get a rise out of an overbearing
Christian fundamentalism.)

A Grain of Truth

Now, it’s easy for me to dwell on how outlandish Out of
Shadows seems.

When Mike Smith asserts, as a way to prove the occult media
conspiracy, that the word “Hollywood” is a coded reference to how
ancient druids used holly branches to cast mind-control spells, and
that the word “television” actually can be deciphered as the
command “tell a vision,” this does not strike me as the most
convincing proof to base world-shattering conclusions on.

But I think—particularly since the Artnet News audience is more
likely to scoff at this stuff than take it seriously—that
underscoring Westcott’s question is important: What makes the
argument so effective? What gives it traction?

I don’t think Marina Abramović is a Satan worshipper. On the
other hand, I myself criticized the
2011 LA MOCA gala Abramović organized, pictured several times in
Out of Shadows. Dubbed An Artist’s Life
Manifesto, it saw her serve up low-paid naked women as
human centerpieces for wealthy guests. Accompanying promos saw
Abramović loudly declare her love of US banks
and financiers as the new Medicis even as the fallout of the Great
Recession was still mauling surrounding society.

Though its atmosphere was more like a rich theater kid’s
Goth-themed birthday than an actual Luciferian rite,
An Artist’s Life Manifesto was perfectly
engineered to be a symbol of alienating decadence for anyone
looking in who was actually angry about the disintegrating state of
the world.

The point is that an intimation of truth animates a lot of this
conspiricizing: there really is an arrogant elite that
acts with impunity; the CIA really has done unconscionably horrible
things; the corporate media absolutely is totally warped by money
and power in ways that compromise it.

The easy impulse to dismiss Out of Shadows or its ilk
as “tinfoil hat” material is actually destructive if it sounds as
if is is dismissing any of these real and really felt facts.

An actually spooky moment in Out of
Shadows comes when the film shows one local news anchor
after another earnestly parroting the exact same script,
illustrating its point of a secret pattern in the media. This
glitch-in-the-matrix type moment would read as too on the nose as a
parody of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s old thesis
in Manufacturing
Consent if it weren’t brazenly real.

The funny thing is that what this montage actually illustrates
is not the agenda of an occult elite, but the openly known
right-wing corporate hold on local news. The conservative Sinclair
Broadcasting Corporation is in fact infamous for the
practice of mandating centrally ordered talking points that are
disguised as the thoughts of trusted local voices. In this
particular case, if you listen to the actual words, Sinclair’s
journalists are denouncing “fake news”—a line of attack pretty much
directly aimed at media foes
of Donald Trump, the conspiracy-loving president!

This two-step is actually a pretty handy symbol of the role that
this kind of conspiracy narrative plays, what makes it effective
and what makes it dangerous: it takes the actual fear and fury
about an unjust, unequal, and rigged system and channels it into
chasing the shadows of a fantastic cultural cabal, which is both
everywhere and never reveals itself, so its symbolism can be easily
manipulated for opportunist ends.

But that means it has to be taken seriously rather than
dismissing it for its outlandishness. Not just because it targets
artists, who are ultimately rather lacking in any real power and
therefore vulnerable targets. But because you can see how it
appeals as a way to make sense of a world that really is profoundly
broken, at a time when that brokenness is profoundly exposed. Any
perspective that can’t see that is itself on the way to becoming
the fringe.

The post The Conspiracy Theory That Marina Abramovic Is the
Ringmaster of the New World Order Is the Symptom of a Much Bigger
Problem appeared first on artnet News.