We Tried Marina Abramović’s Wellness Drops So You Don’t Have To

Where artists go, critics must naturally follow. In 2024, this motto may very well lead us to the wellness industry. So when asked to review Marina Abramović’s new line of wellness drops, ‘The Longevity Method,’ I was thrilled. Besides art, I am an enthusiastic hobbyist of pills, tinctures and diets: Abramović was offering the chance to fuse my interests. Coming with a hefty £99 price tag, the drops were developed in collaboration with Dr Nonna Brenner of Austria, described on the artist’s website as ‘a healer who embraces ancient and natural methods to treat illnesses.’ Dr Brenner had cured the artist from a bout of Lyme disease – what could she do for me?

Conservative art-worlders may raise their eyebrows at the idea of the artist-as-wellness-guru. We, after all, are still basking in the afterglow of autonomous avant-garde aesthetics with its promise of capitalist non-instrumentality, even if our field looks more and more like a giant consumer event for the 1% (perhaps because it is). But why exactly not wellness? Artists are preeminent proto-typers of lifestyles, and have been in the business of merchandise for as long as they have existed. Even performance art’s occult grandfather, Joseph Beuys, dabbled in product endorsement in Japan (selling not wellness drops, alas, but whiskey). Performance artists, in particular, are on the frontlines of the body commodified: as spirited body workers and professional showstoppers who frequently engage in spectacle, performance artists of the 1960s and ’70s predicted the virtuosic performance labour of the late capitalist economy, including its most entrenched vulgarities. Abramović is a case in point: consider her 1975 performance, Art Must Be Beautiful… Artist Must Be Beautiful, where a seraphic Abramović is seen combing her hair with ever-increasing force for almost an hour. Could we think of a better meditation – premonition – of the violences of the beauty influencer age?

Still, I must admit to some initial scepticism. ‘The Longevity Method’ itself remained vague, to say the least, an amalgamation of lessons from mindfulness, trans-cultural shamanism, and a dash of art history (such as ‘walking backwards in nature while holding a mirror, an exercise that stretches for hours’). Anxious, I picked up the spirited drops from my editor and sat myself down in a bar with friends. It was time. The packaging was promising, the precious bottles coming decadently boxed, with the artist’s mythic touch mechanically reproduced by ‘3D-printing’ her fingerprints as a decorative pattern. Two products from the range stood before me: Immunity and Energy. Fifty drops three times a day, the instructions read. Which one did I need the most? Could I, as a privileged reviewer, do both simultaneously?

Uncertain, I cracked open Immunity (I had napped that day and felt rather awake) and counted 50 drops into a glass of water. A pungent, garlicky aroma hit us – nay, the entire bar – in the face. I frowned in disbelief. ‘It smells like the stuff you feed horses to deter flies from their mane,’ my friend, a former horse-girl, observed astutely. I closed my eyes and gulped down the potion, hoping for longevity and more. We inspected the ingredients list: hawthorn berry, lemon, cranberry, kalmus, and yes, garlic – broadly familiar and available ‘superfoods’ – but also something called ‘shilajit,’ a ‘sticky substance that comes out of the cracks in high mountain ranges of Asia.’ What an image! More alarming to my friends was the listing of 96% ethanol in a product claiming longevity, but as a seasoned tinctee, I knew that homeopaths have been dousing their eco-meds this way for decades as a method of preservation (to what effect, health-wise, I am less certain). 

‘It smells like the stuff you feed horses to deter flies from their mane’

As I waited for redemption, I sought Abramović’s 2016 memoir, Walk Through Walls, recommended by my artist-friend as ‘the trippiest reading experience of [his] life.’ The cover, a solemn portrait of the artist airbrushed to perfection, seemed to confirm my worst suspicions. But the acknowledgements page caught my eye: amidst predictable mentions of editors and galleries, the names of not one but five healers appeared. Curious, I kept reading. Abramović stands a world apart from the part of the wellness-industrial complex characterized by Gwyneth Paltrow, not only because she is funny (in that sarcastic, post-communist way) but because she is not afraid to base her pursuit of spiritual knowledge and bodily wellbeing on trauma. Across her dizzying accounts of performative endurance, psychosomatic burn-out, month-long Ayurvedic retreats and intermittent depression, I was entranced by a profound tension regarding the (consumable) fantasy of beautiful, healthy bodies in the 21st century. What emerges in Abramović’s life story and work is a particular body politic of consumerist angst, a Beuys for the post-socialist age. The pursuit of authentic health is a futile yet compulsive project under capitalism, above which even our most body-knowledgeable artists find it difficult to raise themselves after half a century of rigorous study.

So, drops for £99. Did they do the trick? For 10 days, I devotedly dripped three times a day, only missing one dose because I, well, went drinking. I basked in the bottles’ branded glow, proudly displaying them on my kitchen counter in case a guest might take an interest; they were even discussed at art openings and yoga sessions. I had finally matriculated to influencer ­– yet physiologically, I couldn’t quite place my finger on the change. I wondered if it could be the overpowering effects of my reishi powder or perhaps my daily Ayurvedic pill for muscular tension. It turns out that Abramović finds tougher competition in my medicine cabinet than in my art history library. Of course, the point is patience and endurance – in both art and in healing. 

Products from the Marina Abramović Longevity Method are available from the website

^{Main image: Courtesy: The Marina Abramović Longevity Method}