Step inside the factory in Madrid where superstars make their art

Marina Abramovic is most famous for her feats of endurance. In 2002 she lived in a gallery without food for 12 days

On a sunny February afternoon in Madrid, the performance artist Marina Abramovic is going over a list of things she wants to create for her coming solo show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. For starters, there’s something she calls a “fountain.”

“The fountain is me, made out of glass,” she explains, speaking in a Slavic-accented English that’s delivered in a soft near-monotone. “But out of everything—my nose, mouth, eyes, breasts, fingertips—comes blood.”

Abramovic is most famous for her feats of endurance. In 2002 she lived in a gallery without food for 12 days. In 2010, for a piece titled The Artist Is Present, she sat in a chair in the atrium of New York’s Museum of Modern Art for more than 700 hours, locking eyes with any stranger who sat across from her.

In Madrid, she’s sitting in an apartment above Factum Arte, an art fabrication company, levelling her gaze at Adam Lowe, Factum’s founder and the man who’ll help her translate her art from performances to objects. For the next several months, she’ll work with the company’s 50 technicians and artisans to make dozens of artworks, including a table covered with 10,000 glass tears and a statue of the artist eating herself.

Another project will charge Abramovic with enough electricity that she can extinguish a candle by pointing at it. “It’s generating a million volts of static,” Lowe says. “If it goes wrong, it’s a killing machine.” In addition to the works that will be exhibited in London, some of what’s produced at Factum will be sold through her various galleries.

Abramovic isn’t known for her sense of humour, but she probably should be. When she notes, “I really hope not to put too much ego into anything that I do.?... I like to keep it light,” it’s unclear at first if she’s joking. But Lowe, who’s been pecking away at a laptop while Abramovic talks, bursts into laughter. “You’ve just talked about making a sculpture of yourself with blood flowing out of every orifice,” he says. “You can’t then talk about ‘keeping it light.’?”

Since founding Factum in 2001, Lowe has established a similar repartee with a who’s who of the contemporary art world: the sculptor Maya Lin, best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington; Anish Kapoor, who dreamed up Chicago’s famous bean-shaped Cloud Gate; and Jenny Holzer, whose conceptual art includes the Truisms, one-line sentences splashed across building facades. Like a popular high school teacher, Lowe will bounce around possibilities with visiting artists, helping them to figure out how to make their ideas tangible.

What comes out of Factum’s Madrid factory ranges from giant golf balls made out of marble by Paula Crown to a full-scale olive tree — including its root structure — cast in brass. When I visit, one room holds a towering fibreglass sculpture of interlocked circles by Mariko Mori. Steps away from it is a row of El Anatsui’s Benchmarks print series, which captures the topography of his work tables.

The vast size of many of the artworks in Factum, combined with the high-tech carving and 3D-printing machinery, gives room after room the air of a Willy Wonka factory, but one where art, not candy, is the treat of choice. Lowe, who presides over all of it, is here to make sure that the artists who enter have the tools, technology, and support staff to make whatever they dream up.

“There’s a kind of community that’s been built there,” says Anatsui, who won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2015. 

There’s a common perception that “real” artists are in a garret somewhere working in tortured solitude. That idea isn’t true today, and it wasn’t 500 years ago. Rembrandt had a workshop so robust (and effective) that there’s still an ongoing debate about which paintings are by him and which are by his assistants. Tintoretto devoted the last two decades of his life to painting the walls of Venice’s Scuola Grande di San Rocco building and the interiors of the Doge’s Palace; art historians agree that he rarely touched many of “his” studio’s canvases during this period. Even John Chamberlain, the 20th century artist known for his crushed metal sculptures, rarely made them himself — he notoriously hated to weld.