Park Avenue Armory honchos have been trying to boot kid cadets from their building for years — but are happy to showcase a controversial performance artist’s show depicting 12-foot penises, “open orifices” and women “furiously” massaging their breasts.
The US debut of Marina Abramović’s four-hour “Balkan Erotic Epic” opens next year in the drill hall of the Upper East Side historic building run by a non-profit accused of using it as its own shady private country club.
Adding insult to injury, Abramović sits on the Armory’s board of directors, creating a massive conflict of interest, critics charge.
The show, which premiered in the UK last month, features the graphic portrayal of what Abramovic claims to be a Balkan nude fertility ritual where a groom drills three holes into a wooden bridge and puts his penis in it.
“The first thing I clapped eyes on was a hairy bottom going up and down on a giant screen,” wrote Adrian Chiles in his critique for The Guardian. “There was an awful lot to take in.”
The show also features five guys “face down, humping the ground . . . relentlessly on for the duration of the four-hour performance” to fertilize the soil, as five giant penises tower above them in a grassy field.
During another explicit scene, a group of seven women are seen “repeatedly exposing their vulvas to the ground and sky” — apparently to make the rain stop — while another naked bunch stand in a graveyard massaging their breasts “while having a slow-motion orgy with skeletons.”
Another inserts a small fish in her vagina in an attempt to make her man fall further in love with her.
“It’s a vainglorious, vacuous piece of schlock, riddled with soft-porn cliches,” slammed The Telegraph’s chief art critic Alastair Sooke.
The mixed reviews haven’t dampened the Armory’s enthusiasm.
“Balkan Erotic Epic makes you rethink taboos about how the body should work,” said Armory CEO Rebecca Robertson to ARTnews. “I promise you, you will see what I mean when you see it.”
The $85 tickets have already gone on sale for the December 2026 show.
“This doesn’t seem aligned whatsoever to what they committed to in terms of services that they’re supposed to provide to the community,” said Upper East Sider Jay Stallard. “I guess erotic art has its place, but what are they going to do . . . bring poor kids from schools and let them enjoy this sort of performance? I find the organization to be personally repulsive. It seems like it’s their own personal social club.”
The state-owned military building on Park Avenue and East 66th Street is at the center of a court fight between the Park Avenue Conservancy and a group of child cadets that have used a small room in the full-square-block landmark for more than 100 years.
The conservancy continues to try to evict the kids despite a bill signed last year by Gov. Hochul protecting the 150-year-old Knickerbocker Greys youth cadet program.
The Armory wouldn’t say if and how much Abramović — a board member since 2012 — is getting paid for her erotic show. But critics are calling it a blatant conflict of interest.
“The grants that have been afforded to these people in the name of art, it’s astronomical. And it’s not like a ticket to the naked lady show is going to bring in a gazillion dollars,” said Stallard. “It just reeks of corruption.”
The Armory has received $19.8 million in public funds since 2020 from the NYS Council on the Arts & NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, yet spent $30.4 million on productions in 2023, which only brought in $11.4 million, according to its latest available tax filings.
Serbian-born Abramović, 78, first made a splash in 1974 when she let strangers do whatever they wanted to her for six hours as part of a performance piece at a Naples art gallery.
The scene quickly descended into complete savagery, with people cutting up her clothes, sexually abusing her, even cutting her neck and drinking her blood — all while the artist known as the “grandmother of performance art” stood motionless.
One person even pointed a loaded gun at her head.
And she is no stranger to scandals.
In 2017, The Post ran an expose called “the art of the steal,” after the edgy artist backed out of her plans to turn an upstate building into an art center, amid questions of where the $2.2 million in donations she’d collected went. Abramović never faced legal action for the missing money.
Conspiracy theorists had a field day with her in 2016, after WikiLeaks published a batch of emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, that included a note from Abramović to Podesta’s brother, inviting him to a “Spirit Cooking dinner” – a reference to her 1996 performance “Spirit Cooking” in which she used pig’s blood to write “aphrodisiac recipes” on the wall.
“I’m an artist, I’m not a satanist,” Abramović insisted at the time. “They Googled me, and I am perfection to fit a conspiracy theory.”
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