A pain in the art: Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic reigns supreme as the queen of painful performance art. She has been inflicting tortures on herself since the 1970s: high points include the 1997 Venice Biennale when she invited visitors to watch her sitting in a fetid basement for four days, while she scrubbed rotting cow bones, wept and sang the Slavic folk songs of her homeland, the former Yugoslavia (she won the Golden Lion for Best Artist). Now, for the first time, she is coming to London, with a show at the Lisson Gallery that will reprise her greatest hits as well as new work. Be prepared for ice blocks, knives, nudity and tears.

Fashionable New York adores Abramovic and this year she ruled the city's art scene with retrospectives at the Guggenheim and MoMA, where she staged a 700-hour performance piece, The Artist is Present, during which spectators – including Isabella Rossellini, Rufus Wainwright, Björk and Lou Reed – took turns to sit opposite her in a public ceremony described as 'silent opera'. The end of that feat of endurance was celebrated with a Givenchy-sponsored party (Riccardo Tisci is a great friend) attended by Liv Tyler, Christina Ricci and, of course, the artist-actor-whatever James Franco. Another fan is the magician David Blaine, whose latest project, sealing himself inside a super-sized bottle and casting himself out to sea, confirms him as a fellow 'ordealist'. He recently called Abramovic 'one of my greatest inspirations'. She is, at 63, a grand dame of the scene, and yet she has never been so hip.

She was a child of President Tito's regime, with both her parents occupying favoured positions in his government. The family home was a grand apartment that had been confiscated from Jews during the Nazi occupation; Marina's mother, niece of the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, was in charge of public art and monuments and was extremely house-proud. 'We were Red bourgeoisie,' Marina has said. She trained as a painter at Belgrade's Academy of Fine Arts (where she met her first husband; they never lived together and divorced in 1977), became radicalised as a student and discovered performance art.

In 1974, the same year Joseph Beuys cohabited with a coyote for three days in a New York gallery, Marina was in Naples, staging a work called Rhythm 0, in which she presented her naked body to a gallery audience along with 72 implements including nails, chains, olive oil, saws, lipstick and guns. For six hours the crowd was invited to do with her 'as they desired'. Two factions emerged: vandals and protectors. Photographs show her being manipulated like a mannequin, doused in water and, finally, with 'END' written on her forehead in lipstick. But this was only the beginning.

She went on to make art in which she brushed her hair until her scalp bled, danced until she collapsed and screamed until she was hoarse. In 1974 she gave herself conniptions by taking anti-catatonia drugs. In 1975 she put on a show at the Guggenheim which included The Lips of Thomas, a ritual requiring her to eat a kilo of honey very slowly, whip herself, cut a star into her flesh (her work often features references to communist motifs) and lie down on a cross of ice, until the public, anxious for her safety, disrupted the piece. She describes her work as a staging of her fears in order that she may transcend them. She has, she says, 'a sense of purpose to do something heroic, legendary and transformative; to elevate viewers' spirits and give them courage. If I can go through the door of pain to embrace life on the other side, they can, too.'

There is, indeed, something strangely uplifting about the way she left her lover, collaborator and astral twin (they share a birthday) the German artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen). After a coup de foudre encounter in 1976 – they met and went to bed for ten days – Abramovic and Ulay spent 12 years together, working and touring the world in a Citroën van from Australia, where they lived with Aborigines, to Amsterdam, where she owns a canal house. When they decided to part in 1988, they set off to walk the Great Wall of China from opposite ends, meeting near the middle briefly to say goodbye. By this point she had met Paolo Canevari, an Italian sculptor and video artist, who she married after 12 years of living together, first in Amsterdam and then in an elegant loft apartment in New York. They divorced last December.

Abramovic's thoughts now turn to her legacy. For the MoMA show, she trained a troupe of young artists and dancers to be 're-performers' of her work. They had to attend her punitive five-day boot camp, in a star-shaped house in upstate New York where they observed silence, slept on the floor of an old barn, fasted and breathed in unison. She has also created a Foundation for the Preservation of Performance Art in Hudson, New York, complete with huge archives. Re-performance is a contentious subject – Ulay, for example, believes the work should be by nature ephemeral – but others, including Vito Acconci, have given her their blessing to re-perform pieces, such as his Seedbed (1971), in which he hid under a ramp and masturbated (literally, a seminal work). With Abramovic guarding their flame, the 1970s performance artists really are still crazy after all these years.

Marina Abramovic is at the Lisson Gallery,
52-54 Bell Street, NW1, from 13 October to 13 November (020 7724 2739; lissongallery.com)