Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramovićis a Yugoslav performance artist based in New York. Her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Active for over three decades, Abramović has been described as the "grandmother of performance art." She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body."...
NationalitySerbian
ProfessionPerformance Artist
Date of Birth30 November 1946
CountrySerbia
What you get is the opening of your mind. I'm not preaching any new religion; I'm ritualizing everyday activities. You drink the water. You count the rice. You sit in Crystal Cave. You lie in Levitation Chamber. You push yourself to a new level.
If we go for the easy way, then we never change
Most people are more comfortable with what is familiar. I’ve spent my life doing the opposite.
I hate kitchens. I don't understand these enormous American kitchens that take up half the living room and then they just order pizza.
I'm interested in utopian communities of the past. Many of them didn't survive and I'm examining closely the reasons they failed.
Galás is a great artist with a very powerful voice.
In real life, you just work for the ordinary self, but in the front of audience you become the superself. That's a completely different thing.
You know, art is very emotional business. But mostly it becomes not emotional, the fabric of commodity. It becomes business. It becomes so many different things. Because we forgot there was emotions involved.
You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important - in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language.
From the very early stage when I started doing performance art in the '70s, the general attitude - not just me, but also my colleagues - was that there should not be any documentation, that the performance itself is artwork and there should be no documentation.
My grandmother, when she looked at American movies, she said, 'They're all the same. In the first scene somebody shoots somebody and then everybody makes phone calls.'
If you see a Renaissance body, this is completely ugly in this time. Everybody has to be skinny. But the Renaissance body with incredible flow of the meat everywhere, it was beauty.
Television is completely another medium. For me, Lady Gaga and HBO are bringing us to mass culture.
My new work deals with emptying my body: 'Boat emptying, stream entering.' This means that you have to empty the body/boat to the point where you can really be connected with the fields of energy around you. I think that men and women in our Western culture are completely disconnected from that energy, and in my new work I want to make this connection possible.