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
The only way to change consciousness and the world around us is to start with yourself.
I had so much fear of blood, and the first thing I did was to cut myself to see what happens. That's the only way to rebuild yourself.
We always want to do things the way we like, that's why we never change.
If we go for the easy way, then we never change
All my inspiration comes from life. That's how it never stops, in a way.
I have always staged my fears as a way to transcend them.
Once you live in New York, you can't live anywhere else. Living in Paris is like going in slow motion. It's so bourgeois. I get so bored.
If you do performance and music, it's not performance as music.
I think 21st century should be art without objects.
The only theatre I do is my own. Somehow, my life is the only life that I can play.
Most of the time, the artists are not supposed to wear the fashion. It is always seen as a vanity. But I think I don't need to prove anything in my life. I can honestly say I love fashion and I can be many things at the same time.
I really don't like art where you need to know so much theory to understand. If the theory is removed, it doesn't do anything. That means that this work is an illustration of theory, and I don't believe in the power of the work itself.
I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral in Montparnasse in Paris. It was rainy. It was all wrong. And I was thinking, 'God, she loved life so much.'
To really change the way society thinks, you have to give your entire being to it until there's nothing left.