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
Marina Abramovic quotes about
When you have so much pain, you think you will lose consciousness. If you say to yourself, ‘So what, lose consciousness,’ the pain goes away.
I am not a therapist. I am not a spiritual leader. These elements are in the art: it is therapeutic, spiritual, social and political - everything. It has many layers. But art has to have many layers. If it doesn't, then forget it.
True love for whatever you are doing is the answer to everything.
The hardest thing to do is something that is close to nothing.
I am pure performance, and Robert Wilson is pure theater.
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.
To me the pain and the blood are merely means of artistic expression.
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.'
You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'
In every culture, [there are those] shamans or medicine men who endured incredible physical pain, because it's a door opening to the subconsciousness. And the way we can actually control the pain -- it's how to control everything. This is the key.
Because of technology, we don't develop telepathy. We don't use telepathy, but use, you know, the mobile phones. Why?
I didn't get paid for performances most of my life. If I did, I would be billionaire now, and I'm not.
I made a tape recording of a bridge collapsing and I wanted to play it suddenly and very loudly when people were walking over a big bridge in Belgrade. The council forbid it. Their imagination is tiny; mine is big. I want always to shake everything up.
Every party is the same, too many people, too little food, and you have to wait around. I'm extremely bored with parties.