#strong #inspiring #awesome
Extracts from the guardian interview:
"To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre," she replied. "Theatre is fake… The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real."
She has stabbed her hand with knives and sliced her skin with razor blades. She has lain naked on a cross of ice for hours. She has allowed the public to prod, probe and abuse her prone body. Once she almost died when a performance, in which she lay inside a huge flaming star made of petrol-soaked sawdust, went horribly wrong.
"I test the limits of myself in order to transform myself," she says, "but I also take the energy from the audience and transform it. It goes back to them in a different way. This is why people in the audience often cry or become angry or whatever. A powerful performance will transform everyone in the room."
The Artist is Present, it redefined the parameters of performance art, and in the process became a huge cultural event discussed on talk shows and in news features. It took the form of what Abramovic calls "a pared-down, long-durational piece that destroys the illusion of time". To this end she sat motionless and silent on a wooden chair inside a circle of light in the huge atrium of Moma, seven hours a day, from mid-March until the end of May. Anyone who was prepared to queue could sit opposite her just as long as they agreed to remain silent and motionless and to stare back into her eyes.
The results were surprising even to her. Every day several people broke down in tears. She was most impressed, though, by the man who sat silently opposite her for seven hours, an entire day's duration. "The others in line grew angry and aggressive," she says, laughing, "but then they realised that the waiting was also part of the performance."
The Artist is Present broke attendance records at Moma, attracting more than 850,000 visitors.I give people a space to simply sit in silence and communicate with me deeply but non-verbally.
"Physically, mentally, I have to prepare myself for a feat of endurance. I became a vegetarian, I did deep meditation, I cleansed myself. I train the body and the mind. I learn to eat certain foods so that I don't have to go to the toilet for seven hours. I learn to sleep in short bursts at night. This is very hard: sleep, wake, drink, pee, exercise, sleep, wake and on and on. So even the not-performing is intense."
"The brother of my grandfather was the patriarch of the Orthodox Church and revered as a saint. So everything in my childhood is about total sacrifice, whether to religion or to communism. This is what is engraved on me. This is why I have this insane willpower. My body is now beginning to be falling apart, but I will do it to the end. I don't care. With me it is about whatever it takes."
"...I realise the power of art that does not hang on the walls of galleries."
Abramovic insists that she had no knowledge of the existence of performance art or body art when she started doing her first performance-based pieces. "I heard about Beuys later and then the others. I was incredibly naive and innocent. I mean, even when I am 23 and I have started with the blood and cutting, I still have to be back home by 10.30pm every night or my mother would be ringing the police to say I am missing." This double life continued, she says, until she was 29. "Even now, I have traces of the good little girl. When I am not performing, for instance, I am really very quiet and ordinary. I don't drink or smoke and I have never taken drugs.
"It was a little crazy. I realised then that the public can kill you. If you give them total freedom, they will become frenzied enough to kill you."
"I am sick and tired of the mistreatment of performance art"
To this end, she has created the Marina Abramovic Institute in San Francisco. She is currently raising the money to open the Marina Abramovic Foundation for Preservation of Performance Art in downtown Manhattan. It will be dedicated to the performance, cataloguing and propagation of the form and, in the process, the immortalising of her name.
Now, as age encroaches, she has become an artist whose main subject is time itself. "I still look at my body as a machine and I still use the mind – the will – to control what I do," she says, "but there is something more Buddhist now about the performances. At 63, I can do seven hours, but the energy and the work is more distilled. I could not do that before, but now I have more knowledge of time and energy. For me, the long duration of a piece is the key to real transformation – and performance art is nothing without transformation."
