In The Mind of Marina Abramovic

“In theatre, blood is ketchup; in performance, everything’s real” – says Marina Abramovic.

She is an icon, a superstar, a strange black hole in the universe. She is a superwoman with scars instead of tattoos, a grandmother of the performance… For her good art is only possible in life, not in artificial spaces as studios: “In the performance the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.” Marina’s work is hardcore. She pushes her own body and mind to the incredible extremes and uses them as tools to deliver her message.
Her art disturbs, predicts the future and asks painful questions: “I gradually started involving the body – and as soon as I started using my body it changed everything. You know, for an artist the most important thing is to find the right tool. Painting is a tool, sculpture is a tool, video is a tool, and performance is another tool because I could actually do something with that energy”.

Child of the Sun

For more than 25 years she worked with Tibetans to understand how the mind functions and how to control it. Soon she understood that time is only an illusion, a frame made by humans. Once a Brazilian shaman told Marina that her DNA is solar and she was sent to this planet with the mission to deal, understand, translate and transfer Universe’s pain. Maybe that’s why one of her first performance Rhythm 0 in Naples was so painful and Marina Abramovic was harmed by the audience. On the table were 72 objects that could give pleasure or could hurt. In the beginning, people were careful but later become aggressive towards her body. This terrifying performance caused a piece of her hair to turn grey, amongst the enormous stress on her body.

 

The works

In Freeing the Body ( 1976), a six-hour performance,  Marina just danced to music’s rhythm until she fell down. In Freeing the Voice (1976) she screamed until she didn’t have any voice.
But there has been love and separation in her art actions, too. Few years Abramović and her boyfriend Ulay lived a nomadic lifestyle, focused on performances that put them in specific physical and emotional circumstances. People called them a “two-headed body” who dreamed to enter the Great Wall in China. After five years the dream came true and they received permission for the walk. “It was supposed to be a grand romantic idea, and it was powerful for us. But we thought it was one straight line that we could walk along, each of us alone, and camp out on the wall every night. It was so difficult because only parts of the wall were renovated for tourists. The rest of it, around the mountains, was a ruin.” – says Marina Abramovic
During the five years, period their work had become internationally renowned. Abramović welcomed the success, as she was tired of being the archetypal poor artist, but Ulay had no interest in celebrity…

The Lovers

The project “The Lovers” (1988) is one of the most epic, bittersweet and controversial performances. Marina and her love Ulay started from the opposite ends of the Great Wall in China with the idea to meet each other at Buddhist Temple, at Erlang Shen, Shenmu. “The energy you experience from the wall seemed perfect to us to make a work of art. And it was: it was painful, it was a hardship, but it made me merge with the landscape.” The original idea was that, after walking about 5995 kilometres, they would wed. However, after many tribulations prior to the walk, that idea transformed into a heartfelt goodbye. They hugged and said goodbye. Walking the dragon’s spine, as the Chines call the Great Wall was a motif for transcending the barriers that divide us and in a way – connect us.

Life goes on

The ex-pair hadn’t spoken to each other for more than 20 years. That is until Ulay surprised Marina at The Artist is Present at MOMA in New York. Over a period of two and a half months, Abramović sat at a table, inviting viewers to take the opposite chair and take part in a silent conversation. When Ulay appeared, Marina was shocked, her eyes filled with tears. There was only silence and pain in the air. In the end, Marina Abramovic extended her hands toward Ulay: “We came to this moment of real peace. Everything naughty, nasty disagreements or whatever from the past, we dropped. We became good friends again. That’s a beautiful story actually.”

During The Artist is present a lot of celebrities sit in front of Marina. Among them were Bjork, Marisa Tomei, Isabella Rossellini, Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright… “I didn’t even know it was Isabella Rossellini, kept thinking: ‘She looks familiar.’ Couldn’t even recognise Sharon Stone. I was in another zone.” But when Lady Gaga entered MOMA the project really went viral. Kids, aged 12 to 14 and up, people who typically don’t go to museums, went to MOMA to catch a glimpse of… Mother Monster herself. “And they saw the show and then they started coming back. And that’s how I get a whole new audience” – says Marina Abramovic.

In 2021 Marina released a “digital manifestation” of The Abramovic Method on WeTransfer with the idea to reach 70 million people.