Marina Abramović

The face you cannot forget, the shocking art widely known throughout the world is a property of “grandmother of performance art” – Marina Abramović.

Through the most famous act she did, “The Artist is Present”, she will remain ever present, ever the part of the world of World art.

A fine line between the life and death is an inspiration to a former painter and latter body artist, Marina Abramović, for unusual performances which many think are perverted, controversial, vulgar, alien, but none remain indifferent to these shocking spectacles.

Many of these acts are masochistic, and in many of them Marina overcame the inhuman pain she bestowed upon herself, testing the limits of her physical endurance, whilst moving the boundaries of art in unforeseen directions. To this artist the main purpose always remained in getting the public’s reaction, and in that endeavor she always succeeded.

She received a Venetian Golden Lion award, and New Yorkers will always remember her by a great retrospective performance “The Artist is Present” from 2010, which name also carries the documentary about her filmed by an American director Matthew Akers.

The exhibition consisted of two parts, the first where on one museum floor young artists delivered her most famous performances, and the other, on second floor where she sat motionless six days a week, for three months, and where thousands of visitors watched her straight in the eyes.

New York’s audience during the encounters with Marina’s fiery gaze cried, laughed, provoked her, and yet she remained still. However, one set of eyes burnt all her walls. Her static performance was disrupted by Ulay, her former business and love partner, when Marina awakened from trance and shook hands with him.

The whole world will remember her performance “The House with the Ocean View” which marked the last season of the famous TV show Sex and the City, in which Carrie Bradshaw went to ascertain that the artist hasn’t been taking any food, withholding speech, and sitting in gallery for 24 hours for the whole 12 days. This performance granted her the New York Bessie award.

Marina Abramović was born on the 30th of November in 1946 in partisan family. Her parents were active participants in National Liberation Army, with successful military careers, and her grandfather was the Serbian Archbishop Varnava. After graduating the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, she continued her studies in Zagreb. She was teaching in the Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad, and in the Faculty of Fine Arts in Braunschweig the subject called the Art of Performance.

Marina lived in Amsterdam since 1975, but she spent most of her time traveling the world. Later on she moved to New York where she resides today, and where she formed an Independent Performance Group, a forum for actual art performance where she works with few selected young artists.

Still, long before these modern performances, in 1975 Marina went a step further in staring at the face of death when she enabled the audience in her last action of “Rhythm” performance held in Naples, to hurt her or kill her with razor blade, knife or a pistol. Action lasted for six whole hours and ended with the fight of those who wanted to save her and those who wanted to condemn her.

The roots of her art have been found in her childhood, in one girl’s lonely heart who failed to get the attention of her career-driven parents, so she was seeking it by allowing her rebelliousness to act out. Her perception of reality and herself affected her later through the need to place her ideas in the most unusual ways.

Many have considered that that’s the reason why Marina wasn’t successful with maintaining relations with her parents, her friends from Belgrade and Amsterdam later on, and with Ulay in the end, who is a co-performer in her last painful farewell in her life – saying goodbye and parting from her lover beneath the scrutinizing eye of the public.

The two of them started their journeys on separate ends of the Great Wall of China and walked the distances of 1250 miles, so they could reunite once more and finally part their ways forever. And with this performance of lovers’ farewell under the public eye, she said goodbye to her lover, but she never said goodbye to her true love – art… The art is part of her, part of who she is. And with that she could never part.

So the death wouldn’t sneak up on her and so she wouldn’t fail in making a special performance out of it, “controversial grandmother of performance art” concocted her last act – her funeral. On the day of her funeral three coffins will be placed, one in Belgrade, one in Amsterdam, and one in New York.

It will remain an everlasting enigma where Marina will rest in peace. Whether it will be the city where she was born, where she will die, or where she had her bliss? That, and many more of her secrets will be the subject of conversations to come, and world of art will never forget the uniqueness of one Marina Abramović.