Adhering to the concept that it does not matter whether art is beautiful or ugly, rather that it just needs to be true – Marina Abramović has gained an international reputation. In the beginning she replaced painting with body art, insisting on the body language of dancers, acrobats, village wizards, Tibetan monks and shamans. She synthesized her knowledge of performance in the Abramović Method with which she teaches selected young artists from around the world.
The two main questions on the route to any creativity: who we are and why we are on this planet, she solved in her own way, discovering her purpose in performance art. The beginnings of body art, through which she examines the limits of psychological and physical endurance, are linked to the Edinburgh Festival of 1973, when she injured her body for the first time during a performance with 20 knifes. She burned a fire around five-pointed star, burnt hair and nails, almost suffocated herself, and the audience needed a while to realise that she was not acting like she was in a trance, but was really unconscious.
Determined by destiny or shaped by individual energies, our lives unfold in different ways. What is that defined your life, making it just the way it is?
When I look back, I think I was very lucky that I perceived very early who I was and what I wanted to do in life. I had my first exhibition at the age of 12 and was jealous of Mozart, who began his creation at the age of seven. I really always wanted only to be an artist. And I knew that if I wanted to be an artist I would not be able to have what we call a normal life. Art takes an enormous amount of energy, while a person has only one energy core and can pursue only one goal in the right way, if they really want to succeed. First I started to paint, than I made audio installations, I very quickly brought my body into all of it. It was a difficult start. Nobody believed that what I was doing was art, my professors were appalled, parents criticized at the party meetings…
What was it in performance that attracted you so strongly?
Performance is a living art that involves the artist and the observer being in a time and place where art takes place. Performance is a matter of an immediate and concrete exchange of energy, the artist sends their energy to the audience, which returns it, then the artist transforms it and sends it back to the audience. If the performance is bad it produces that strange taste in mouth, a bad feeling among observers, who then become opposed to all performances. But if the performance is good, it can completely change our lives.
On the path of self-perception you passed with a constant touching and moving of boundaries. Limits of pain, endurance of the body, but also psyche. How do you experience categories of fear, pain, transience?
I will answer you with a story. A few months ago I got a call from a famous science fiction writer inviting me to have lunch together in Los Angeles. His name is Kim Stanley Robinson. He wrote a trilogy about Mars and movies have been filmed based on some of his books. He gave me his latest book, entitled “2312”, explaining that I am one of the characters in this book and my name is Abramović. I asked him what I am doing in such a distant future. He replied: “The same as now, performance, on an asteroid in a space without gravitation”. I asked him why me, he replied that my art is so intangible that it could be easily transported on a galactic journey. Satisfied with the answer, I came back to New York. After a few months I went to Brazil to visit shamans, from whom I learn how to transform my energy. One shaman lady, who looks at stone circles and talks about the past and the future, said that I don’t feel at home anywhere, because my house is not on this planet. When I think about it a bit better, I really do not feel at home anywhere. She told me that my DNA is solar in origin, that I came to Earth from another galaxy. I then commented then than I am surely an elien and she explained that I am here for a specific reason. I asked what my role is. The shaman lady answered that I am here to teach people how to transform pain into creative energy.
The performance Rhythm 0 from 1974 is remembered by many as the boldest step into the unknown – when you made available to the public and at your own responsibility – places seventy objects of pain and pleasure for them to do with you what they want. What was the essence of that concept?
The greatest gift to the audience is the artist, his body and soul. And that’s exactly what it was. The only thing I did not know wwas hether the public would keep that what they were offered or destroy it. It was a unusually bold action. The audience could have killed me. I came to the hotel after six hours, looked in the mirror and saw a wisp of completely grey hair. But everything that happened that night was extraordinarily important for me. I could feel, could see where were my boundaries, both physical and mental.
You say that performance is neither theatre nor entertainment. That it is a serious business. In the theatre blood is ketchup, in performance it is all real. Is this a consistency to a concept that it does not matter whether art is beautiful or ugly, but that it just needs to be truthful?
I think that the artist should not have an easy road. If an artist has an easy road, if they are always happy in life, then I think they will not create anything noteworthy. Happiness is a state that does not change us. Creativity comes when you’re not happy, and when everything hurts you, when you are fighting against some injustice … Then the artist can work, from that material they can create something that has meaning. The basis of my work is my own problems that I am trying to solve. The only way to resolve them as an artist is to find a key that is universal – that everyone can identify with, feel, look at their own problems and find their own key to solving them. This is the only real answer of art. The artist is a mirror of society and has always been.
Dragana Marković
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