#18 The godmother of performance art
On creativity, courage, self-discipline, and success.
Marina Abramović knew from the age of seven that she wanted to be an artist, but it wasn’t until she was 14 that she received a set of oil paints. Her first lesson was with a friend of her father, the painter Filo Filipović, who taught her how to make a sunset. He cut a piece of canvas and put it on the floor, emptied a can of glue on top, added some yellow and black pigments, then poured half a litre of gasoline and lit the match. Everything exploded. It would be her introduction to performance art, and a reminder that the process is more important than the outcome.
At 24, Abramović was still living at home with her mother and had to abide by a 10 pm curfew. But she immersed herself in art, painted obsessively, and was admitted to the art class of the painter Krsto Hegedušić in Zagreb. He taught her that an artist should never settle or get comfortable:
“If you get good at drawing with your right hand that you can make a beautiful sketch with your eyes closed, you should immediately change to your left hand to avoid repetition.”
Abramović would never let this happen, putting herself always at risk, and pushing boundaries she might not have even been aware of in the first place. All, in the name of art, of course. Because “art is serious, and so necessary.”
In 1973, in Edinburgh, her performance – Rhythm 10 – was based on a traditional drinking game played by Russians and Yugoslavs. This involves spreading your fingers on a table and stabbing down a sharp knife, fast, in the spaces between your fingers. Every time you miss and cut yourself, you would have to take another drink. Abramović’s variation on the game involved not one but ten knives. This would be an exercise of indulging locus of control, choosing to go deliberately through the rapid motions until injuries occur. The blood and the pain would both be the ultimate testament to absolute presence.
“It was as if electricity was running through my body, and the audience and I had become one. […] I had experienced absolute freedom – I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless, the pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all – and it intoxicated me. I was drunk from the overwhelming energy that I’d received. That was the moment I knew I had found my medium.”
The following year, Abramović performed Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she offered herself as an object of experimentation for the audience – with pens, scissors, chains, an axe and a loaded pistol for the participants to use. In Rhythm 5 (1974), she laid down in the centre of a burning five-point star close to losing consciousness.
I don’t think Abramović likes the idea of labels, but she is the supreme stoic. She’s allowed herself to live under extreme physical and mental duress to challenge the viewers outside conventional patterns of thinking. She sat motionless with a snake slithering around her body, slammed herself into a wall, spent 736 hours in the MoMa atrium in intense silence, not out of sensationalism or exhibitionism. Abramović thinks that people are afraid of simple things such as suffering and mortality, and that part of her mission is to stage these fears for the audience. To her, art must be disturbing and ask questions.
Even her 12-year romance with Ulay, a fellow performance artist, turned into a piece of art – The Lovers (1988). They walked towards each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China – 2,500 km each – to meet in the middle, only to say goodbye. Abramović ditches aesthetics in favour of rawness and authenticity. This is what she said upon receiving the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale for the video installation and performance Balkan Baroque:
“ I’m only interested in an art which can change the ideology of a society.”
In “Walk Through Walls,” Marina Abramović chronicles her journey from the child raised in postwar Yugoslavia to the relentless, insatiably curious and unparalleled artist she is today. An astonishing feat of body, spirit, and creative vitality that has inspired generations. She leaves behind not just a tremendous cultural heritage, but also a signature method of techniques –The Abramović Method – to explore what it takes to be present in both time and space and how to generate willpower and concentration, beyond any physical or mental limits. A glimpse into Abramović’s artistic universe includes slow-motion walking, counting grains of rice, and mutual-gazing, exercises that you can do too due to her collaboration with WeTransfer.
“To achieve a goal, you have to give everything until you have nothing left. And it will happen by itself.”
**
I hope you found today’s entry as inspiring as I have found Marina Abaramović’s memoir. Before you go and change the world for the better, don’t forget to take a look at the latest news in the cultural and digital space!
Happy reading, happy learning,
Teodora x
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🥁 📚 The latest in the literary world
The UK government is looking to make a change in the law, which would allow cheaper books to flood the British market without the copyright-holder’s permission. On one hand, this sounds like good news for the readers, yet not so good for the writers who would have their incomes significantly reduced.💰 💔 Almost 2,700 authors, including Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro and the former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, have launched a campaign – Save Our Books – lobbying against the move: “[This would] have a devastating impact on our world-renowned book industry. If writing becomes a profession only accessible to the wealthy, important stories will not be told.” 😢
Mel Brooks, the legendary comedy writer, director and producer, has written a memoir at the age of 95! 👴 It’s called “All About Me! My Remarkable Life In Business” and it will cover everything from Brooks’s New York childhood and service during World War II to his creative partnership with Carl Reiner. The memoir will be released on November 30 by Penguin Random House. 🙌
There is no secret that Bill Gates is an avid reader; he’s also an avid fan of Vaclav Smil, the Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst, who has published more than 40 books and about 500 papers on energy, environmental and population change, food production, risk assessment, and public policy. 💡 Gates has read nearly all of them and argues that he’s learned more from reading Smil than anyone else. Smil’s latest book, “Numbers Don’t Lie: 71 Things You Need To Know About The World,” has fascinated Gates, so much so that he wrote an entry on GatesNotes about it, as well as made a promotional video! 🤔
Leïla Slimani, the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, had her third novel released in the UK this week – Faber acquired the rights for what it’s set to be a trilogy! 📚 The first one in the series, “Le pays des autres,” translated by Sam Taylor as “The Country of Others,” draws significantly on the history of Slimani’s own family and it takes place in Morocco after World War II, leading up to the revolt against French colonialism. Here’s an interesting interview with Slimani discussing the disillusionment of immigration, discrimination, and freedom, all recurring themes in her latest book. 📖
BONUS: The “Mariko Aoki phenomenon” – that’s all I’m saying. I let you do the work and decipher the message. 👀 🚽 💩 If you’re concerned this might happen to you, don’t worry: here’s a Q&A with a gastroenterologist. You’re welcome ?!
🎧 📰 👀 My media diet this week
Can suicide be predicted? Will Stephenson became interested once he’s found a device in Sweden that could read your palm and tell you whether or not you would kill yourself. From there, it was only natural to dive into the history of suicide, including “suicidology,” the term coined by Edwin Shneidman, the father of suicide prediction. Why read this? Mostly because of the facts about suicide. For instance, did you know that Monday is the most popular day of the week to kill yourself? Or that, on average, someone dies by suicide about once every forty seconds? Also, another one to ponder: if humans had access to a button that would kill us instantly and painlessly, we would all press it sooner or later. ✋ 🛑
Can we save the planet by shrinking the economy? 🌍 We’ve been told that humans need to reduce global economic activity because, at our current levels of consumption, the world won’t hit the target of stabilising global temperatures at no more than 1.5 degrees of warming. Why read this? Kelsey Piper from Vox dismantles the “bold, romantic vision” by arguing that the degrowth movement would be impossible to implement, being both too radical and not radical enough. 📈 📉
A lighter, funny story – literally – about the “ha ha” tapback. (Ha!) Todd Levin argues it is the best way to respond to text messages. He might have a point: gone are the overbearing “LOL” and the “streaming tears of laughter” emoji, which is, let’s face it, a bit much. 😁
📌 Random news in brief
James Corden got cast in a movie musical, again – this time as a mouse. 🐭Cinderella will be released exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, September, 3. Meanwhile, fans have had enough: “How come James Cordon is in everything?” 🙄 🤭
When I was playing with Barbie dolls, I used to cut their heads off – maybe a sign of early feminism? Glad that Barbie gave up on their emblematic (or rather problematic!) thin, white-skinned girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. Now, Barbie has made a doll of Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, the scientist who helped create the Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, in hope of inspiring girls to get into STEM careers. 👩🔬 🦠 🔬
Sex in cyberspace? 💋 Whether you like it or not, this is the future of pornography. Apparently, Virtual Reality has been one of the fastest-growing categories of videos on Pornhub, particularly due to its “immersive experience.” 😵💫 🤯
Oh wow that book you picked up was super interesting. It making me want to read it. Wow what an insane preforming artist. The whole walking across the great Wall of China to break up with someone that insane.
Oh as dark as it sounds I think more people would press the button then I would like to think. I think it be great if you could predict someone is going to do it. Because then maybe we have a better chance at saving them.
HA Ha don't sound overbearing I think and not over used. It sounds like someone really laughing. :D lovely read thank you teodora!