17
Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic Author(s): Janet A. Kaplan Source: Art Journal, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 7-21 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777944 Accessed: 28/04/2010 04:40 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org

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Page 1: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina AbramovicAuthor(s): Janet A. KaplanSource: Art Journal, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 7-21Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777944Accessed: 28/04/2010 04:40

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

Page 2: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

As this issue was in production we learned the tragic news that Penny McCall and her husband, David, were killed in a car accident while

engaged in relief work in Albania. McCall was a vigorous supporter of

many projects in the arts, including the work of Marina Abramovic. In salute to her generosity and vision we dedicate this interview to her

memory.

Expiring Body, an exhibition of work by Marina Abramovic, was held at the

Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, from December 4, 1998,

through February 6, 1999. Performing Body, a lecture/performance, was presented on December 4, 1998, at the Philadelphia Convention Center in conjunction with the exhibition. The following interview took place December 3, 1998, before the conflict in Kosovo began.

Abramovic: You absolutely need fresher lipstick. Yours is too dark. You need

something to lift you up.

Kaplan: I was going to begin by asking you how you prepare to perform. Instead, you took out fifty-five beauty products with which to make me up so that I would look better on the video record of this interview. Is this how you

begin?

Abramovic: A long time ago I made a piece called Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful. At that time, I thought that art should be disturbing rather

Janet A. Kaplan

Deeper and Deeper: Interview with

Marina Abramovic

than beautiful. But at my age now, I have started thinking that beauty is not so bad. My life is full of such contradic- tions. Many come from my childhood. I was born in

Yugoslavia. My father and mother are divorced. As an adult, I recently wanted to go back to help them because of the war. With the embargo, there is nothing in the stores. They don't have basics. So I called my father to ask him what he needs, and he dictates a long list-antibiotics, bandages, penicillin, toilet paper, coffee, sugar, powdered milk, all these basic things for survival. Then I call my

mother and ask what she needs. She says, "I need Chanel lipstick, Absolute Red, Number 345, and hair spray." I am between these two. It took me a long time to come to terms with this because I've always tried to put a face in front of the public that is very tough, very male, a going-forward-no-matter-what performance attitude. But after I had so many problems with Ulay completing our apotheosis on the Great Wall of China, where we split up, I decided that now I need glamour. I need something to love. I need to see all these other parts of me which I had absolutely never allowed to exist. I had been ashamed of this part of me and let them go. Then I created The Biography, in which I

staged my life and played both sides, the tough one and the contradictory one, and when I exposed my shame, this was the biggest liberation I had in my life.

Kaplan: Please describe the exhibition and lecture at the Fabric Workshop (fig. 0). Abramovic: This exhibition has three parts. It starts with a lecture called Performing Body, for which I made a selection from twenty-five years of my experience with the body in a performance situation, including different artists from different backgrounds-film, dance, performance, theater-to explore how they use their own bodies to perform. I structure the lecture as a real human body, with works that focus on chest, hands, feet, stomach, and so on. It starts with the head. I have a collection of many different people using just their

I. The Biography, December 4, 1998. Performance. Photo courtesyThe Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Photo Aaron Igler.

7 art journal

Page 3: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

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Page 4: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

heads to say something. And then I move to the other parts of the body. I don't

actually show much of my own work, but I do show the work of others who have inspired me. In the exhibition I show some of my own work of the last ten

years. Many people think, She's doing performance again; why are there objects or photographs? I use all kinds of materials as I need them, but the subject is

always the same. It's always about the body and about performing. So the photograph is about the moment of the performance. Then I have video installations and the objects. There are objects for human use, which the public can use, and objects not for human use, for spirit use. And there are objects I call power objects, which contain a certain energy.

My new installation has cross-cultural elements. I went to India and Sri Lanka for two months and met people with special psychic powers who push the limits of their body much farther than we in Western culture can do. So I made Expiring Body Image, which consists of three parts: head, torso, and feet. For the head, I use an example from Western

culture, and I always use someone close to me. Here, it is my brother, who is a doctor of philosophy. He is talking about time, space, energy, alpha states of

mind, and death. Touching his head is the torso of an African man in a vodun ritual who really worked with the spirits. And then we have the feet. In Sri Lanka I filmed a ceremony in which people in a certain state of mind could walk on fire and not burn themselves.

In the other part of the installation, which I call

Diary, I shot repetitive moments in prayer ceremonies. I show a sixty-year-old Tibetan woman who prayed by prostrating herself, repeating this moment over and over through the day. This is ten or fifteen hours of work. If you asked anybody even in the best physi- cal condition to do such a thing, it would be impos-

sible. But if you cross a threshold into a certain state of mind, you can push your body over this limit. My whole research in this piece is to find the limit. How can a Western body have this experience, and how can an Eastern body push much farther into an area unknown for us? I am interested in this because for me performance is a means of research to find mental and physical answers.

At one point in my life, I didn't stop performing, but I started producing objects. Many times as I perform I see that the public is in a voyeuristic situation.

They sit in the dark looking at something happening on stage, and they don't

really participate. For me, the most important thing is experience. Transforma- tion only matters if you really go through something yourself. As a performer, I'm going through this thing. But it's not really the public's experience. So I decided to build these transitory objects. I don't call them sculptures. They're objects that the public can perform, like props. When they trigger their own

experience, the object can be removed. It is not something that should be per-

2. Shoes for Departure, 1990.Citrine.9 x 21 x 13

(22.9 x 53.3 x 33); 9 x 20 x II (22.9 x 51 x 28). Photo courtesy The Fabric Workshop and

Museum, Philadelphia. Photo Aaron Igler.

8 SUMMER 1999

Page 5: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

manent. People ask me, Can we really walk on a ladder with knives? Of course we can. It depends on our state of consciousness. If you put this ladder with knives in front of a shaman in Brazil, he will walk on it. It's our problem that we can't. In a way, it's to remind you that you can push your limits. Then I have

crystal shoes (fig. 2). I have instructions for the public to take off your shoes and, with naked feet, put on the two crystal shoes, close your eyes, don't move, and make your departure. I'm talking about a mental, not physical, departure. So the public can enter certain states of mind helped by the material itself. Material is very important for me. I use crystals, human hair, copper, iron. The materials already have a certain energy.

God Punishing (fig. 3) is a large piece that consists of five large crystals and

whips made with copper and Korean virgin hair. The story goes back to my childhood, when I read about King Solomon. He had ships anchored at sea. A storm destroyed all the ships and the people died. He was so angry at the gods of the sea that he ordered his soldiers to stand on the shore and whip the sea 385 times. As a child, this image of men whipping the sea was so absurd and fantastic. Who are we to punish the gods? To translate that story into an object, I arranged some crystals, which for me are frozen sea, and made whips from Korean virgin hair. The public is invited to take these whips and whip the crys- tals. It's important that the whips are made from the hair because we are the

gods, and we can only punish the sea with our own body.

3. Marina Abramovic: Works: 1990-1998. Installation view. Photo courtesyThe Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Photo Will Brown.

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Page 6: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

Kaplan: Why Korean virgin hair?

Abramovic: In some Korean villages, before a virgin woman marries, she cuts off her hair as a sacrifice. This kind of untouched innocence is important for me. So that is the kind of hair I used to fit the myth. And then I had other things, like a

crystal brush and a table and chairs for spirit use. They are objects that can't be used by humans because they are too small or too high. At P.S. I I exhibited Chair for Man and His Spirit. The chair for the spirit is fifteen meters high, and the chair for the human is really small. I like to make objects for the invisible world so it becomes visible in another way. The invisible world is a para-reality to us. It is

very important to be aware of that.

Kaplan: Is it your expectation that people will really participate in the work, that

they will put on the shoes, take the hair whips, and beat the crystals?

Abramovic: It's a question of culture. If you do such a piece in Holland, people do it right away. In other cultures, say Sweden, people are very reserved. There is the directive that you're not supposed to touch art. You're not supposed to get close. The whole idea of the temporality of the object is very important to me, so

they have to be used and, by use, destroyed. This is totally against the idea of the art object that has to last forever. I'm very interested in temporality. Not just of

objects, but of our bodies, too. That's why I call this new piece Expiring Body.

Kaplan: When you perform, how do you prepare? What kinds of things do you need to get yourself ready for performances that demand great rigor?

Abramovic: I don't do anything. It's hard to explain. I enter into the mental and

physical construction in the moment the public is there. Before that moment, I am extremely nervous. I have stomach pain, dizziness, and can't talk to anybody. Three days before a performance, this very uncomfortable state of mind sets in. I can't calm myself. It just takes possession of me. But the moment the public is there, something happens. I move from the lower self to a higher state, and the fear and nervousness stop. Once you enter into the performance state, you can

push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do.

Kaplan: So in your private life, separate from preparing for a performance, you don't engage in ritual practice?

Abramovic: Again, it's a huge contradiction, because there are moments in my life when I need to completely withdraw and do ritual practice. I go to a monastery and spend three months in total retreat. I do not see anybody, and I do very radi- cal things. But when I finish this monastery trip, I go to New York and do all the bad things for my body-eating half a kilo of chocolate, watching bad movies. But

both of these are reality. Then I can go on to other things. I find even if I wish to

equalize spirituality in my work and my life, it's difficult to do. I used to be ashamed of that. Now I like to analyze this openly to show others that we all have this

problem. The thing is to learn from your own art because it is much farther along than you are.

Kaplan: Your work has such rigor that it sets a very high moral standard. But

you're inviting the possibility that it's the performative experience itself that

allows you to do that.

10 SUMMER 1999

Page 7: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

Abramovic: Yes. The performance can also affect your own life backwards. So I'm learning from my own work.

Kaplan: But how much do you expect your audience to be able to follow you when, for example, you're sitting in a gallery on a bicycle seat for three hours?

Abramovic: I don't expect anything from the public. I only know what I expect from myself, and for me it's important that when I'm doing a performance that I am there with my body and mind 100 percent. You know you can perform with

your body in the space, but your mind is in Honolulu. To be in the here and now is very important. It takes enormous energy and concentration. When that happens, the public gets trapped into this here and now, and they are there with you. I know if I slip even one second, somebody may leave, but if I keep this energy, nobody does. It's a very special state, and it really works. If I'm 100 percent there, I know I can affect the public very strongly.

Kaplan: What is your expectation of audience engagement in work that is

only documentation of things that happened when nobody was present?

Abramovic: Documentation can be extremely boring, like the long process performances in the 1970s that were seventeen hours or three days long. You can't do this with documentation in the '90s, not when we are facing a culture in which the concentration required for television advertisements is thirty seconds

4. Spirit House: Dozing Consciousness, 1997.

Single-channel video projection, 30 mins. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, NewYork. Performance: Lying on the ground, my face is buried in quartz crystals. Performed for video.

maximum. We can't look at things anymore. So one way is to have the attitude about documentation that it doesn't represent the truth. I have to be honest with myself. One way to deal with documentation is to edit it in a way in which you see the begin- ning, the climax, and the end of the

piece in a shortened view. The other

way is to create the performance only for the video, so that the camera is the viewer. Then when you show it, the energy of the performance can be translated to the public. That is

why I've done installations like Spirit House (fig. 4) and Balkan Baroque (fig. 5), where I start with a large installation in which I perform. Then I remove myself and the energy of

the performance, and the video can create a kind of space in which the public can understand what happened. From the early days when I was working in

Yugoslavia and didn't have video, only photography, I found that the most

interesting way to present my work was not to look at sequences of how the

performance developed, but rather to decide which photograph had the energy by itself as a photograph and then show just that one. The photograph then has power itself.

II art journal

Page 8: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

. .. .. . ..

.. . .. ...

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kaplan: But certainly the power is diminished. For people to get the full energy, they need to be with

you.

Abramovic: Definitely.

Kaplan: You've gone to a lot of

places-Aboriginal sites in Australia, other parts of the world-that are

very remote from the context of the

gallery and museum structure in the

ways in which we see art. Do you see part of your goal as translating that ritual idea from one context to the other? They seem about as oppo- site as they can be in the realm of

experience. In one, the people all

participate, and in the other there is

5. Balkan Baroque, 1997 (published 1998). Cibachrome photograph mounted on aluminum, ed. 18.49 x 85 (124.5 x 216). Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, NewYork. Performance: In the mid- dle of the space, I wash 1,500 fresh beef bones, continuously singing folk- songs from my childhood. Duration: 4 days, 6 hours; June 1997; XLVII Biennale,Venice.

the performer and then the viewers who, even if engaged, are certainly not

engaged at the level of people involved with the same ritual.

Abramovic: In 1979, when I was working with Ulay, we felt we had exhausted all the possibilities of the performance structure because of the tough, physical performing elements we used. That was also the time when many of the first

performance artists had become tired of performing. It's an extremely vulner- able situation. They went back to the seclusion of their studios and started

producing things. Also, there was a huge demand from the market to have

something to sell, because in performance, there was nothing. You only sell the

memory. I found this a kind of regression. I had been a painter before, and I

thought that performance had still not been fully explored. The physical part was explored, but there was a huge mental area that had not been touched. But we didn't know how to proceed with the work. The only thing we knew was that the best answer we could look for was in nature. So we went back to the desert and started traveling. The desert was a great place for us, because there was a minimum of information, an extremely violent environment, heat, and so on. You were confronted with yourself and your own life. Then we decided to go to the Aborigines to find answers in nature. We chose the Aborigines because the culture was absolutely nomadic, as we were. At that time, we lived in the car and just traveled around. We didn't have any home. Also, Aborigines don't just make ceremonies three times a year. Ceremony is their life. They have this amazing narrative culture, the dreamtime stories. When they make a ceremony, they spend a long time making the most beautiful objects. The moment the ceremony is finished, the objects are left there, destroyed. And then they start all over again. So there was no material culture. It was very close to how we thought about our life and performance as a way of living. Another

interesting thing about Aborigines is that they never had yes or no in their lan-

guage. They don't exist because they don't doubt. They are completely con- nected with nature, and there is no doubt in their minds. Suicide doesn't exist in

12 SUMMER 1999

Page 9: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

the Aboriginal world because it's not needed. It was very interesting how much we learned, how much we were inspired by this culture. We didn't produce any work there; in nature, you can't make art. Nature is so perfect as it is that art becomes an obstacle. Art can only be done in destructive societies that have to be rebuilt. I see the artist as a bridge between nature and the city. We went to nature to get, and we went to our society to give. Going to nature was a way to recharge. Interestingly, when we came back, everybody was painting, making sculptures, and so on. Our answer was performance. We found new energy for performance, but now less physical and much more mental. We came from the Aborigines with this idea for the Nightsea Crossing piece, in which we just sat for long periods of time opposite each other at a table in the museum. Nobody would see us start or end the performance. When the public arrived in the museum, we were already there. When they left, we were still there. So they would see this image with no beginning, no end. The difference between us and the object in the museum is that the objects have another kind of energy, a static

energy, but we have a live energy. And that was really the answer to the '80s.

Working with the body, but with the mental area, opened in a different way.

Kaplan: You said somewhere that you felt that the artists performing in the

90os don't have the same kind of rigor. There is a toughness missing that you felt the '7os had. But tough is certainly a word I would associate with your work. Do you feel that has changed for you during this decade?

Abramovic: No. I'm still looking for these things. When I'm afraid or don't know something, or when I enter into a completely unknown area, I always think that's the moment that I want to go through, and it's even more painful because the pain is such a good door to cross into another state of conscious- ness. So for me I still think these elements are very important to perform.

There's a huge return to body consciousness in the '90s. Lots of young artists working with different media are using elements from the '70s, but now

they're doing it electronically. They will take one moment of the performance, reedit it, and make a loop that brings this feeling of endless experience to the viewer, but actually the artist himself didn't go through that experience. That's a

big difference. You're getting this illusion of something that didn't really happen. Now, fashion and the media take more elements from performance. If you look at MTV, it's full of images from '70s performance. It's amazing. It's recycled and

put in a different context. One month after I made Balkan Baroque, Face maga- zine had four pages of girls in Calvin Klein T-shirts and the long white dresses stained with blood, carrying bones. And it's not only me. There is a young artist in London who slept in the gallery, and the media coverage was enormous.

Everybody was talking about how vulnerable and incredible it was. It was a tremendous piece. In the '70s, at least ten artists slept in the gallery. One of the best performances was Chris Burden's. But there was no reference to that

performance in the articles. I'm very interested in what a new body in the twenty-first century will look

like. What is interesting now is all these new things, the club culture, piercing, cutting, looking like an accident victim. Piercing and cutting in the '70s were done for a different reason. In the '90s it's part of fashion. So the structure and the meaning are different.

I 3 art journal

Page 10: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

Kaplan: What is the motive in your plan to recreate performances from the 70s, given that it is now a displaced activity of someone else that you're

going to reexperience for yourself?

Abramovic: One day many years ago, I was invited by five girl artists in Amsterdam to attend a performance they called Marina Positions, in which they remade my performance Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful. This is the piece I had done fifteen years before, in which I combed my hair with a brush and really hurt myself, showing a very disturbing image that is the oppo- site of beauty. The five girls sat in a row and simultaneously repeated my actions. In the beginning, I was angry. Why are they doing my piece? But during the performance, I became completely excited and thought, this is fantastic. A hundred years after Mozart's death, you can have your own interpretation of Mozart, but you still say it's by Mozart. In that way, I think a performance should be open like music. There's the structure of the performance that you can see, and then you can make your own interpretation and have your own experience. You absolutely have to respect the originality of the piece and ask the living artist for the permission. You can do whatever you want after that. There are some performance pieces that I only saw in photo or video reproduction, or sometimes I just heard people talk about them. I may never have experienced them, but my idea of the piece had tremendous effects on my life. Why can't I

experience these pieces? I will show the original material, and then I will do my interpretation, and then we can see. I think at the end of the century it's very important to do this.

Kaplan: Do you see it in the context of a symposium, or are you thinking of

actually restaging performances?

Abramovic: I always go straight to the experience, so I'm thinking about staging performances. I was always very impressed by Chris Burden's crucifixion piece, Trans-fixed. What I heard in Yugoslavia, although I didn't even have a picture of it, was that Burden crucified himself on a Volkswagen, that somebody drove the

Volkswagen through Los Angeles, and that he was arrested. That was my image. When I talked to Burden and to the only three witnesses, I learned that only four people saw this piece. The story was that he was in a garage with a doctor, who pulled the nails through and crucified him on the Volkswagen. Then the

garage door was opened. The three friends pushed the car out of the garage, took the photograph, then put the car back into the garage. There's such a huge difference. I would ask for his permission to do the piece, but then I would do it completely differently.

The idea of female sacrifice is quite interesting to me. I would like to be

crucified, but not on a Volkswagen, because I don't like the car. I would choose another car. And then I would like to drive through the city, because this was

my first image of the piece. And the only person who can drive this car, from

my point of view, would be Madonna. I know it's completely insane. Another

interesting piece that I'd like to work on is Vito Acconci's Seed Bed, in which the

artist is under the elevated floor of the gallery masturbating. What is interesting about masturbation is that you are producing something. There is a product. But what does a woman produce in masturbating? Also Dennis Oppenheim's

14 SUMMER 1999

Page 11: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

Tarantula and Gina Pane's Candlebed. I also would like to do one of my own

pieces, Rhythm 0, in which I have many objects on a table, including a pistol, and I invite the public to use any of them on me. Anyone can do anything to me. It's an extremely risky piece, but that could be interesting for me to repeat now in the '90s. And then after these performances, I would open it all to discussion.

Kaplan: And would you want those artists to be included in the conversation with the audience?

Abramovic: Yes. I would make five pieces, one after another. After each piece, the leftover installation would remain. For example, after the Burden, there would be the car; after the Acconci, the floor; after the Oppenheim, the tarantula in the tube used in the performance; objects on the table in my case; the candlebed in the case of Pane. The leftover pieces are like the after- performance exhibition and then the symposium. It's very interesting that from the artists I've been impressed with, except Pane, I have chosen all Americans.

Kaplan: And all men.

Abramovic: That's true. That was the kind of performance that intrigued me. I've always been asked about the man and woman thing, but I don't care if it's a man or a woman. The most important thing is if the piece is good. Who is doing it is secondary. When I'm doing performances, I don't emphasize gender.

Kaplan: What is your relationship to the feminist performance work of the 70s and '8os-body art that was very specifically feminist-driven?

Abramovic: I don't have much relation to it because when feminism became an issue, I was in Yugoslavia. It never touched me because I come from a family in which my mother was a major in the army and the director of the Museum of Art and Revolution. In Yugoslavia women were partisans, absolutely in power, in control, from the government level to any other level. I always felt that I had all this energy. When I began my career in Italy, after I left Yugoslavia, there was not a single woman artist on the scene, but I had everything I needed. I never felt that I didn't have things because I was a woman.

Kaplan: A lot of women focused on their bodies not because of issues of inequality but because of the specifics of being a woman in a female body. Is that of interest to you?

Abramovic: No. But, it's very interesting, this feeling of being feminine. I only started after I became fifty. Not before. In most of my performances, I use the body naked, but for a totally different reason, because it's the most natural, simple, architectural. All my early performances deal with the body and archi- tecture, especially the pieces that Ulay and I made, because we were always in relation to space and time. But not because it was male or female. I'm more female in my private life. I don't think so much in my work, but in my private life

very much. I'm in love with glamour, fashion, and so on, but in the '70s, it didn't exist for me.

Kaplan: In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist you talked about there

being a cultural emergency that you felt you were working toward in terms

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Page 12: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

of consciousness. You also spoke about the destruction of the planet. Are you addressing that cultural emergency in your work?

Abramovic: I was talking more about the role of the artist. If art comes just from art, it loses its power and becomes decorative. I never create art to be decorative. I don't like this idea of aesthetic beauty-a beautiful frame, nice colors that go well with the carpet. To me art has to be disturbing. It has to ask

questions and have some kind of prediction of the future within it. It has to have different layers of meaning. Each generation has to take what is needed at that time. But it should not be something that just reflects daily life, like a

newspaper. You read the newspaper today; tomorrow it's old. Art has to have a spiritual value and something that opens certain states of consciousness, because we are losing ourselves so much. The main thing for me is this total

separation. We are facing a separation of body and mind in the future that has

already begun. Heaven's Gate, the computer sect in America that committed suicide in order to join the spaceship hiding behind the comet, was very inter-

esting to me. Now we are entering the twenty-first century and, as Paul Virilio has said, we are sitting at home with the body in one space, but we are every- where with the mind-by the Internet, by computers, zipping through the world. The body is becoming something very heavy, an obstacle. This separa- tion will become so disastrous that body and mind eventually must come back

together. And art has to have the answers.

Kaplan: So you're trying to set a moral standard?

Abramovic: I went to see two major shows in New York, Mark Rothko and

Jackson Pollock. I really love Pollock. His energy seems to me, looking now, nervous and confused, even though he was very close to performance, with his bodily involvement in paintings. But I had never seen many of Rothko's

paintings all in one place, and I was surprised at my reaction. I found him to be a

complete artist. From the beginning he explored different states of conscious- ness. It was so luminous. It was such a spiritual experience to see the progres- sion of this work until its culmination in blacknesses. It was a kind of fulfillment. You see how the end of life comes and all that he went through. As an artist, you have to know how to live, how to die, and when to stop working.

Kaplan: What other artists do you look at?

Abramovic: Yves Klein is very important. In reference to his statement that

paintings are just the ashes of his art, that the process is what is the most

important, I like to tell this story of how I started painting. I had my first exhibi- tion when I was twelve. When I was fourteen, my father asked me what I want- ed for my birthday. I asked for oil paints. So he went to a friend of his who had been a soldier in the army and then went to Paris to become an informel artist. He was on vacation and came with my father to buy the colors because he

knew what we needed. We got all these boxes of different materials. He made

a studio in my room and gave me my first painting lesson. He took the canvas, cut it irregularly, and put it on the floor. He opened one can and threw some

liquid glue on it. Then he opened another with some sand and little pieces of

rock and then took some bitumen, yellow, red, and a little bit of white, and then

16 SUMMER I999

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he threw turpentine and gasoline onto the canvas, put a lit match in the middle, and everything exploded. Then he looked at me and said, "This is a sunset," and left. If you're fourteen and this is your first painting lesson, it's very impressive. It took weeks for the whole thing to dry. Very carefully I put it on the wall, and I went with my parents on vacation. I came back, and since the sun had been

falling directly on this sunset, everything had melted, and it was just a pile of dirt on the floor. There was nothing left on the canvas. Much later I understood

why it had had such an impact on me. Klein's statement that paintings are just the ashes of art made sense to me. What is really important for me in the per- formance is the process. When the performance is finished, the memory is

something else, but the process is what is essential.

Kaplan: What do you find are the differences between solo and collaborative

work?

Abramovic: Earlier, when I worked alone, I reached a wall. I was so radical and

tough that I was almost facing a kind of edge. Death was the next step, because I could not see how it could progress farther. It was almost a miracle for me to meet Ulay. We met on our birthday. He was born on the same day as I, and that same day I met him and fell in love. So there was this huge erotic, emotional

relationship, and from there came the work. To me it was much higher to work with somebody else than to work by myself because the main problem in this

relationship was what to do with the two artists' egos. I had to find out how to

put my ego down, as did he, to create something like a hermaphroditic state of

being that we called the death self. The work came out of this. It melded this male and female energy into something else. The most difficult thing was when we faced emotional problems that did not have to do with the work. We could not continue with the work; it was finished. The most difficult challenge was how to return to my own work because I had thought it is so much higher to have two people making one work together. It took me a long time. The only way I got over my problem was by staging my life in a theater play called The

Biography, in which I play myself and create a distance in which I can let go.

Kaplan: If I am sitting in a performance of The Biography, what do I see?

Abramovic: You see my whole life. The performance is condensed, as though they are video clips, from beginning to end. I play these in the context of opera, because opera is the most artificial place. In the '70s we hated theater because of its artificiality. Performance was different. In opera you know everything is

plastic, fake, and played. But in my performances you see real blood, plus ele- ments of antireality. I redid all my performances in a concentrated way, so that I had to make a climax in less than three or four minutes. I found theatrical means to redo the ones I originally did with Ulay. Sometimes just by showing the slides, sometimes just showing an empty chair.

Kaplan: Is The Biography itself documented somewhere?

Abramovic: It exists as video documentation of the theater pieces, and it's a work in progress. I started it about eight years ago. I play it every year, twice maximum. I'm always adding the new events of my life, so even when I am in a

wheelchair, I will still be able to do it.

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Page 14: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

Kaplan: You mentioned that you like to teach. Is that something you continue to do in your practice as an artist?

Abramovic: Many people teach as a way to survive. In my case, I have a need to teach. At the point in your life when you've gained so much experience, it's

important to be generous to the young generation. You have to open yourself up. I have taught for a long time in academies around the world. Now I am

teaching permanently in Braunschweig, Germany. My class is called Cleaning the House. (Please see the description that follows this interview.) The house refers to the body. Before you start learning from me, you have to clean your house. To be an artist is a necessity, like breathing. You have to feel the need to create, and that still doesn't make a good artist. It just makes you an artist.

Kaplan: Are students able to hang in there for the entire process of cleaning the house?

Abramovic: Oh, yes. They have to. I teach them what it is to be an artist, and that it's very important that you really know that you have to take responsibility. I absolutely disagree with artists who say that they are only doing work for themselves. I'm sitting in the studio and I don't care. This is total bullshit. The moment you create the work, it's not yours anymore. It's not your property. The artist is a servant to society. You have to have a clear-cut function, and you have to have responsibilities.

Kaplan: Getting your work out in the public space. Is that what you mean by responsibility?

Abramovic: You need to spend as much energy in that regard as you spent in

making the piece, in putting the piece in the right place, in the right conditions, to be sure that the meaning is clear. A long time ago, when Christian Boltanski was a young artist, he was showing a small piece in a gallery. I didn't know him at that time, but I was passing through Paris, and I went to look. He was doing a television interview, and the interviewers were very suspicious of his work. He was showing a table with a napkin, little shoes from when he was a six-week-old

baby, a doodle, and childhood photographs. The interviewer asked, "What do

you want to do with this work?" Boltanski was extremely serious. He looked at the camera and said, "I want to change the world, of course."

Kaplan: What do you like to read? What sort of things feed you?

Abramovic: I read a huge mixture of different things. For me it is very impor- tant to read source books. I love all kinds of dictionaries, to see the meanings and the roots of words. Then I like illuminated texts very much, because they were written in a special state of mind. I like those great diaries of Saint Teresa. She complains about her levitation. She says, "I was cooking, and then this

strange force took me off the ground, and I was above levitating. But I wanted

to finish my dinner." She is complaining that levitation was too much sometimes. I also read a lot of anthropological texts. And then, in an airplane, I read Vanity Fair, for contrast.

Kaplan: Do you see yourself continuing to travel to faraway places? You have said that you feel you have to go to the East and bring it back to the West.

18 SUMMER 1999

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Abramovic: It's true. Geographical belonging is very important. I come from the Balkans. The Balkans is literally a bridge between East and West. It's right there, a bridge between two different worlds, a most contradictory place. You have the Eastern notion of time, but you also have the Western notion, and it's

always in contradiction. To me, the East is a source of spirituality and also of

forgotten knowledge we no longer have. That, together with nature, is very inspiring for me. That is where I can reach art. Then I came to the West, where I can make my own mixture of things.

Kaplan: Your work is for the West. Your audience is in the West.

Abramovic: Absolutely. The East doesn't need all this.

Kaplan: You said somewhere that you feel that every artist basically has one

good idea that he or she just keeps working with. What's your good idea?

Abramovic: I have this old professor who told me two truths, both of which are very important for me. One truth he told this way. If you always draw with the right hand, and you get better and better, so virtuoso that you can close

your eyes and make perfect drawings, you must immediately change to the left. It's very important, because habit is the worst thing for the artist. When you are

producing one thing and become recognizable and everybody knows you, you have to change. You have to surprise yourself, because the worst is if you just respond to the needs of the market. Then development stops. The second

thing he said is that in every artist's life, you may think you have a new idea or

many new ideas every day. In fact, you may have one good idea, or, if you are a genius, two. But be very careful with this. All the rest is interpretation of the same idea, and for me, the only idea I have always had is the human body. That's the only thing I have always been interested in. It's a large area to be

explored, and I always feel that I'm just at the beginning.

Kaplan: So you never worry about not knowing what to do?

Abramovic: I've never been bored in my life. I don't even know what that means. And I never have doubts about being an artist. It's the only thing I've ever wanted to be.

Kaplan: Well, unless there are other things you'd like to talk about, I thank

you.

Abramovic: Wait. A little joke. I always like jokes. Sometimes there is so little art that has real humor, and humor is very important, because with laughing, the truth, even the worst, is easy to take. I recently heard a performance joke that I like very much. Q: How many performance artists does it take to screw in a

light bulb? A: I don't know. I was there for only four hours.

I am very grateful to Marina Abramovic for her enthusiastic participation in this interview and to those who facilitated it, including Mary Jane Jacob, Susan Maruska, and Steven Beyer of the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia; Lilli-Mari Andresen, Cecile Panzieri, and Sean Kelly of Sean Kelly Gallery in New York; and Alexander Godschalk in Amsterdam.

I 9 art journal

Page 16: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

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Brancusi said:

"It's not important what you do,

what is really important is the

state of mind from which you are

doing it."

That state of mind is essential for

me in the moment of performing. That fragile passage between per-

former and public, when you take

a step to enter your mental and

physical construction.

This workshop is designed for stu-

dents of Art to go though different

stages of experiences and investigate their: Endurance, Concentration,

Perception, Self-control, Will Power,

Confrontation with the Limits

(Mental and Physical)

After the no eating and no talking

period (which varies from three to

five days), students will be asked

to make work from this newly achieved "state of mind."

Description and conditions of

the workshop

Duration: 8 days

Conditions for participation:

Those interested should be informed

of the following conditions before

they decide to participate

i. Participants should be in good health, not suffering from any

mental or physical disorders,

anorexia, or bulimia; they should

not be pregnant and should not be

using any prescription medications.

2. During the duration of the

workshop, no intoxicants (alcohol,

cigarettes, drugs, sex) may be

consumed.

3. Four days without food, except for large quantities of water and

herbal teas, and four days without

talking.

0 A SIramvi

Page 17: Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramovic

Program examples:

Waking at 7 a.m. and doing heavy outdoor physical exercises: a combi

nation of Aborigine step dancing, Stifi training, Hopi Indian dancing, to the Yves Klein jump.

After this, washing and drinking tea and doing different types of

exercises that will continue all day for the entire four days.

I will inform the students of the

nature of each exercise only just before it is executed.

fin yorwybc.oe Ti

Completion of the workshop:

During the fifth and sixth days, the

participants are asked to make one

artwork using materials found in the

surroundings, or working only with

their own body.