Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade in the late 1960s, Marina Abramovic has been a pioneer of performance art, creating some of the most important works in the field. Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that documents approximately fifty of the artist's ephemeral, time- and media-based works from throughout her career. The book will also discuss a unique element of the Museum's retrospective, live performance: a new work created for the occasion, and performed by the artist herself; and recreations of Abramovic's works by other performers - the first such to be undertaken in a museum setting. The book spans over four decades of Abramovic's early interventions, and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances and collaborative performances made with the Dutch artist Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). Its essays examine Abramovic's ideas of time, duration, and the reperformance of performance art as a way to extend it into posterity. Marina Abramovic also includes a CD, an audio recording of the artist's own voice, guiding the reader through the publication. The artist is present not only in the exhibition but also in the experience of the book.
“I had experienced absolute freedom—I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all—and it intoxicated me.” In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramović’s MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit across from her and communicate with her nonverbally in an unprecedented durational performance that lasted more than 700 hours. This celebration of nearly fifty years of groundbreaking performance art demonstrated once again that Marina Abramović is truly a force of nature. The child of Communist war-hero parents under Tito’s regime in postwar Yugoslavia, she was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was beginning to build an international artistic career, Marina lived at home under her mother’s abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m. curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor—all of which informs her art and her life. The beating heart of Walk Through Walls is an operatic love story—a twelve-year collaboration with fellow performance artist Ulay, much of which was spent penniless in a van traveling across Europe—a relationship that began to unravel and came to a dramatic end atop the Great Wall of China. Marina’s story, by turns moving, epic, and dryly funny, informs an incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. A remarkable work of performance in its own right, Walk Through Walls is a vivid and powerful rendering of the unparalleled life of an extraordinary artist.
A clothbound companion to Marina Abramovic's tribute to Maria Callas, a new performance that recreates the iconic opera diva's famous onstage death scenes An opera production conceived by the legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic (born 1946), 7 Deaths of Maria Callasis a continuation of the artist's lifelong meditation on the female body as a source of both power and pain. Here Abramovic turns her focus to renowned opera singer Maria Callas, whose stunning soprano voice captivated audiences around the world in the mid-20th century. Though she remains one of opera's greatest singers, Callas' life was beset by struggle and scandal. Today, the opera diva is remembered for having been a figure of both talent and tragedy. Through a mix of narrative opera and film, Abramovic recreates seven iconic death scenes from the American-born Greek singer's most important roles--in La Traviata, Tosca, Otello, Madame Butterfly, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoorand Norma--followed by an interpretive recreation of Callas' own death performed onstage by Abramovic herself. This clothbound volume serves as a companion to the live performance and provides insight into the conception, planning and execution of Abramovic's project, probing the many creative elements that make up this dynamic exploration of female suffering.
In an extensive interview, the book, kept in the form of a breviary, offers insight into the intentions and ideas of Marina Abramovic, an internationally renowned artist. Collected texts reflect the view of art history as well as that of the users of h
For 12 days in November 2002, Marina Abramovic lived on three open platforms in the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. She did not eat or speak, nor did have any privacy: the rooms were open and spectators were even invited to observe the artist through a high-powered telescope. She had no escape: the ladders leaning against bedroom, sitting room and bathroom had rungs made of large butcher knives. Throughout her 30-year career, Abramovic has used her body as her primary material, pushing it to extremes of altered consciousness, often putting herself in great physical peril. Her concern with creating works that ritualize the simple actions of everyday life like lying, sitting, dreaming and thinking focuses, in effect, on the manifestation of a unique mental state. In one early solo performances, the artist announced that she would be a passive object for six hours and laid out 72 items spectators could use on her, including a loaded gun. A fight broke out when someone tried to use it. Beginning in the late 70s, she and her then partner Ulay collaborated on now classic performances in which they crawled on their stomachs with a python that hadn't eaten in two weeks; collided with each other, naked, at top speed; sat motionless for seven hours at either end of a long table, trying not even to blink; and, most famously and difficultly, crossed the Great Wall of China, starting at opposite ends and walking until they met in the middle. Abramovic thought "The House With the Ocean View" would be most like walking this last piece, so she mounted the platforms at Sean Kelly Gallery clad in the old hiking boots she wore in China. This volume presents documentation of "The House With the Ocean View," Abramovic's most important performance work to date, alongside essays by the artist, her gallerist Sean Kelly, art historian Thomas McEvilley, curator Chrissie Iles, and others. Published in conjunction with the Sean Kelly Gallery
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