Walk Through Walls

Metadata

• Author: Marina Abramovic
• Full Title: Walk Through Walls
• Category:#books

Notes

Marina Abramovic made a significant amount of her art (and the start of her notable art) with her partner (both romantically and professionally) Ulay. As she describes it, many of their works, even if not intentional spoke to their relationship and the problems of the moment. Ultimately, they split up (both romantically and professionally), and Marina went on to expand what she worked on without Ulay.

She has so much courage and unfaltering certainty in what she does, even if she doesn’t know that it will succeed. She is always trying to do something that feels crazy. She is the pinnacle of creating provocative art.

Highlights

• I remember wanting to go back to my grandmother’s house, because it had been such a secure place for me. It felt very tranquil. She had all these rituals in the morning and in the evening; there was a rhythm to the day. (Location 143)
• I never played with dolls. I never wanted dolls. And I didn’t like toys. I preferred to play with the shadows of passing cars on the wall or a ray of sun streaming through the window. The light would catch the dust particles as they traveled to the floor, and I would imagine that this dust contained little planets with different galactic peoples, aliens who came to visit us, traveling on the rays of the sun. And then there were the glowing beings in the plakar. My entire childhood was full of spirits and invisible beings. It was shadows, and dead people that I could see. (Location 205)

New highlights added September 21, 2023 at 10:20 AM

• Milica told fortunes with Turkish coffee grounds or with a handful of white kidney beans, which she’d throw into a pattern and then read the abstract images they created. These signs and rituals were a kind of spirituality for me. They also connected me to my inner life and my dreams. Many years later, when I went to Brazil to study shamanism, the shamans looked at the same kinds of signs. If your left shoulder itches, it means something. Every single part of the body is connected with different signs that allow you to understand what’s happening inside you—on a spiritual level, but also on a physical and mental level. (Location 508)
• Later on, I understood why this experience was so important. It taught me that the process was more important than the result, just as the performance means more to me than the object. I saw the process of making it and then the process of its unmaking. There was no duration or stability to it. It was pure process. Later on I read—and loved—the Yves Klein quote: “My paintings are but the ashes of my art.” (Location 530)
• All at once it occurred to me—why paint? Why should I limit myself to two dimensions when I could make art from anything at all: fire, water, the human body? Anything! (Location 535)

New highlights added September 21, 2023 at 10:20 PM

• Conceptualists in the United States (where people like Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth were making pieces in which words were as important as objects); the Arte Povera movement in Italy, which was turning everyday objects into art; and the anti-commercial, anti-art Fluxus movement in Germany, whose stars were the provocative performance and Happening artists Joseph Beuys, Charlotte Moorman, and Nam June Paik. There was a Slovenian group called OHO that rejected art as an activity separate from life: any part of life at all, they believed, could be art. They were doing performance art as early as 1969: In Ljubljana, an artist named David Nez did a piece called Cosmology, where he lay inside a circle on the floor, with a lightbulb suspended just over his stomach, and tried to breathe in tune with the universe. (Location 719)
• And second, don’t flatter yourself that you have any ideas. If you’re a good artist, Hegedušić said, you might have one good idea; if you’re a genius, you might have two, period. And he was right. (Location 748) ^41bfa1
• I became convinced that when we die, the physical body dies, but its energy doesn’t disappear—it just takes different forms. I came to believe in the idea of parallel realities. I think that the reality we see now is a certain frequency, and that we’re all on the same frequency, so we’re visible to each other, but that it’s possible to change frequencies. To enter a different reality. And I think that there are hundreds of these realities. (Location 769)
• SKC’s first exhibition, which she called Drangularium—literally, “trinketarium,” or “Little Things.” The purpose of the show was to let artists exhibit everyday objects that were somehow significant to them, rather than artworks, per se: the idea came from Arte Povera in Italy. (Location 784)
• I brought in a peanut in its shell and fixed it to the wall with a straight pin. The peanut stuck out just far enough from the wall to cast a tiny shadow. I called the piece Cloud With Its Shadow. As soon as I saw that little shadow, I realized two-dimensional art truly was a thing of the past for me—that piece opened a whole different dimension. And that show opened new worlds for many people. (Location 794)
• There was a lot of excitement after Drangularium, and a new show quickly followed at SKC: it was called “Objects and Projects.” For this exhibition I created a work called Freeing the Horizon. I reproduced ordinary picture postcards of various streets and monuments in Belgrade, photographically erasing the monuments themselves and most of the surrounding buildings. For instance, in a postcard of the grand Old Palace of the Obrenović Dynasty, I whited out the palace itself, leaving only the grass in front, a couple of cars, a few people strolling by. (Location 901)
• The more I thought about it, the more I realized how unlimited art could be. Around this time, I was also becoming fascinated by sound. And I had an inspiration: I wanted to take a sound-effects recording of a bridge collapse to an actual bridge and play the recording every three minutes—every three minutes, though the structure was clearly intact, you’d hear the gigantic crashing sound of the whole thing falling down. Visually, the bridge still existed, but acoustically it was disappearing. Yet I had to get permission from the municipal authorities to mount this piece, and permission was not granted. They told me the bridge could actually collapse from the strong sound vibrations. (Location 908)
• I made my first sound pieces. In a tree outside the gallery I installed a big speaker that played a continuous loop of birds singing, as if we were in the middle of a tropical forest and not gloomy Belgrade. And inside the gallery, inside three cardboard boxes, I put tape machines playing other sounds of nature: wind blowing, surf crashing, sheep bleating. (Location 914)
• One of the most talented guys in my group of six, Era, had created a piece for the exhibition by simply covering a big mirror in the gallery with transparent packing tape, subverting the normal use of a mirror by forcing visitors to see their reflected images in a distorted way. (Location 918)
• It’s interesting with art. Some people have the ability—and the energy—not just to make the work, but to make sure it’s put in exactly the right place, at the right moment. Some artists realize they have to spend as much time as it took them to get an idea in finding the way to show it, and the infrastructure to support it. And some artists just don’t have that energy, and have to be taken care of, by art lovers or collectors or the gallery system. (Location 949)
• Yet I think I needed this gravity. Much later on, I read a statement of Bruce Nauman’s: “Art is a matter of life and death.” It sounds melodramatic, but it’s so true. This was exactly how it was for me, even at the beginning. Art was life and death. There was nothing else. It was so serious, and so necessary. (Location 978)
• That thing that each of us lives with, that you are your own little self privately—once you step into the performance space, you are acting from a higher self, and it’s not you anymore. It’s not the you that you know. It’s something else. There on the gymnasium floor of Melville College in Edinburgh, Scotland, it was as if I had become, at the same time, a receiver and transmitter of huge, Tesla-like energy. The fear was gone, the pain was gone. I had become a Marina whom I didn’t know yet. (Location 995)

New highlights added September 23, 2023 at 4:30 AM

• Because I had come to believe that art must be disturbing, art must ask questions, art must predict the future. If art is just political, it becomes like newspaper. It can be used once, and the next day it’s yesterday’s news. Only layers of meaning can give long life to art—that way, society takes what it needs from the work over time. (Location 1295)
• Before I left I went to a bookbinder and had a special scrapbook made, with blank pages and a red-brown canvas cover, our names printed on it in gold, like a Communist passport. During our glorious week in Prague (we stayed in the Hotel Paris), we filled the book with mementos: train and bus and museum tickets; menus, maps, and brochures. We were starting to build a history together. And by the time I returned to Belgrade, we had decided to live together. (Location 1316)
• I had never been interested in drugs or alcohol. It wasn’t a moral decision; they just didn’t do anything for me. The things I saw and thought in the normal course of my life were strange enough without clouding my mind. But Ulay’s drinking worried me, because I was in love with him and he was doing nothing with his life when he sat around these bars all day. I felt I was wasting my time, too. We had done these pieces together; I knew there was so much more we could do. I kept making the case to him—not nagging him, not criticizing him, but reminding him in the most loving way that there were worlds we could conquer together. Then one day he tapped his fingers down on the table and looked me in the eye. “You’re right,” he said. (Location 1464)
• ART VITAL No fixed living place. Mobile energy. Permanent movement. No rehearsal. Direct contact. No predicted end. Local relation. No repetition. Self-selection. Extended vulnerability. Passing limitations. Exposure to chance. Taking risks. Primary reactions. (Location 1476)
• The result was Imponderabilia. In developing the work, we thought about a simple fact: if there were no artists, there would be no museums. From this idea we decided to make a poetic gesture—the artists would literally become the door to the museum. Ulay built two tall vertical cases in the museum entrance, making it substantially narrower. Our performance would be to stand in this reduced opening, naked and facing each other, like doorposts or classical caryatids. Thus everyone coming in would have to turn sideways to get past us, and everyone would have to make a decision as he or she slid by: face the naked man, or the naked woman? (Location 1553)
• I realized that this is a theme I return to constantly—I’m always trying to prove to everyone that I can go it alone, that I can survive, that I don’t need anybody. And this is also a curse, in a way, because I’m always doing so much—at times, too much—and because I have so often been left alone (as I wished, in a way) and without love. (Location 1891)
• Once he told a story I’ll never forget. Somewhere in Micronesia, there were two circular groups of islands, a smaller circle within a larger one. Sekelj told a story about a ring and a bracelet. He said that the natives on one of the islands in the smaller circle had a ritual: on a particular day of the year, all the villagers would get in canoes and go to the next island bringing a special ring. But when they arrived, everybody there would be shut in their huts, pretending they weren’t home. So the ring-bringers would scream and shout and do a dance to make the people come out of their huts, and when they finally emerged, the people who had brought the ring would tell them a story about how difficult it had been to come from their island to this island—there had been a storm; a whale had eaten the ring and they’d had to fight the whale to get it back—a whole saga. Then, finally, they would hand over the ring and return to their own island. The next year, the natives who had received the ring took it to the next island over, and the same ritual took place—except that this new group of ring-bringers would add their own story to the story of the group who had brought them the ring the year before. So from year to year, the ring would travel around the smaller circle of islands—and the amazing thing was, this same process was going on with a bracelet in the opposite direction in the outer circle! (Location 1983)
• The temperature at the moment is 40–45 Celsius. We are really feeling this temperature. We sleep under the open sky full of stars. We feel like the first people on this planet. (Location 2079)
• The land is filled with stories: they are always traveling through this mythical landscape. An Aborigine will say to you, “This is a snake man just here fight with a water woman”—and all you see are some boulders, maybe a bush that looks like some strange form of fish. You look at this landscape, and hear this story, and it’s not that it happened in the past, it’s not something in the future. It’s happening now. It is always now. It has never “happened.” It is happening. This was a revolutionary concept to me—all my ideas about existing in the present came from there. (Location 2099)
• In the beginning, there were flies everywhere. I was covered with them—in my nose, in my mouth, all over my body. It was impossible to chase them away, so I began to name them: Jane was the one on the roof of my mouth, George was the one who liked to sit in my ear. Then after three months, I woke up one morning without a single fly on me. It was then that I understood that the flies had been drawn to me because I was something strange and different: as I became one with my surroundings, I lost my attraction. (Location 2133)
• a beautiful line from a second-century Chinese poem, “Confessions of the Great Wall”: “The earth is small and blue, and I am a little crack in it.” (Location 2176)
• We performed Gold Found by the Artists for sixteen straight days in Sydney. We fasted for the entire period, only consuming juice and water in the evenings, and never spoke to each other throughout. (Location 2223)
• in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. In that novel, Prince Myshkin describes with acute precision the sensations that overcome him before an epileptic attack: he experiences the most powerful feeling of harmony with everything around him, and a tangible sense of lightness and luminosity in nature. As Dostoevsky describes it, those sensations are so profound that the nervous system can’t take it, and the epileptic seizure comes on as a result. (Location 2242)
• These sensations sound very similar to those I’ve experienced while performing long-duration pieces. These pieces are very repetitive, very constant: there are no surprises for the body, and so the brain kind of checks out. That’s when you get into a state of harmony with everything around you: that’s the moment when what I call “liquid knowledge” comes to you. I believe that universal knowledge is everywhere around us. It’s only a question of how we can achieve that kind of understanding. Many people have experienced moments when something in their brain says, “Oh my God, now I understand.” And those moments feel so rare, but the knowledge is always out there for the taking. You only have to tune out all the noise around you. In order to do this, you have to exhaust your own system of thinking, and your own energy. That’s extremely important. You must really be exhausted, to the point where there’s nothing left: where you’re so tired that you can’t take it anymore. When your brain is so tired of working that it can no longer think—that’s the moment when liquid knowledge can enter. That knowledge has been very hard for me to win, but I have won it. And the only way to win it is by never, under any circumstances, giving up. (Location 2246)
• This is how I read the story: that to achieve a goal, you have to give everything until you have nothing left. And it will happen by itself. That’s really important. This is my motto for every performance. I give every single gram of energy, and then things either happen or they don’t. This is why I don’t care about criticism. I only care about criticism when I know I didn’t give 100 percent. But if I give everything—and then 10 percent more than everything—it doesn’t matter what they say. (Location 2371)
• there was something about this man who had flicked my forehead so gently, something unbelievably humble and innocent and pure. I think that innocence opened my heart. If that man had told me to open the window and jump, for whatever reason, I would have done it. It was something I’d never experienced—complete surrender. Pure love. It came so unexpectedly, like a wave. (Location 2418)
• He said that you can tell the most terrible truths if you first open the human heart with humor. Otherwise, the heart closes and nothing comes in. (Location 2422)
• Failures are very important—they mean a great deal to me. After a big failure, I go into a deep depression and a very dark part of my body, but soon afterward I come back to life again, alive to something else. I always question artists who are successful in whatever they do—I think what that means is that they’re repeating themselves and not taking enough risks. If you experiment, you have to fail. By definition, experimenting means going to territory where you’ve never been, where failure is very possible. How can you know you’re going to succeed? Having the courage to face the unknown is so important. I love to live in the spaces in between, the places where you leave the comforts of your home and your habits behind and make yourself completely open to chance. (Location 2525)

New highlights added September 23, 2023 at 6:33 PM

• And the moment you step into this other state of mind, you are tapping into a limitless energy, a place where you can do anything you want. You’re no longer little you with all your limitations—“poor Marina,” the person who cries like a baby when she cuts herself slicing an onion. When this kind of freedom comes, it’s as if you’re connected with a cosmic consciousness. It’s the same thing, I would soon find, that seems to happen in every good performance: you’re on a larger scale; there are no more limits. (Location 2867)
• BREATHING. Lie on the ground, press your body against the ground as forcefully as possible without breathing, keep this position as long as you can, then breathe deeply and relax. BLINDFOLD. Leave home and go to the forest, where you are blindfolded, then try to find your way back home. Like a blind person, an artist needs to learn to see with his or her whole body. LOOKING AT COLOR. Sitting in a chair, look at a sheet of paper printed with one of the primary colors for one hour. Repeat for the other two colors. LONG WALK IN LANDSCAPE. Start walking from a given point, proceeding in a straight line through the landscape for four hours. Rest, then return along the same route. WALKING BACKWARD. Walk backward for four hours, while holding a mirror in your hand. Observe reality as a reflection. FEELING ENERGY. With your eyes closed, extend your hands in front of you toward another participant. Never touching the other person, move your hands around different areas of their body for one hour, feeling their energy. STOPPING ANGER. If you get angry, stop breathing and hold your breath until you can’t hold it anymore, then inhale fresh air. REMEMBERING. Try to remember the very moment between being awake and falling asleep. COMPLAINING TO A TREE. Hold a tree and complain to it, for a minimum of fifteen minutes. SLOW-MOTION EXERCISE. For the entire day, do everything very slowly: walking, drinking water, showering. Peeing in slow motion is very difficult, but try. OPENING THE DOOR. For three hours, very slowly open a door, neither entering nor exiting. After three hours the door is not a door anymore. (Location 3581)

New highlights added September 26, 2023 at 12:31 PM

• Her diaries were just as heartbreaking. One entry from that same time period read, “Thinking: If animals live a long time together, they start loving each other. But people start hating each other.” That shook me to my core, not only for what it said about my parents’ lives, but for what it might say about mine. (Location 4716)

New highlights added September 27, 2023 at 2:55 PM

• wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, who had just died the year before. These are big, beautifully stark graphite grids, extraordinarily simple—which means that their conception was so difficult. (Location 4876)
• “Marina, why don’t you face the reality of who you are now?” he said. “Your love life is gone. But you have a relationship with your audience, with your work. Your work is the most important thing in your life. Why don’t you just do in the MoMA atrium what you did in Japan with Ulay—except that instead of Ulay sitting across the table from you, it is the public? Now you’re alone: the public completes the work.” I sat up very straight, thinking about it. The Artist Is Present was taking on a whole new meaning. But then Klaus was shaking his head. “Or maybe not,” he said. “We’re talking about three months, all day, every day. I don’t know. I don’t know if it would be good for you, physically or psychologically. Let’s go back to the shelves.” But the more I thought about the shelves, the more complicated the whole idea seemed. Too complicated. I thought about Sol LeWitt’s beautiful simplicity. (Location 4886)
• Chrissie Iles wrote this: “I walk into the arena of the performance. Marina’s head is bowed. I sit down in front of her. She raises her head. She is like my sister. I smile. She smiles gently. We look into each other’s eyes. She begins to cry. I cry. I think nothing of my life and everything about how the people sitting have affected hers. I want to send her love. I realize she is giving me unconditional love.” The sheer quantity of love, the unconditional love of total strangers, was the most incredible feeling I’ve ever had. I don’t know if this is art, I said to myself. I don’t know what this is, or what art is. I’d always thought of art as something that was expressed through certain tools: painting, sculpture, photography, writing, film, music, architecture. And yes, performance. But this performance went beyond performance. This was life. Could art, should art, be isolated from life? I began to feel more and more strongly that art must be life—it must belong to everybody. I felt, more powerfully than ever, that what I had created had a purpose. (Location 5172)

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title: “Walk Through Walls” author: “Marina Abramovic” url: "" date: 2023-12-19 source: kindle tags: media/books

Walk Through Walls

Metadata

• Author: Marina Abramovic
• Full Title: Walk Through Walls
• Category:#books

Highlights

• I remember wanting to go back to my grandmother’s house, because it had been such a secure place for me. It felt very tranquil. She had all these rituals in the morning and in the evening; there was a rhythm to the day. (Location 143)
• I never played with dolls. I never wanted dolls. And I didn’t like toys. I preferred to play with the shadows of passing cars on the wall or a ray of sun streaming through the window. The light would catch the dust particles as they traveled to the floor, and I would imagine that this dust contained little planets with different galactic peoples, aliens who came to visit us, traveling on the rays of the sun. And then there were the glowing beings in the plakar. My entire childhood was full of spirits and invisible beings. It was shadows, and dead people that I could see. (Location 205)
• Milica told fortunes with Turkish coffee grounds or with a handful of white kidney beans, which she’d throw into a pattern and then read the abstract images they created. These signs and rituals were a kind of spirituality for me. They also connected me to my inner life and my dreams. Many years later, when I went to Brazil to study shamanism, the shamans looked at the same kinds of signs. If your left shoulder itches, it means something. Every single part of the body is connected with different signs that allow you to understand what’s happening inside you—on a spiritual level, but also on a physical and mental level. (Location 508)
• Later on, I understood why this experience was so important. It taught me that the process was more important than the result, just as the performance means more to me than the object. I saw the process of making it and then the process of its unmaking. There was no duration or stability to it. It was pure process. Later on I read—and loved—the Yves Klein quote: “My paintings are but the ashes of my art.” (Location 530)
• All at once it occurred to me—why paint? Why should I limit myself to two dimensions when I could make art from anything at all: fire, water, the human body? Anything! (Location 535)
• Conceptualists in the United States (where people like Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth were making pieces in which words were as important as objects); the Arte Povera movement in Italy, which was turning everyday objects into art; and the anti-commercial, anti-art Fluxus movement in Germany, whose stars were the provocative performance and Happening artists Joseph Beuys, Charlotte Moorman, and Nam June Paik. There was a Slovenian group called OHO that rejected art as an activity separate from life: any part of life at all, they believed, could be art. They were doing performance art as early as 1969: In Ljubljana, an artist named David Nez did a piece called Cosmology, where he lay inside a circle on the floor, with a lightbulb suspended just over his stomach, and tried to breathe in tune with the universe. (Location 719)
• And second, don’t flatter yourself that you have any ideas. If you’re a good artist, Hegedušić said, you might have one good idea; if you’re a genius, you might have two, period. And he was right. (Location 748)
• I became convinced that when we die, the physical body dies, but its energy doesn’t disappear—it just takes different forms. I came to believe in the idea of parallel realities. I think that the reality we see now is a certain frequency, and that we’re all on the same frequency, so we’re visible to each other, but that it’s possible to change frequencies. To enter a different reality. And I think that there are hundreds of these realities. (Location 769)
• SKC’s first exhibition, which she called Drangularium—literally, “trinketarium,” or “Little Things.” The purpose of the show was to let artists exhibit everyday objects that were somehow significant to them, rather than artworks, per se: the idea came from Arte Povera in Italy. (Location 784)
• I brought in a peanut in its shell and fixed it to the wall with a straight pin. The peanut stuck out just far enough from the wall to cast a tiny shadow. I called the piece Cloud With Its Shadow. As soon as I saw that little shadow, I realized two-dimensional art truly was a thing of the past for me—that piece opened a whole different dimension. And that show opened new worlds for many people. (Location 794)
• There was a lot of excitement after Drangularium, and a new show quickly followed at SKC: it was called “Objects and Projects.” For this exhibition I created a work called Freeing the Horizon. I reproduced ordinary picture postcards of various streets and monuments in Belgrade, photographically erasing the monuments themselves and most of the surrounding buildings. For instance, in a postcard of the grand Old Palace of the Obrenović Dynasty, I whited out the palace itself, leaving only the grass in front, a couple of cars, a few people strolling by. (Location 901)
• The more I thought about it, the more I realized how unlimited art could be. Around this time, I was also becoming fascinated by sound. And I had an inspiration: I wanted to take a sound-effects recording of a bridge collapse to an actual bridge and play the recording every three minutes—every three minutes, though the structure was clearly intact, you’d hear the gigantic crashing sound of the whole thing falling down. Visually, the bridge still existed, but acoustically it was disappearing. Yet I had to get permission from the municipal authorities to mount this piece, and permission was not granted. They told me the bridge could actually collapse from the strong sound vibrations. (Location 908)
• I made my first sound pieces. In a tree outside the gallery I installed a big speaker that played a continuous loop of birds singing, as if we were in the middle of a tropical forest and not gloomy Belgrade. And inside the gallery, inside three cardboard boxes, I put tape machines playing other sounds of nature: wind blowing, surf crashing, sheep bleating. (Location 914)
• One of the most talented guys in my group of six, Era, had created a piece for the exhibition by simply covering a big mirror in the gallery with transparent packing tape, subverting the normal use of a mirror by forcing visitors to see their reflected images in a distorted way. (Location 918)
• It’s interesting with art. Some people have the ability—and the energy—not just to make the work, but to make sure it’s put in exactly the right place, at the right moment. Some artists realize they have to spend as much time as it took them to get an idea in finding the way to show it, and the infrastructure to support it. And some artists just don’t have that energy, and have to be taken care of, by art lovers or collectors or the gallery system. (Location 949)
• Yet I think I needed this gravity. Much later on, I read a statement of Bruce Nauman’s: “Art is a matter of life and death.” It sounds melodramatic, but it’s so true. This was exactly how it was for me, even at the beginning. Art was life and death. There was nothing else. It was so serious, and so necessary. (Location 978)
• That thing that each of us lives with, that you are your own little self privately—once you step into the performance space, you are acting from a higher self, and it’s not you anymore. It’s not the you that you know. It’s something else. There on the gymnasium floor of Melville College in Edinburgh, Scotland, it was as if I had become, at the same time, a receiver and transmitter of huge, Tesla-like energy. The fear was gone, the pain was gone. I had become a Marina whom I didn’t know yet. (Location 995)
• Because I had come to believe that art must be disturbing, art must ask questions, art must predict the future. If art is just political, it becomes like newspaper. It can be used once, and the next day it’s yesterday’s news. Only layers of meaning can give long life to art—that way, society takes what it needs from the work over time. (Location 1295)
• Before I left I went to a bookbinder and had a special scrapbook made, with blank pages and a red-brown canvas cover, our names printed on it in gold, like a Communist passport. During our glorious week in Prague (we stayed in the Hotel Paris), we filled the book with mementos: train and bus and museum tickets; menus, maps, and brochures. We were starting to build a history together. And by the time I returned to Belgrade, we had decided to live together. (Location 1316)
• I had never been interested in drugs or alcohol. It wasn’t a moral decision; they just didn’t do anything for me. The things I saw and thought in the normal course of my life were strange enough without clouding my mind. But Ulay’s drinking worried me, because I was in love with him and he was doing nothing with his life when he sat around these bars all day. I felt I was wasting my time, too. We had done these pieces together; I knew there was so much more we could do. I kept making the case to him—not nagging him, not criticizing him, but reminding him in the most loving way that there were worlds we could conquer together. Then one day he tapped his fingers down on the table and looked me in the eye. “You’re right,” he said. (Location 1464)
• ART VITAL No fixed living place. Mobile energy. Permanent movement. No rehearsal. Direct contact. No predicted end. Local relation. No repetition. Self-selection. Extended vulnerability. Passing limitations. Exposure to chance. Taking risks. Primary reactions. (Location 1476)
• The result was Imponderabilia. In developing the work, we thought about a simple fact: if there were no artists, there would be no museums. From this idea we decided to make a poetic gesture—the artists would literally become the door to the museum. Ulay built two tall vertical cases in the museum entrance, making it substantially narrower. Our performance would be to stand in this reduced opening, naked and facing each other, like doorposts or classical caryatids. Thus everyone coming in would have to turn sideways to get past us, and everyone would have to make a decision as he or she slid by: face the naked man, or the naked woman? (Location 1553)
• I realized that this is a theme I return to constantly—I’m always trying to prove to everyone that I can go it alone, that I can survive, that I don’t need anybody. And this is also a curse, in a way, because I’m always doing so much—at times, too much—and because I have so often been left alone (as I wished, in a way) and without love. (Location 1891)
• Once he told a story I’ll never forget. Somewhere in Micronesia, there were two circular groups of islands, a smaller circle within a larger one. Sekelj told a story about a ring and a bracelet. He said that the natives on one of the islands in the smaller circle had a ritual: on a particular day of the year, all the villagers would get in canoes and go to the next island bringing a special ring. But when they arrived, everybody there would be shut in their huts, pretending they weren’t home. So the ring-bringers would scream and shout and do a dance to make the people come out of their huts, and when they finally emerged, the people who had brought the ring would tell them a story about how difficult it had been to come from their island to this island—there had been a storm; a whale had eaten the ring and they’d had to fight the whale to get it back—a whole saga. Then, finally, they would hand over the ring and return to their own island. The next year, the natives who had received the ring took it to the next island over, and the same ritual took place—except that this new group of ring-bringers would add their own story to the story of the group who had brought them the ring the year before. So from year to year, the ring would travel around the smaller circle of islands—and the amazing thing was, this same process was going on with a bracelet in the opposite direction in the outer circle! (Location 1983)
• The temperature at the moment is 40–45 Celsius. We are really feeling this temperature. We sleep under the open sky full of stars. We feel like the first people on this planet. (Location 2079)
• The land is filled with stories: they are always traveling through this mythical landscape. An Aborigine will say to you, “This is a snake man just here fight with a water woman”—and all you see are some boulders, maybe a bush that looks like some strange form of fish. You look at this landscape, and hear this story, and it’s not that it happened in the past, it’s not something in the future. It’s happening now. It is always now. It has never “happened.” It is happening. This was a revolutionary concept to me—all my ideas about existing in the present came from there. (Location 2099)
• In the beginning, there were flies everywhere. I was covered with them—in my nose, in my mouth, all over my body. It was impossible to chase them away, so I began to name them: Jane was the one on the roof of my mouth, George was the one who liked to sit in my ear. Then after three months, I woke up one morning without a single fly on me. It was then that I understood that the flies had been drawn to me because I was something strange and different: as I became one with my surroundings, I lost my attraction. (Location 2133)
• a beautiful line from a second-century Chinese poem, “Confessions of the Great Wall”: “The earth is small and blue, and I am a little crack in it.” (Location 2176)
• We performed Gold Found by the Artists for sixteen straight days in Sydney. We fasted for the entire period, only consuming juice and water in the evenings, and never spoke to each other throughout. (Location 2223)
• in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. In that novel, Prince Myshkin describes with acute precision the sensations that overcome him before an epileptic attack: he experiences the most powerful feeling of harmony with everything around him, and a tangible sense of lightness and luminosity in nature. As Dostoevsky describes it, those sensations are so profound that the nervous system can’t take it, and the epileptic seizure comes on as a result. (Location 2242)
• These sensations sound very similar to those I’ve experienced while performing long-duration pieces. These pieces are very repetitive, very constant: there are no surprises for the body, and so the brain kind of checks out. That’s when you get into a state of harmony with everything around you: that’s the moment when what I call “liquid knowledge” comes to you. I believe that universal knowledge is everywhere around us. It’s only a question of how we can achieve that kind of understanding. Many people have experienced moments when something in their brain says, “Oh my God, now I understand.” And those moments feel so rare, but the knowledge is always out there for the taking. You only have to tune out all the noise around you. In order to do this, you have to exhaust your own system of thinking, and your own energy. That’s extremely important. You must really be exhausted, to the point where there’s nothing left: where you’re so tired that you can’t take it anymore. When your brain is so tired of working that it can no longer think—that’s the moment when liquid knowledge can enter. That knowledge has been very hard for me to win, but I have won it. And the only way to win it is by never, under any circumstances, giving up. (Location 2246)
• This is how I read the story: that to achieve a goal, you have to give everything until you have nothing left. And it will happen by itself. That’s really important. This is my motto for every performance. I give every single gram of energy, and then things either happen or they don’t. This is why I don’t care about criticism. I only care about criticism when I know I didn’t give 100 percent. But if I give everything—and then 10 percent more than everything—it doesn’t matter what they say. (Location 2371)
• there was something about this man who had flicked my forehead so gently, something unbelievably humble and innocent and pure. I think that innocence opened my heart. If that man had told me to open the window and jump, for whatever reason, I would have done it. It was something I’d never experienced—complete surrender. Pure love. It came so unexpectedly, like a wave. (Location 2418)
• He said that you can tell the most terrible truths if you first open the human heart with humor. Otherwise, the heart closes and nothing comes in. (Location 2422)
• Failures are very important—they mean a great deal to me. After a big failure, I go into a deep depression and a very dark part of my body, but soon afterward I come back to life again, alive to something else. I always question artists who are successful in whatever they do—I think what that means is that they’re repeating themselves and not taking enough risks. If you experiment, you have to fail. By definition, experimenting means going to territory where you’ve never been, where failure is very possible. How can you know you’re going to succeed? Having the courage to face the unknown is so important. I love to live in the spaces in between, the places where you leave the comforts of your home and your habits behind and make yourself completely open to chance. (Location 2525)
• And the moment you step into this other state of mind, you are tapping into a limitless energy, a place where you can do anything you want. You’re no longer little you with all your limitations—“poor Marina,” the person who cries like a baby when she cuts herself slicing an onion. When this kind of freedom comes, it’s as if you’re connected with a cosmic consciousness. It’s the same thing, I would soon find, that seems to happen in every good performance: you’re on a larger scale; there are no more limits. (Location 2867)
• BREATHING. Lie on the ground, press your body against the ground as forcefully as possible without breathing, keep this position as long as you can, then breathe deeply and relax. BLINDFOLD. Leave home and go to the forest, where you are blindfolded, then try to find your way back home. Like a blind person, an artist needs to learn to see with his or her whole body. LOOKING AT COLOR. Sitting in a chair, look at a sheet of paper printed with one of the primary colors for one hour. Repeat for the other two colors. LONG WALK IN LANDSCAPE. Start walking from a given point, proceeding in a straight line through the landscape for four hours. Rest, then return along the same route. WALKING BACKWARD. Walk backward for four hours, while holding a mirror in your hand. Observe reality as a reflection. FEELING ENERGY. With your eyes closed, extend your hands in front of you toward another participant. Never touching the other person, move your hands around different areas of their body for one hour, feeling their energy. STOPPING ANGER. If you get angry, stop breathing and hold your breath until you can’t hold it anymore, then inhale fresh air. REMEMBERING. Try to remember the very moment between being awake and falling asleep. COMPLAINING TO A TREE. Hold a tree and complain to it, for a minimum of fifteen minutes. SLOW-MOTION EXERCISE. For the entire day, do everything very slowly: walking, drinking water, showering. Peeing in slow motion is very difficult, but try. OPENING THE DOOR. For three hours, very slowly open a door, neither entering nor exiting. After three hours the door is not a door anymore. (Location 3581)
• I had so much space in those six floors. I thought of the house as an extension of my body. I had a thinking room, a room just for drinking water. I had a room with just one chair facing a fireplace, for sitting and staring into the fire. All the living spaces were clean and spare, with perfect wood floors. In the basement there was a gym with a sauna. On the ground floor, a modern kitchen and dining room. A big studio and guest bedrooms above, which my friend Michael Laub rented from me. A roof garden. And right below it, on the top floor, my bedroom. (Location 3626)
• “I’m only interested in an art which can change the ideology of society….Art which is only committed to aesthetic values is incomplete.” (Location 3847)
• The piece sprang from the question I’ve always asked, and am still asking: What is art? I feel that if we see art as something isolated, something holy and separate from everything, that means it’s not life. Art must be a part of life. Art has to belong to everybody. And life—even in 1999—was moving too fast for the human spirit to absorb. “I want you to dream,” I’d written in my proposal for Dream House. “You must dream in order to face yourself.” (Location 4101)
• Her diaries were just as heartbreaking. One entry from that same time period read, “Thinking: If animals live a long time together, they start loving each other. But people start hating each other.” That shook me to my core, not only for what it said about my parents’ lives, but for what it might say about mine. (Location 4716)
• wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, who had just died the year before. These are big, beautifully stark graphite grids, extraordinarily simple—which means that their conception was so difficult. (Location 4876)
• “Marina, why don’t you face the reality of who you are now?” he said. “Your love life is gone. But you have a relationship with your audience, with your work. Your work is the most important thing in your life. Why don’t you just do in the MoMA atrium what you did in Japan with Ulay—except that instead of Ulay sitting across the table from you, it is the public? Now you’re alone: the public completes the work.” I sat up very straight, thinking about it. The Artist Is Present was taking on a whole new meaning. But then Klaus was shaking his head. “Or maybe not,” he said. “We’re talking about three months, all day, every day. I don’t know. I don’t know if it would be good for you, physically or psychologically. Let’s go back to the shelves.” But the more I thought about the shelves, the more complicated the whole idea seemed. Too complicated. I thought about Sol LeWitt’s beautiful simplicity. (Location 4886)
• Chrissie Iles wrote this: “I walk into the arena of the performance. Marina’s head is bowed. I sit down in front of her. She raises her head. She is like my sister. I smile. She smiles gently. We look into each other’s eyes. She begins to cry. I cry. I think nothing of my life and everything about how the people sitting have affected hers. I want to send her love. I realize she is giving me unconditional love.” The sheer quantity of love, the unconditional love of total strangers, was the most incredible feeling I’ve ever had. I don’t know if this is art, I said to myself. I don’t know what this is, or what art is. I’d always thought of art as something that was expressed through certain tools: painting, sculpture, photography, writing, film, music, architecture. And yes, performance. But this performance went beyond performance. This was life. Could art, should art, be isolated from life? I began to feel more and more strongly that art must be life—it must belong to everybody. I felt, more powerfully than ever, that what I had created had a purpose. (Location 5172)