Marina Abramovic “I like to push the limits, but I love life too much”

Marina Abramovic, the most radical performance artist of the past forty years, welcomes us warmly. She has come to Argentina to participate in the 1st Performance Biennial: she conducted a workshop and delivered an unforgettable lecture. We are at the hotel in Puerto Madero where she is lodged. We are told we have half an hour to interview her: she has a vertiginous agenda. She listens to us attentively and answers gently. She is beautiful, luminous. Unforgettable.

Born in the former Yugoslavia, Abramovic walked the Great Wall of China to reencounter the German artist Ulay, the love of her life, just to say good bye to him. She exposed her body to the public: she placed 72 items on a table, among them a pistol, and invited the public to use them on her in any way they saw fit. She almost got killed. She experimented with drugs in extreme performances. She took her pain-tolerance threshold to the limit: she cut herself with knives, burned herself. She has inquired into the role of the public and her own role taking center stage. With an economy of resources, she revolutionized the MoMA and the Serpentine Gallery with her intense, moving performances.

In Balkan Baroque, distinguished with the Golden Lion Award at the 1997 Venice Biennale, she scrubbed 2,500 bones of cows from our pampas for six days – an ineffaceable allusion to war, originating in the Balkan Wars. Now she recalls that performance: “It was very hot in Venice, I spent those six days cleaning bones amidst worms. The stench penetrated my own bones.”

From the beginning of her career, Abramovic experimented with and explored the boundaries of her physical and mental resistance and that of the public. Now her thing is the mind. With the body, she has already closed a chapter.

-When did you realize that the body was your tool for making art?

-I realized at a very early stage that my purpose was to be an artist. The first thing I did was a painting exhibition based on my dreams: I was twelve years old and I was very jealous of Mozart because he had started his career when he was seven (laughs). Then I enrolled in the Academy of Art and we formed a group with other artists; I was the only woman. We started experimenting with different media. My first work involved sound installations. And that was my initiation in performance art; I realized that I could not do any other thing. Performance is a very specific medium and it is based on time: it is a medium that has been relegated because it has been absolutely unacknowledged. For me it has been a great fight, because it was an art that confronted Yugoslavian thinking, there was great antagonism from my family, from the public opinion in general, so I felt as the first woman walking on the moon.

-How did you experience the extremely intense feeling that life is finite?

-In my life and in my work, I think about that all the time. It is very important to focus on temporality and on the human existence in order to be able to focus on life. When I was seventeen, that issue was constantly present: I cried a lot because I had the feeling that I could die at any moment. The feeling or the awareness that we would not always be here was always something traumatic for me. At that moment I started to work with the notion of death and the importance of thoughts about death to somehow exorcize those fears. This gave rise to the piece Nude with Skeleton, to help me come to grips with this idea. I wanted to feel what it would be like when I was only bones and dust. The more you think about death, the more you enjoy life.

-At 14 you played Russian roulette with your mother’s gun. Did you ever experience that feeling again in any of your performances?

-At that age I had no notion of danger. I was playing with a friend; she pulled the trigger and nothing happened, I pulled the trigger, until eventually I fired against the bookcase and hit one of the books: the bullet destroyed Dostoievsky’s The Idiot (laughs). My parents had many books by Russian and French authors, it could have been a book by Engels, or Lenin, but no, it was The Idiot. Then I really panicked, because I became aware that I was playing with death. I like pushing the limits, but I love life too much. I do not want to die, and I did not want to die back then.

-What was the performance that had the greatest emotional impact on you?

-The last performance is always the one that has the greatest impact on me. I never look back, I always look ahead. The one we presented at Serpentine Gallery, where I spent 512 hours, had a very strong impact. I experienced a great fear of failure. Not in terms of the public’s reaction, but of losing faith in that this was possible. We worked together with the curator and the museum director to see what we were going to show. And only two months before the preparation of the exhibit, I called them and said to them: “I only want an empty gallery, with nothing in it; I want to work directly with the public.” The idea was that visitors go through a space where they had to leave all their belongings: watches, notebooks, cell phones. They were handed headphones to block any outside sounds. Then I took them by the hand and invited them to face a white wall or to do some very simple exercises, or simply stand on a platform. This incredible miracle happened: people began to wake up with regard to who they were. The most moving part for me was that the public had the possibility to feel this energy, which is simply eternal. A hundred and fifty thousand people attended the show. This gave me a sense of purpose: the feeling that my performance may afford clarity, that it may awaken consciences. I only gave them the possibility to reconnect with themselves. I find this really thrilling.

The Artist is present is a very important piece for me. In fact, I might say that it changed my life, but this one goes even farther. Visitors ranged from a housewife from Bangladesh to a science fiction writer: one could find all the different social strata, people with different jobs, from different places and with different religions.

-What were the experiences that led you to shift the focus from your body to your mind?

–It was a gradual change. At first I was interested in the limits of the body; now I focus on the limits of the mind. We only use 33 percent of our brain. Many think that my work is easier now, but cutting oneself is actually not so difficult: there is only a bit of blood. On the other hand, penetrating into this unknown ocean that is the mind, coming into contact with the unconscious is really difficult. I am currently working with American and Russian scientists to find out what happens when one is face to face with a stranger, looking at each other without any kind of verbal communication. The brain waves that are produced are ten times more intense than speech. That is what interests me now. I am convinced of the fact that in order to change the world, one must awaken the conscience of individuals. The body is merely a carcass; the mind is the real thing.

- You once asserted that women are not prepared to sacrifice themselves for art like men are. What have you sacrificed for art?

-Everything: I have no children and no husband. The truth is that I am not a very good prospect. My work is everything. Focusing completely on my work is a solitary task. I have no private life. I am the perfect example of a modern nomad. Nobody can resist spending a week with me; it is an absolutely military rhythm.

-How do you prepare yourself before each performance?

-This preparation requires a rigorous physical training, a nutritional treatment for detoxification, and a great deal of mental preparation. And while it is true that I can spend hours on end without speaking, when I finish I need to shout.

-Have you ever been disappointed by the audience?

-Never. This is about me, not about the public. They have never disappointed me; for me, a hundred percent is not enough. I must give my all, 120%, and perhaps they will not notice the difference, but they will be there. If I give less, they will leave.