In 1988, Abramovic and Ulay decided to make a spiritual. Each of them walked the Great Wall of China, starting from the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle. As Abramovic stated, “That walk became a complete personal drama. Ulay started from the Gobi desert and I from the Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2500 km, we met in the middle and said good-bye.”

Abramovic conceived this walk in a dream, and it provided what she thought was an appropriate, romantic ending to a relationship full of mysticism, energy and attraction. She later described the process: “We needed a certain form of ending, after this huge distance walking towards each other. It is very human. It is in a way more dramatic, more like a film ending … Because in the end you are really alone, whatever you do.”

Abramovic reported that during her walk she was reinterpreting her connection to the physical world and to nature. She felt that the metals in the ground influenced her mood and state of being; she also pondered the Chinese myths in which the great wall has been described as a “dragon of energy.”

How many people get inspired after having a dream? Mostly people who wake up from their dream usually end up forgetting what they dreamed about but what makes a dream very unique and different is the fact that it's coming from your subconscious and you have no control over it. Every dream is unalike to each other and according to Linda Staten, "There will always be dreams grander or humbler than your own, but there will never be a dream exactly like your own... for you are unique and more wondrous than you know!"

There is no doubt that our dreams can have an impact on our own lives, but they can also inspire whole generations and cultures too and over the years, many artists similar to Abramovic have been creatively inspired, had new ideas generated and have come up with important discoveries for the modern world all from their dreams.

How many of you guys can do this without getting exhausted or feeling uncomfortable because of the fact that there's a person of the opposite sex "aah"-ing in your mouth. Not to mention ones breath or how annoying the sound is when heard repetitively for 9 consecutive minutes. Think you could handle it? Some of Marina's collaboration pieces introduces the opposite sex and incorporates factors that other beings may deem uncomfortable...

How about this act?

Now if this is not a trust exercise, I don't know what is. How many of you would trust the opposite sex with a bow and arrow pointing straight to your heart? I know I wouldn't risk it.

What about a slapping contest? I know this would go against some people's beliefs that men should never hit woman but did you ever think as humans we are equal. You have to look at the video as if it's a piece of art versus thinking about it being a wrongdoing.

In any case, her works with Ulay, the German artist has gotten a lot of attention due to her acts with him. It caused a lot of controversy on what was right or wrong. In anyway, the fact that it got a reaction from the audience made it aesthetically successful.

All artists get criticized and to some, Marina's work may be deemed negative due to religious beliefs. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Abramovic was asked by an art critic to define the difference between performance art and theatre in which she replied...

"To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake… The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real."

In her 40 years as a performance artist, Abramovic has dealt in what she calls "true reality", often at great physical and psychological cost. She has stabbed her hand with knives and sliced her skin with razor blades. She has laid naked on a cross of ice for hours. She has allowed the public to prod, probe and abuse her body. Once she almost died when a performance, in which she lay inside a huge flaming star made of petrol-soaked sawdust, went horribly wrong. (The fire sucked the oxygen from around her, causing her to pass out. An audience member intervened and she was rushed to hospital with burns to her head and body.)

"I test the limits of myself in order to transform myself," she says, "but I also take the energy from the audience and transform it. It goes back to them in a different way. This is why people in the audience often cry or become angry or whatever. A powerful performance will transform everyone in the room."

So what makes a performing artist you ask?

It's an art form which artists use their body or voice to convey artistic expression.

Can you believe the first recorded use of the term performing artist was used in 1711?

There are all types of forms and genres within the term itself which includes dance, music, opera, theatre, magic, spoken words, circus arts, and musical theatre. In Abramovic's case, it goes against her idea that theatre is fake. I believe she has created her own idea of art but it's definitely one that has viewers cringing at the thought and I'm sure most of her audiences would never place themselves in a situation such as the type of performances in which Marina creates.

Browsing though the web I came across a page that consisted of reactions from one of her performances. In this performance the artist sat across from the viewer and just blankly stared at them. Some of them broke down couldn't help their tears and I wondered why such a simple stare could do that to a person. They say silence usually is golden but in this case was it a good thing? a bad thing? It made me come up with the conclusion that people relate to art whether it's a painting or not. The audience has to feel a connection of some sort and that could just mean a simple reaction such as crying. Some might take it as nothing but a stupid joke but to others, it's the feeling that gets evoked in them that makes Marina a successful performing artist.

Here are some of the reactions...

Pretty intimating huh? No? Well here's the link to the other reactions the viewers had...

Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry

Some selected works that briefly show her sanity...

Rhythm 10, 1973

In her first performance Abramovic explored elements of ritual and gesture. Making use of twenty knives and two tape recorders, the artist played the Russian game in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of her hand. Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of twenty she had set up, and record the operation.

After cutting herself twenty times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging together past and present. She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body – the pain and the sounds of the stabbing, the double sounds from the history and from the replication. With this piece, Abramović began to consider the state of consciousness of the performer. “Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do.

Rhythm 10 video

[edit]Rhythm 5, 1974

Abramovic sought to re-evoke the energy of extreme body pain, in this case using a large petroleum-drenched star, which the artist lit on fire at the start of the performance. Standing outside the star, Abramović cut her nails, toenails, and hair. When finished with each, she threw the clippings into the flames, creating a burst of light each time. Burning the communist five-pointed star represented a physical and mental purification, while addressing the political traditions of her past.

In the final act of purification, Abramovic leapt across the flames, propelling herself into the center of the large star. Due to the light and smoke given off by the fire, the observing audience didn't realize that, once inside the star, the artist had lost consciousness from lack of oxygen. Some members of the audience realized what had occurred only when the flames came very near to her body and she remained inert. A doctor and several members of the audience intervened and extricated her from the star.

Abramovic later commented upon this experience: “I was very angry because I understood there is a physical limit: when you lose consciousness you can’t be present; you can’t perform.”

[edit]Rhythm 2, 1974

As an experiment testing whether a state of unconsciousness could be incorporated into a performance, Abramovic devised a performance in two parts.

In the first part, she took a pill prescribed for catatonia, a condition in which a person’s muscles are immobilized and remain in a single position for hours at a time. Being completely healthy, Abramovic's body reacted violently to the drug, experiencing seizures and uncontrollable movements for the first half of the performance. While lacking any control over her body movements, her mind was lucid, and she observed what was occurring.

Ten minutes after the effects of that drug had worn off, Abramovic ingested another pill – this time one prescribed for aggressive and depressed people – which resulted in general immobility. Bodily she was present, yet mentally she was completely removed. (In fact, she has no memory of the lapsed time.) This project was an early component of her explorations of the connections between body and mind.

[edit]Rhythm 0, 1974

To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramovic developed one of her most challenging (and best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her.

Abramovic had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and actions.

Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as time passed (and the artist remained impassive) people began to act more aggressively. As Abramovic described it later:

“What I learned was that... if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.” ... “I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”

Rhythm 0 Video

[edit]

Basic Idea of what Marina does...

According to my research, Marina has approximately fifty works spanning over four decades of her early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances, and collaborative performances made with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). Ulay was a German-born artist who created a couple of performances with Marina between 1976 and 1988. His collaboration with her brought out the idea of duality between them. The idea was introduced to investigate ideas such as the division between mind and body, nature and culture, active and passive attitudes, and male and female.


Personally Marina's works consist of things one wouldn't consider as "normal" or "sane". She puts herself or other people in uncomfortable positions to depict "art" as she views it. She uses "body" as both her subject and medium due to her wanting to explore the physical and mental limits of her being. She incorporates pain, exhaustion and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. 

She takes art from traditional media such as painting and sculpture and moved it directly to her body and she doesn't consider her body as just a surface to create art with but the body as the "point of departure for any spiritual development". She refers herself as the "grandmother of performing art," due to her being part of the earliest experiments in performing art and still to this generation is still creating art.

The life of a New York performance artist was the last of my choices for research. I knew nothing of the artist and never expected to learn so much but through some of her work, I became interested in learning more about what this Marina Abramovic, had to offer. Upon reading about her, the first thing that popped up underneath the Google search was the expected Wikipedia description filled with basic brief information about her life and the things she has done in her life that made her a well-renounced artist.

According to Wiki...

Marina Abramovic is a Belgrade-born New York-based performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the "grandmother of performance art". Abramovic's work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.

Early life of the Artist...

Marina Abramovic's great uncle was Patriarch Varnava of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Both of her parents were Partisans during the Second World War: her father Vojo was a commander who was acclaimed as a national hero after the War; her mother Danica was a major in the army, and in the mid-sixties was Director of the Museum of the Revolution and Art in Belgrade. Abramovic's father left the family in 1964. In an interview published in 1998, she described how her "mother took complete military-style control of me and my brother. I was not allowed to leave the house after 10 o'clock at night till I was 29 years old. All the performances in Yugoslavia I did before 10 o'clock in the evening because I had to be home then. It's completely insane, but all of my cutting myself, whipping myself, burning myself, almost losing my life in the firestar, everything was done before 10 in the evening."
Abramovic was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1965–70. She completed her post-graduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, SR Croatia in 1972. From 1973 to 1975, she taught at the Academy of Fine Arts at Novi Sad, while implementing her first solo performances.
From 1971 to 1976, she was married to Nesa Paripovic. In 1976, Abramović left Yugoslavia and moved to Amsterdam.

Link: Marina Abramovic