Until you understand her childhood and youth you might question how Marina Abramavic, who pioneered performance art, came from Tito’s drab grey Yugoslavia. While physically and emotionally abused by her parents, she did not live in a tiny flat with 20 relatives and was not deprived of the outside world or art. Her parents' connections helped, but she achieved on her own and her own terms. Thanks to a ridiculously risky real estate deal decades ago, she wouldn't have needed to work ever again—but try telling that to her. TO EXALT THE EPHEMERAL: ALINA SZAPOCZNIKOW, 1962–1972 HAUSER & WIRTH PUBLISHERS ISBN: 9783906915494 This article is an updated version of a previous profile, first published for Marina Abramovic's 75th birthday onNovember 30, 2021.

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. She has presented her work at major institutions in the US and Europe, including the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven,1985; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1990; Neue National Galerie, Berlin, 1993, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1995. She has also participated in many large-scale international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1976 and 1997) and Documenta VI, VII and IX, Kassel (1977, 1982 and 1992). Recent performances include "The House With The Ocean View" at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York in 2002, and the Performance "7 Easy Pieces" at Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2005. In 2010, Abramovic had her first major U.S. retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in “The Artist is Present” at Museum of Modern Art, New York. Using herself and the public as medium, Abramovic performed for three months at the Serpentine Gallery in London, 2014; the piece was titled after the duration of the work, “512 Hours”. Was listening to this in audio on 'Libby', the app for library users--and ran out of time. Awful to have it snatched away right in the middle. Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramovic (1946) has simply taken art to another level: while painters and sculptors strive diligently to recreate reality and suggest the emotions of pain and longing, Abramovic succeeds - using her own body and brilliant imagination to make us witness the unwitnessible/unwitnessable. She is the standard bearer for performance art - in many ways being the creator of this medium. In this excellent book There is a very interesting conversation between Klaus Biesenbach and Marina Abramovic that allows the reader (and viewer) many insights as to how the artist selects her subject matter and how she displays it. Abramovic is vibrant and passionate. She is art and art is her. The story is hers, but in writing a life this big, decisions had to be made. Credit must be given to James Kaplan who is most likely the one who set the tone, decided on the pace, emphasis and general overview.

'Absolute freedom' through performance

This major exhibition presents key moments from Abramović’s career through sculpture, video, installation and performance. Works such as The Artist is Present will be strikingly re-staged through archive footage while others will be reperformed by the next generation of performance artists, trained in the Marina Abramović method. You know, I just was reading some Ernst Jünger, and he has a line: “Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!” Wonderful. It is important not to fear pain, to understand pain and accept it. Then pain is much more bearable. Like now, when I was in the hospital, they were giving me opiates every two hours because there was unbearable pain. But I understand if I take this, I will look like a vegetable. So I was taking every two hours, four, then eight and nine, and then finally I didn’t take any. I just deal with pain. But this for a much faster recovery. The relationships with Ulay and Paulo are important for how long and deep they were and how difficult the abrupt separations were.

Arguably her most provocative early work was 1974's "Rhythm 0," a performance in Italy, this time in Naples.In it,Abramovic directed the audience: "There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired." Ze stelt me vragen over mijn eigen principes. Als ze zegt dat ze zit te trillen van angst als er turbulentie is in het vliegtuig, dan denk ik: geen last van. ‘Maar’, voegt ze eraan toe, ’als het om mijn werk gaat, gooi ik alle voorzichtigheid overboord.’ Op dat moment gaan de radertjes in mijn hersenen in het werk. Different works will be reperformed during the run of the exhibition, so no two visits will be the same.

Energy, aura’s, unexplainable phenomenons, visions, mindfulness, focus on experience, yoga retreats. Sakyčiau, verta skaityti, jei mėgstate, kai menininkai pasakoja apie savo meną, ir nesibaidote dvasingumo. About 10 years ago I saw the theater production “the life and death of Marina Abramovic”, a production by Bob Wilson, starring Marina Abramovic herself and Willem Dafoe. And that still is one of the most imaginative visual spectacles I have ever seen. So, this autobiography has been on my want-to-read list for a long time. Reading it has clarified quite a bit, especially her sheltered childhood in a “Red Bourgeois” environment in what is now Serbia (then Tito's Yugoslavia) and her eternal obsession with getting love and attention from her very cold mother. A psychologist/psychiatrist can probably explain perfectly why Abramovic always pushed the physical and mental boundaries in her artistic performances, even to the point of masochism, and explicitly went on an exhibitionistic tour. Her ‘performance art’ is not my genre, I must admit, but it remains intriguing. Dopo tre mesi, prendo solo le idee finite nel cestino. Non guardo neanche le idee che piacevano. Il cestino, infatti, è un tesoro, una miniera delle cose che hanno paura di fare.

Ik weet inmiddels dat geen enkele houding prettiger is dan een andere. Zelfs de prettigste houding wordt na een tijdje ondragelijk. We have meetings with Rem Koolhaas, Susan Sontag, the Dalai Lama, the artistic lead of Givenchy, other artists, Lady Gaga, TED talks ( https://www.ted.com/talks/marina_abra...). The last part of the book misses for me the rapturous energy and drive, focussed on getting her at her first performances. It's insane the number of times she's been prepared to die for art, and I get the feeling she isn't done trying yet. 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 50 of the artist's ephemeral time- and media-based works from throughout her career. The book also discusses a unique element of the Museum's retrospective, live performance: a new work created for the occasion, and performed by Abramovic herself; and re-creations of the artist'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). Essays by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator of Media and performance art at MoMA, and four distinguished scholars examine Abramovic's ideas of time, duration and the reperformance of performance art as a way to extend it into posterity. The Artist Is Present also includes a CD with audio commentary by the artist that guides the reader through the publication. The artist is present not only in the exhibition but also in the experience of the book.Born in Belgrade just after the end of the Second World War, Marina Abramovic was raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church (her great uncle was a Patriarch and a canonized saint in the Church) and left Yugoslavia in 1976, having already established herself as a performance artist, living in Amsterdam and eventually New York, where she presently lives.HANS ULRICH OBRIST & MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE CONVERSATION SERIES WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN ISBN: 9783865604750 The book is filled with photos. There are some obligatory color photos of colleagues, but the highlights are the many B & W that help the reader envision the work. Sanity? Insanity? What is performance? Is it art? Why would someone do something like that to themselves? Such radical commitment at the bottom of it. She explains the difference between theater and performance art is that in performance, everything is real. The knives are real, the blood is real, the hardship is real. But working with Willem Dafoe in a theater piece, the Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, she opens to the possibility that theater is also real, that what the actor does, through his commitment, is as real as anything. Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramovic has pioneered performance as a visual art form, creating some of the most important early works. The body has always been both her subject and medium. Exploring her physical and mental limits in works that ritualize the simple actions of everyday life, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. From 1975–88, Abramovic and the German artist Ulay performed together, dealing with relations of duality. Abramovic returned to solo performances in 1989.