Saturday, 30
Considering Marina's autobiographical book as the best I could give to myself I downloaded it on my birthday. Doing something I really wanted and often don't have time for - reading. Together with my boyfriend I spent my 60th at our beloved home in Sukuta. No party, no guests, no birthday cake. Just the two of us. The right thing to do I thought.
Today I finished the book. Reading it helped me to better accept myself as well as my life. Sometimes I drew lines between her and me. As a matter of fact my life is not to be compared with hers. No question we are separated by dimensions - last but not least by our artworks. I wish I could have followed and accomplish my afflatus the way she did. Though reading Abramović ' Memoir gave back to me the warrant of that very idea I had in mind in my early twenties. About the way you should dedicate your life to the arts - no separation between daily life and party, work, leisure and meditation. Art Is Everywhere. Being aware that you are not doing wrong when you stick to your inspiration as something that is worth to keep up. Further having read Marina and contemplating her work makes me overcome my frequently appearing feeling of self-pity, which often results in lethargy.
I chose the excerpts almost randomly, intuitively. Just to give my reading a rest, a halt and not to forget. Of course there had been endless more outputs to cite. But as I am short always like proved by my diary I am not a writer. And too quickly I get the impression that I am talking too much. At my parents home much of talking was never welcome. That is how I learned to suppress what I would have liked to express. -Losing too many words- they used to say. Or as my father advised: Rede nicht, Künstler. Schaffe.
Friday, 29
Oddly enough, the image harked back to the beginning of my friendship with Marco, whom I first met in Rome in 2007. All I knew about him at first was that he was a friend of Paolo's, and he kept asking to make a portrait of me. Finally I said, "Okay, I'll give you ten minutes." He arrived exactly on time, with an assistant and a great deal of camera equipment. When I asked how I should pose, he said, "I'm not interested in your face— I'm interested in your scars." He was talking about the scars on my neck from Rhythm 0, on my hands from Rhythm 10, on my belly from Thomas Lips. I was so impressed by this idea— really almost jealous that I hadn't thought of it myself— that Marco and I became instant friends. And when I began preparing The Artist Is Present, he was the only photographer I could think of who could dedicate his time to every moment of the piece.*
Abramović , Marina. Walk Through Walls: A Memoir (p. 311). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
AN ARTIST'S CONDUCT IN HIS LIFE:
An artist should not lie to himself or others
An artist should not steal ideas from other artists
An artist should not compromise for himself or in regards to the art market
An artist should not kill other human beings
An artist should not make himself into an idol. …
An artist should avoid falling in love with another artist
AN ARTIST'S RELATION TO SILENCE:
An artist has to understand silence
An artist has to create a space for silence to enter his work
Silence is like an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean
AN ARTIST'S RELATION TO SOLITUDE:
An artist must make time for the long periods of solitude
Solitude is extremely important
Away from home, Away from the studio, Away from family,
Away from friends
An artist should stay for long periods of time at waterfalls
An artist should stay for long periods of time at exploding volcanoes
An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at fast-running rivers
An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at the horizon where the ocean and sky meet
An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at the stars in the night sky
—An Artist's Life Manifesto: Marina Abramovi? *
Abramović , Marina. Walk Through Walls: A Memoir (pp. 308-309). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Thursday, 28
While still in Sri Lanka, I got a call from Sean Kelly, passing along a strange request: the producers of Sex and the City were asking if I wanted to play myself on the show— performing The House with the Ocean View. At the time I had never seen Sex and the City, and I was not an actress, so I said no. For a fee, I gave them permission to reference the performance, which they did.
Later, after I returned to Amsterdam, I went to my favorite little vegetable shop, which had the most expensive strawberries in the city— and to my amazement, the owners gave me a free box of strawberries. They had never been so nice to me. When I thanked them for their generosity, they explained that they were giving me this gift because I (or at least an actress playing me) had been on Sex and the City. Strangely enough, that was the first time I felt accepted by the general public. I was so shocked how fast my performance had been consumed by the mass media. Yet despite my fasting and serious intent to change consciousness in The House with the Ocean View, the performance and I were mocked.*
Abramović , Marina. Walk Through Walls: A Memoir (p. 269). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Monday, 25
I put together Delusional, the five-act theater piece Charles Atlas and I staged in Frankfurt in the spring of 1994 at the invitation of Tom Stromberg, the artistic director of Theater am Turm, one of the most avant-garde theaters in Europe. It was a big, complicated piece— too complicated, really, yet it contained the seeds for works I would complete more successfully later on.
Delusional took place on a Plexiglas stage covered with canvas. In the middle of the stage I lay on a bed of ice, wearing a black cocktail dress. Scattered around the floor were 150 dead-looking black plastic rats lying on their sides. Meanwhile the video interview I'd done with my mother ran on a screen in the background. After a while I got up and danced energetically to a fast Hungarian folk tune. When I became exhausted, I lay back down on the ice bed.
While I reclined there, still breathing hard, a new video was projected, showing me in a white lab coat, giving a lecture about rats. In New York City, I said, there were six to eight rats per person; in Belgrade, there were twenty-five. I continued speaking about the amazing reproductive abilities of rats— and then, while the video changed to the interview with Vojin, I changed my costume.
This costume, the Rat Queen costume, had been created for me by the London performance artist and cult figure Leigh Bowery.(...)
(...)
Delusional was so soaked with my shame that Rebecca Horn found it deeply upsetting. After the performance, she came to my dressing room and said, "You have to sue Charles Atlas— I can get you the best lawyer." I told her the piece had expressed exactly what I wanted to say.*
Abramović , Marina. Walk Through Walls: A Memoir (p.220, 221). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Sunday, 24
I had to rearrange my motivation. Then I always remember this sentence of John Cage saying, "when I throw I Ching, the answers I like the less are the answers [from which] I learn the most."*
Abramović , Marina. Walk Through Walls: A Memoir (p. 181). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Friday, 22
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.*
Abramović , Marina. Walk Through Walls: A Memoir (p. 155). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Thursday, 21
I had wanted attention for my work, but much of the attention I got in Belgrade was negative. My hometown newspapers ridiculed me viciously. What I was doing had nothing to do with art, they wrote. I was nothing but an exhibitionist and a masochist, they said. I belonged in a mental hospital, they claimed.*
Abramović , Marina. Walk Through Walls: A Memoir (p. 67). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
- Arte Povera -
Wednesday, 20
What happened? Art happened. When I was fourteen, I asked my father for a set of oil paints (...) 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! There was something like a click in my mind— I realized that being an artist meant having immense freedom. If I wanted to create something from dust or rubbish, I could do it. It was an unbelievably freeing feeling...*
My mother had a very strange attitude about sex. She was very worried that I would lose my virginity before marriage. If I got a phone call and it was a male voice, she would say, "What do you want with my daughter?" and slam the phone down. She even opened all my mail. She told me sex was dirty and that it was only good if you wanted to have a child. I was terrified of sex because I didn't want to have children, which to me felt like it would be a terrible trap. And all I ever wanted was to be free.*
In 1965, though, when I was nineteen, I did a kind of breakthrough painting: it was a small picture called Three Secrets. This very simple canvas shows three pieces of fabric— one red, one green, one white— draped over three objects. The picture felt important to me because instead of presenting an easily digestible image, it made the viewer a participant in the artistic experience. It demanded that imagination take place. It allowed for uncertainty and mystery. It opened a door for me, into the plakar of my unconscious.*
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. Some members of OHO came to Belgrade to speak about their beliefs; I stood up in the auditorium and praised them.*
Abramović , Marina. Walk Through Walls: A Memoir (p.30, 31, 33, 38, 44). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Tuesday, 19
my occupation of today is reading Walk Through Walls: A Memoir Marina Abramović 2017.
*all excerpts i've added purely
by accident. Any attempt of interpreting why i chose a certain part would go up in smoke.
Wednesday, 13 - expressionism -
minimalism -
Tuesday, 12
- l'art pour l'art - dadaism - surrealism - nihilism - existentialism - conceptualism - performance - intervention -
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