Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic is a Serbian and American artist, famous all over the world thanks to her extraordinary and shocking performances. She is rightfully considered one of the best in her genre, and her ideas related to physical pain and even a threat to life and health make viewers rethink their perception of many things and step far beyond the boundaries of the common understanding of the world and themselves.

Born in Yugoslavia, where the communist dictatorship flourished, brought up by rather autocratic parents, Marina Abramovic created her performances as a reaction to any restrictions. She cut and whipped her body, burnt her clothes and appeared naked in the most inappropriate places for this, shocking and sometimes annoying the audience. At the same time, the girl, following the strict order of her mother, had to return home by ten o’clock in the evening, and all her performances ended before that time. Having escaped from Belgrade at the age of 29, the artist was forced to do several jobs and knit sweaters for sale to earn a living. But she did not leave her ideas and continued to organize carefully thought-out performances, which were loved by the audience and participants.

Now Marina Abramovic is called “the grandmother of world performance”. She remains the most significant figure in this kind of art, a real celebrity, among whose fans are singer Lady Gaga and other stars of show business. In 2020, the artist planned to organize several exciting events, one of which is an opera performance called “Seven Deaths”.

Key ideas:

– Marina Abramovic appeared on the world art scene in the 1960s, when abstract art began to lose its relevance, and many artists tried to expand the scope of visual art based on their physical experience. Avoiding such traditional art materials as canvas and paints, she sought to reduce the distance between the creator and the viewer, making her body an object and a way of transmitting information, a kind of medium. Abramovic’s creativity is neither an object nor a subject. This is an act that takes place here and now; it takes place not only in real life but also in the minds of each of its participants and spectators.

– For 12 years, Marina Abramovic had been creating performances with her husband, German artist Uwe Laysiepen, who performed under the pseudonym Ulay. The couple realized many interesting ideas based mainly on gender identity, the relationship between a man and a woman, concepts of trust, mutual assistance and the expression of their emotions. The complex relationship of the artists ended in a painful breakup, which also happened in the form of performance. The event took place at the Great Wall of China: the artists walked towards each other from its different ends and, meeting in the middle, looked into each other’s eyes in order to go away forever in different directions.

– Most of the works of Marina Abramovic contain sexual overtones. She often appears completely naked in her performances or shows extremely frank behavior. The artist says that sexual energy is given to a person by nature, and for the Serbian people it is characteristic to raise this energy to the rank of a rite, a magical ritual that can affect many aspects in life.

– The works of the Serbian artist often include elements of real physical danger. Many works contain real weapons or sharp objects that can harm or even kill the author of the work. Once Abramovic cut a star with a knife on her stomach, and another time she stood with her partner Ulay for several minutes under the arrow of a bow. The most resonant was the performance of 1974, in which the audience had the opportunity to interact with the artist with the help of several items offered to them, among which was a gun. According to Marina, the audience could well kill her if they wanted to, and it was terrifying. Abramovic performed such actions not because of masochistic motives but to demonstrate to the audience the essence of the relationship between people and the limitless possibilities of the human psyche.