[ Marina Abramović ] An artist's relation to solitude.
An artist must make time for the long period of solitude.
Solitude is extremely important.
Away from home, away from studio,
away from family, away from friends.
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 turbulent ocean.
My physical endurance and the extreme willpower
I think I got from my mother and my father,
because my mother and my father,
they really believe in the communism,
and they believe in sacrifice for the cause.
Your personal life was nothing.
It's important what you are living for.
It's just, like, very, very stoic and very dedicated.
That's how I was educated.
My mother, when her water broke when she was giving birth to me,
she was having communist party meeting,
and she didn't want to stop before she finished it.
And then she went to the hospital
and give the birth to me.
I was thinking this is normal.
I was thinking this is how it was supposed to be.
I didn't think that everything else can be different.
Coming from former Yugoslavia,
from the really interesting family background,
which mother and father don't believe in any kind of religion
and being taken care of by my grandmother,
who was completely religious fanatic,
having, you know, grandfather
who was a saint of the orthodox church,
that was a kind of almost unbeatable combination
to grow as an artist.
Full of contradictions.
Performance is a tool how i can express myself.
And I think, in the life of an artist,
it's very important to find the right tool.
And I have to say that I was very lucky
that it came so early to me, so clearly.
Since I remember, I was always drawing everywhere.
I start on the little, you know, papers
and then i went to the walls
and then the parents really understood
that they should give me more papers
and then I started doing the canvases
and then in no time, I was painting.
And with age 12, I had my first exhibition.
I remember that my first period which I was painting,
it was something given to me already; it was my dreams.
I had very, very vivid dreams.
Sometimes the dream was more than reality,
and I will wake up, and reality will look like the dream,
and dream look like real thing.
So the dreams was always being painted
in a kind of blue and green.
Just these two colors I had.
And later on, I remember being very interested
in truck accidents.
I was crazy about communist big green trucks
and how they're colliding.
So I would go to the actually scenes of accidents took place,
take photographs, go back, and paint them.
And then I was thinking,
"Okay, but what if the big truck will be hit by the little car,
like a children car?"
So I will go and buy little toys
and I would put them on the highways
and I waited the big truck, you know, smash them.
And what happened?
This little toys was always being untouched
by the big trucks.
So I started going home and painting these big trucks
being smashed by these wonderful little innocent
children trucks.
And then after trucks, I get to new period altogether,
and I start paint the sky.
And I was crazy about clouds.
The clouds were coming, the shadows and the clouds,
and it kind of become a kind of mystical chemical
kind of a dimension.
And I remember so well that moment,
and I think I was in my beginning of my 20s,
lying on the grass field
and looking to the sky. Just plain blue sky.
And in this plain blue sky,
I saw the 12 ultrasonic airplanes passing by
and leaving this complete sharp line.
I see in the front of my eyes, first, blue sky,
then the lines created by ultrasonic planes
dissolve in the air into blue sky again.
And I think it was, for me, like a spiritual revelation.
I remember stand up and I want immediately
to go to the military headquarters
and ask general there if they can borrow me
12 ultrasonic planes to make the drawings in the sky.
My father was the general.
Because they know my father, they immediately called him
and say, "Your daughter's completely crazy.
get her out of here."
"Do you know how much it costs to fly the ultrasonic planes
for her to make drawings in the sky?"
So very early, understood that
there is certain things I can't do.
But in the same time, I got a revelation
in this moment of looking to blue sky
that actually I can use everything I want.
I can use the water, the islands,
the fire, the earth, the air, and myself.
And this was the moment that I decided
that it's completely ridiculous to go to the studio
and make something that is two-dimensional
when I could have entire world there for me.
And that's when I stopped painting.
So after this huge revelation,
actually what for me was very interesting
is to start working with the sound.
What was interesting me about the sound
is to create sound environments where, you know,
you have one impression listening to the sound
but visually, completely another impression.
So the first idea I had, it was to put the speakers
on the bridge, of the main bridge in Belgrade,
with the sound of bridge collapsing.
So when you're on the bridge itself,
with every three minutes, the bridge is falling down
but, visually, it's not.
And of course to do such action, you need to get permission
from the city mayor.
So i went to the city mayor house.
Again, happened the same thing,
they absolutely forbid to do this,
because they told me that, actually, from the vibrations
with that kind of sound, the bridge can really fall down.
So I could not do it.
Then I did it with the building where I was living,
but it was only for ten minutes the whole piece,
because the people, inhabitants, were just running out
thinking that everything's bombed.
So that was kind of big mess.
Somehow dealing with the sound, I come to the point
when I had my first performance "Rhythm 10,"
which actually used the knives.
And the "Rhythm 10" is a sound piece, again.
I have the, you know, tape recorders
and I was doing certain game twice.
When it was my body involved.
And the moment when I involved my body in the performance,
this incredible energy dialogue was established with the public.
It was so overwhelming
that I could not ever come back to any other form of art.
In the beginning, in my early work with performance,
I really embraced repetition.
It was to repeat certain action over and over again
to come to the kind of almost charismatic state of mind.
And the performances in the beginning,
quite violent and very tough.
You know, like run into the wall
or breaking the walls,
cutting the stars in the stomach,
lying on the ice, beating yourself
to see how far, physically, you can go
and transcendent, actually, the painful experience
into something else.
Later on, the more and more performance I develop,
I become more and more interested
in mental state of piece
and then extend the time.
The longer performance gets,
the more transcendental can get
and transformative to the performer doing it,
but also to public participating.
So this is the actually, the door
of something completely else.
How you can elevate human spirit.
As you see around us, our life is so short and so fast.
Mine, I have no time for anything.
So the longer I do performance, the better things get.
I think that art should go longer and longer
as life becomes shorter and shorter.
When you die, you can't take your physical goods with you,
but a good idea can stay.
I am very occupied now about my legacy.
It's very important for me, preservation performance art
and how they're going to develop
and what is the future of performance art.
Three years ago, for my own birthday,
I purchased a building in Hudson.
It's a very large space.
We can host about 1,500 people.
I was interesting to create situation
which will be really center for preservation
for performance art,
but also to commission the young artists
and very known artists to make long duration
of performance work.
But not just performance I'm doing,
but also the theater, the music, the video,
the dance, the opera.
Just long duration.
I'm developing system that you never leave the space.
I wanted to create some kind of situation
where you have the seats,
after maybe three hours you're really tired,
the seat reclining to little bed.
You have a little blanket.
You cover yourself.
You go to sleep.
You wake up, piece is going on.
On the left side is a cold drink
inside the chair arm.
And the other side is hot meal.
A little lamp if you want to write the notes.
So that you're really inside the pce for a long period of time.
I've really been thinking so much,
you know, what is the role of an artist?
What is my function on this earth anyway?
I think that being an artist is such a huge responsibility.
In my case, I create three groups of the attitudes,
what i have to do as an artist.
I called the first group is artist's body.
And just very simple; is me performing
in the front of audience.
Second is the public body, is to create objects
I call them transitory because they're not sculptures
and circumstances which the public can actually
perform for themselves and get experience.
And the third, it will be student body.
And this is my function as a teacher,
that actually when you come to one point of your life,
that you really have to unconditionally
transfer the knowledge
to younger generation of artist.
And not only transfer it
but also help them in the development.
It's a really, in a way, some kind of fair dialogue,
because they give you sense of time you live in
because they're young
and they understand differently the world,
and you give them the experience.
You can't decide when you're going to die,
but you definitely can rehearse your funeral.
With a lawyer, I actually made my testament
which my real wish about my funeral is to be three coffins,
one with real Marina and two fake Marinas.
And they're going to be buried
in three different places in the world,
which I lived the longest.
Means Belgrade, in ex-Yugoslavia, now Serbia;
Amsterdam, in Holland;
and New York, which I live right now.
They will be simultaneous burying.
In all of these funerals, people will not wear any black
but really bright clothes, like green or red and pink
and acid yellow and so on.
And it will be very festive situation.
And really, idea: you know, you live well;
you have to die well too.
An artist should look deep inside themselves
for inspiration.
The deeper they look inside themselves,
the more universal they become.
The artist is universe.
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