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Marina Abramović
This video brought to you by Tate.org.uk
Marina Abramović is to many people the definitive performance artist, having begun her career in the early 1970s. Her works test the limits of the human body, and even the endurance of audiences who may witness performances lasting hours, days, or weeks. In this film we join her as she shares highlights from her performance works, discusses the amount of work that goes into staging one of her ambitious pieces, and tells us why it's never easy to explain what she does. Created by Tate.
Marina Abramović is to many people the definitive performance artist, having begun her career in the early 1970s. Her works test the limits of the human body, and even the endurance of audiences who may witness performances lasting hours, days, or weeks. In this film we join her as she shares highlights from her performance works, discusses the amount of work that goes into staging one of her ambitious pieces, and tells us why it's never easy to explain what she does. Created by Tate.
Want to join the conversation?
- How does a performance artist get paid? Do they charge a fee to museums that allow them to perform?(3 votes)
- A commissioned performance work might earn a fee, but otherwise performance artists rely on more tangible artistic media or documentation of their work (in the form of films, drawings, or other means) if they want to earn money from their practice.
And because performance art is so ephemeral, actually selling a piece to a gallery or museum comes with its own set of challenges... check out the story of Tino Sehgal and how Tate acquired one of his performance pieces (which had to be done exclusively through a verbal contract!) http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/welcome-his-situation(2 votes)
Video transcript
If I had the chance and somebody would tell
me okay, you know, not yet, but let's say in the next ten years, to go into the space
ship to go to see out of our galaxy, somewhere completely unknown, and never come back, I
would really go. I really.. when I was a child this one thing I always want to know is what
is behind the cosmos? My name is Marina Abramovic. I was born in the former Yugoslavia, and right
now we are in New York. It's morning and raining and grey, and really shitty weather. I just
came back from Moscow, so I have major jetlag, and I was in the plane, and the people asked
me: what are you doing? You know, sitting, some businessman next to me. You know, I never
can say exactly what I'm doing, so my best undercover is I always say I'm the nurse from
New Zealand, and I'm here in your country, you know, interested in educational or health
programme. And then conversation stops, which always works. For me, it's such a huge preparation.
People don't understand how actually long it takes; Walking the Chinese Wall took me
eight years to set up. Seven Easy Pieces in Guggenheim took me 12 years. The project in
Laos took me two years; the Erotic Balkan Epic took me another two years. The same energy
you spend on getting idea; the same energy you have to spend of placing the idea in right
time and the right place. That's really important. That all the complements have to be right;
like one funny example is that I prefer to do all my performances starting, you know,
and or finishing on full moon nights, when the moon is rising. And is like, you know,
almost mystical thing, but actually the moon energy is incredible, and if they can move
entire oceans, of course the water in our body, why not use that kind of energy when
it's available? So in The House with the Ocean View it was 12 days, and it was really an
experiment. It was a really important thing, because it came just after September 11, when
I think the American public become vulnerable in a different way, and I never left the gallery,
you know, for the 12 days. So experiment was this: if I don't eat and I don't talk and
I purify myself without eating anything except drinking pure water, can I purify space in
this way? And can me and space can actually change kind of molecular structure of the
energy that the public will come, and they will be there just for a short period of time,
or longer period of time, and just be with me. And the public really complete the work.
My work is very long durational lately. It takes a long time, and very little things
is happening, and that means when you are dealing with almost nothing, that's the real
point. Because everybody wanted to have this, how you call? Kind of big concept where many
things are happening, but this many things are happening is just a security that you
hide yourself between objects, between ideas - between I don't know - all kinds of ideas
you want to expose. Actually, just being present as an artist in the space with full consciousness,
and your attitude with your body, and telling the minimum with the minimum, that-s the most
difficult. And this is my process always starts with very, very complicated, and then I strip
to the just bare, you know, idea, and that's it. So my kind of formula I could say that
for me, the performance is mental and physical structure which you create in the front of
the audience in a fixed time and space, you know, and you enter into that construction,
and then performance starts. How I can explain what I am really doing as a performance artist?
It's impossible.