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During her thirty year career, Abramovic has subjected her audiences to performances that have been violent, grueling and sometimes very troubling
Marina Abramovic was born and raised in the former Yugoslavia in 1946. Now based in New York, her work frequently draws on themes of family trauma, national trauma, the body, the state of mankind today.
Marina's family is diverse mix of celebrated figures for both pastoral and military reasons. Her great uncle was a patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church. After his death he was proclaimed a saint, embalmed, and placed in the Temple of St Sava in Belgrade. Both of her parents were Partisans during WWII, her father Vojo was a commander who was acclaimed as a national hero after the War; her mother Danica was a major in the army, and in the mid-sixties was Director of the Museum of the Revolution and Art in Belgrade.
Her father left the family in 1964 and in an interview published in 1998, she described how her "mother took complete military-style control of me and my brother. I was not allowed to leave the house after 10 o'clock at night till I was 29 years old. ... All the performances in Yugoslavia I did before 10 o'clock in the evening because I had to be home then. It's completely insane, but all of my cutting myself, whipping myself, burning myself, almost losing my life in the firestar, everything was done before 10 in the evening."
After obtaining a degree in Fine Arts, Abramović left Yugoslavia in 1976 and moved to Amsterdam where she met the West German performance artist Uwe Laysiepen. Together the explored the ego and artistic identity, forming a collective called "the other", and referring to themselves as a "two-headed body". They dressed and behaved like twins, and created a relationship of complete trust. As they defined this phantom identity, their individual identities became less accessible. Whilst some critics deconstructed their work as a feminist statement, Abramovic denied this and stated that their work was more concerned with extreme states of consciousness than gender identity.
A series of works culminated in the 'death self'. The two performers devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other’s exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with Carbon Dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual's ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.
In 1988, after several years of tense relations, Abramović and Ulay decided to make a spiritual journey which would end their relationship. Each of them walked the Great Wall of China starting from the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle. As Abramović described it: 'That walk became a complete personal drama. Ulay started from the Gobi Desert and I from the Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2500 km, we met in the middle and said good-bye.'
Abramovic believes that 'performance is mental and physical construction in which you step in front of the audience in that time and that space'. Her work is about slowing the audience down, making them aware of their body and their thoughts and of what is going on around them. She has been known to put her audiences through breathing and walking exercises known as 'a drill' in order to prepare them and ensure that they are in the right frame of mind in which to view her work.
'I really believe nobody thinks about the public - art has changed so much since last century and the public is the same... always a voyeur, observing the work but having no idea how to behave, especially when it is a performance'
Marina finds though that her audiences are willing to experience something new, finding her work memorable, challenging and interesting, whether or not they consider it art. She currently owns a theatre and work space in Hudson, New York and has established the nonprofit organisation, Marina Abramović Foundation for Preservation of Performance Art to develop ideas and work in video and post-production with resident artists.
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