Marina Abramovic Quotations | Page 2

What you get is the opening of your mind. I'm not preaching any new religion; I'm ritualizing everyday activities. You drink the water. You count the rice. You sit in Crystal Cave. You lie in Levitation Chamber. You push yourself to a new level.

If we go for the easy way, then we never change

Most people are more comfortable with what is familiar. I’ve spent my life doing the opposite.

Galás is a great artist with a very powerful voice.

In real life, you just work for the ordinary self, but in the front of audience you become the superself. That's a completely different thing.

You know, art is very emotional business. But mostly it becomes not emotional, the fabric of commodity. It becomes business. It becomes so many different things. Because we forgot there was emotions involved.

My grandmother, when she looked at American movies, she said, 'They're all the same. In the first scene somebody shoots somebody and then everybody makes phone calls.'

Television is completely another medium. For me, Lady Gaga and HBO are bringing us to mass culture.

My new work deals with emptying my body: 'Boat emptying, stream entering.' This means that you have to empty the body/boat to the point where you can really be connected with the fields of energy around you. I think that men and women in our Western culture are completely disconnected from that energy, and in my new work I want to make this connection possible.

Art comes from life, not from the studio

But what is art other than revealing human nature?

In every culture, [there are those] shamans or medicine men who endured incredible physical pain, because it's a door opening to the subconsciousness. And the way we can actually control the pain -- it's how to control everything. This is the key.

I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long. She edited out, maybe burned, every single photograph where I'm naked.

I believe stories are very important to all performances. The life story of the performer shapes their work, and the life stories of the audience alter how they receive the work, what they read into the performer.

I am pure performance, and Robert Wilson is pure theater.

To me the pain and the blood are merely means of artistic expression.

I hate repetition. Even when I am home and have to buy milk, I go a different way each time to avoid having a habit of anything. Habits are really bad. So to me it is really important to live in what I call the spaces in-between. Bus stations, trains, taxis or waiting rooms in airports are the best places because you are open to destiny, you are open to everything and anything can happen.

You create a friendship on a level that you've never done before. The basic kind of experience is to basically give love to total strangers all the time, and that really changed everything in me. And this piece transformed me more than any other one before. I saw my entire life differently. What do I have to do? What is my passion on this planet? I'm much more focused than I ever was before.

Artists can do whatever they want!

I have always staged my fears as a way to transcend them.

Through performance, I found the possibility of establishing a dialogue with the audience through an exchange of energy, which tended to transform the energy itself. I could not produce a single work without the presence of the audience, because the audience gave me the energy to be able, through a specific action, to assimilate it and return it, to create a genuine field of energy.

True love for whatever you are doing is the answer to everything.

When you have so much pain, you think you will lose consciousness. If you say to yourself, ‘So what, lose consciousness,’ the pain goes away.

I just want to create situations where people forget time.

Theatre is fake… The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.

The experience I learned was that … if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed… I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.

Don't even ask me why. I do not know, I have no answer to this insane behaviour.

Because we never stop silently loving those who we once loved out loud

Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, “Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don’t. But you listen to them anyway.” So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.

A great artist has to be ready to fail.

If you're a woman, it's almost impossible to establish a relationship. You're too much for everybody. It's too much. The woman always has to play this role of being fragile and dependent. And if you're not, they're fascinated by you, but only for a little while. And then they want to change you and crush you. And then they leave.

We are always in the space in-between... all the spaces where you are not actually at home. You haven't arrived yet.... This is where our mind is the most open. We are alert, we are sensitive, and destiny can happen. We do not have any barriers and we are vulnerable. Vulnerability is important. It means we are completely alive and this is an extremely important space. This is for me the space from which my work generates.

I think communication starts when words are not present at all ... I think we put so much emphasis on language, actually silence is so much more important.