Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

by Marina Abramović

It is incredible how fear is built into you, by your parents and others surrounding you. You’re so innocent in the beginning; you don’t know.

Thinking back, I’m so grateful that I didn’t manage to break my nose, because I think my face with a Brigitte Bardot nose would be a disaster. Plus, she didn’t age very well.

Later on, I understood why this experience was so important. It taught me that the process was more important than the result, just as the performance means more to me than the object. I saw the process of making it and then the process of its unmaking. There was no duration or stability to it. It was pure process. Later on I read—and loved—the Yves Klein quote: “My paintings are but the ashes of my art.”

I knew that when a girl slept with a guy for the first time, she was usually in love with him, and that the guy would always leave afterward, and the girl would suffer.

“I know it’s not my business,” the fish said, before swimming away, “but can you tell me why you wanted to look like this?” The little girl said, “Beauty is temporary. Ugliness lasts forever.”

What had happened while they were there, quite simply, was performance. And the essence of performance is that the audience and the performer make the piece together.

Because I had come to believe that art must be disturbing, art must ask questions, art must predict the future. If art is just political, it becomes like newspaper. It can be used once, and the next day it’s yesterday’s news. Only layers of meaning can give long life to art—that way, society takes what it needs from the work over time.

I realized that this is a theme I return to constantly—I’m always trying to prove to everyone that I can go it alone, that I can survive, that I don’t need anybody. And this is also a curse, in a way, because I’m always doing so much—at times, too much—and because I have so often been left alone (as I wished, in a way) and without love.

This is how I read the story: that to achieve a goal, you have to give everything until you have nothing left. And it will happen by itself. That’s really important. This is my motto for every performance. I give every single gram of energy, and then things either happen or they don’t. This is why I don’t care about criticism. I only care about criticism when I know I didn’t give 100 percent. But if I give everything—and then 10 percent more than everything—it doesn’t matter what they say.

If you experiment, you have to fail. By definition, experimenting means going to territory where you’ve never been, where failure is very possible. How can you know you’re going to succeed? Having the courage to face the unknown is so important. I love to live in the spaces in between, the places where you leave the comforts of your home and your habits behind and make yourself completely open to chance.

What you’re doing is not important. What is really important is the state of mind from which you do it. Performance is all about state of mind. So in order to get to the right state of mind, you have to be mentally and physically prepared.

“I’m only interested in an art which can change the ideology of society….Art which is only committed to aesthetic values is incomplete.”

The piece sprang from the question I’ve always asked, and am still asking: What is art? I feel that if we see art as something isolated, something holy and separate from everything, that means it’s not life. Art must be a part of life. Art has to belong to everybody.

As I moved deeper into the woods, the noise of the surf faded, and all at once I could sense beings all around me: everything was life.