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.

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.”

It’s interesting with art. Some people have the ability—and the energy—not just to make the work, but to make sure it’s put in exactly the right place, at the right moment. Some artists realize they have to spend as much time as it took them to get an idea in finding the way to show it, and the infrastructure to support it. And some artists just don’t have that energy, and have to be taken care of, by art lovers or collectors or the gallery system.

Much later on, I read a statement of Bruce Nauman’s: “Art is a matter of life and death.” It sounds melodramatic, but it’s so true. This was exactly how it was for me, even at the beginning. Art was life and death. There was nothing else. It was so serious, and so necessary.

I had experienced absolute freedom—I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all—and it intoxicated me.

“Beauty is temporary. Ugliness lasts forever.”

Human beings are afraid of very simple things: we fear suffering, we fear mortality. What I was doing in Rhythm 0—as in all my other performances—was staging these fears for the audience: using their energy to push my body as far as possible.

and second, that if the ashtray killed me or seriously injured me, she would go to prison. How lovely that would be!

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.

He said, ‘Take me, for instance. During the war, a grenade exploded near me and a fragment destroyed one of my balls. But you should see what kind of daughter I made.’ At that moment you walked in, and he said, ‘This is my daughter.’ ” I never knew that my father had only one ball.

that pain was something like a sacred door to another state of consciousness. When you reached that door, then another side opened. Ulay had learned this, too—even before we met.

if there were no artists, there would be no museums. From this idea we decided to make a poetic gesture—the artists would literally become the door to the museum.

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.

Failures are very important—they mean a great deal to me. After a big failure, I go into a deep depression and a very dark part of my body, but soon afterward I come back to life again, alive to something else. I always question artists who are successful in whatever they do—I think what that means is that they’re repeating themselves and not taking enough risks.

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.

Then again, there’s always the chance that you really might fall off the edge of the earth.

I had believed that happiness could protect you. I had thought it was like an invisible shield that guarded you from all misfortune.

Because in the end you are really alone, whatever you do.

Even if we have a tiny moment of happiness, soon we, too, are going to be in the pot.

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.

It’s very difficult to kill rats. If you try to give them poisoned food, they will first send out sick rats to try it, and if the sick rats die, the healthy rats won’t touch the bait.

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

“You’ve done your best. Now let it go,” he said. “Things will happen as they happen anyway. Remember the story of the Buddha—he received his enlightenment, but only after he had given up completely. Sometimes you do everything you can to achieve a goal, and then it doesn’t happen because the cosmic laws go a different way.”

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.

I felt deep sadness at seeing how large Susan had been in life and how tiny this funeral was. And how glum. I’ve always believed death should be a celebration. Because you’re entering a new place, a new state.

I told the lawyer I wanted there to be three graves, in the three places I lived longest: Belgrade, Amsterdam, and New York. My body should actually lie in one of the graves—but nobody was to know which.

Two worms lived in shit, a father and son. The father said to his son, “Look at the wonderful life we have. We have plenty to eat and plenty to drink, and we are protected from outside enemies. We have nothing to worry about.” The son said to his father, “But father, I have a friend who lives in an apple. He also has plenty to eat, plenty to drink, is protected from outside enemies, and, he smells good. Can we live in an apple instead?” “No, we can’t,” replied the father. “Why?” said the son. “Because, my son, the shit is our country.”

There is a moment in your life when you realize that you don’t actually need anything. That life isn’t about things.

I just knew it was the right thing: Make it simple. Increase contact. Remove barriers.

But as I’ve always said, once you enter the space of performance, you must accept whatever happens. You have to accept the flow of energy that is behind you and below you and around you. And so I accepted it.

But when Paolo left me, I just sold it and threw out everything we had used together—the sheets, the towels, even the dinnerware. All I kept were a few objects, things I’d owned before we were together. The only way to deal with that kind of pain, I knew, was to make a clean sweep.

When Bob looked at videos of my earlier autobiographical pieces, he said, “If I do this work I’m not interested in your art—I only want to work with your life.” And he had a unique take on my life. “I like your tragic stories,” he told me. “In a certain way they’re so funny. There’s nothing more kitschy than showing the tragic as tragic—I feel we have to stage your life comically to reach the public’s heart.”

Bob brought me up short. “Stop this bullshit crying on stage!” he said. “It’s not you who has to cry; the public has to cry—snap out of it!” It was the best possible cure for me.

met with Rudá first. He told me that every part of the body is related to certain parts of your inner life—everything to do with the legs, for example, is family—and that every emotional pain turns to physical

Now you have to learn to love yourself. “I can’t do this for you,” he said. “You have to do it yourself. You must give love to yourself—your cells’ memory must be filled with love. That’s all you have to do.”