Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

by Marina Abramović

I never played with dolls. I never wanted dolls. And I didn’t like toys. I preferred to play with the shadows of passing cars on the wall or a ray of sun streaming through the window.

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.”

And second, don’t flatter yourself that you have any ideas. If you’re a good artist, Hegedušić said, you might have one good idea; if you’re a genius, you might have two, period. And he was right.

I wrote to galleries everywhere—in France, Germany, England, Italy, Spain, the United States—asking for catalogues and art books, and they started coming, piles of them, stacking up inside my giant mailbox. I read every one of them, hungrily taking in all the advances in the art world, dreaming of the time when I would be part of them.

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.

Some big part of me is thrilled by the unknown, by the idea of taking risks. When it comes to doing risky things, I don’t care. I just go for it.

It was as if electricity was running through my body, and the audience and I had become one. A single organism. The sense of danger in the room had united the onlookers and me in that moment: the here and now, and nowhere else.

Nitsch poured sheep blood and organs—eyes and liver—over my belly and between my legs. Things got stranger from there.

Check this dude out

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.

We had no money, but I felt we were rich: the pleasure of having some pecorino cheese, a few garden-grown tomatoes, and a liter of olive oil; of making love in the car, with Alba just sleeping quietly in the corner, was beyond wealth. There is no price for that.

Many people have experienced moments when something in their brain says, “Oh my God, now I understand.” And those moments feel so rare, but the knowledge is always out there for the taking. You only have to tune out all the noise around you. In order to do this, you have to exhaust your own system of thinking, and your own energy. That’s extremely important.

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.

He looked at me and said, “You know, there’s a Chinese saying: ‘Weak birds fly first.’ ” I began to let my guard walk in front sometimes.

After three months, I only take the ideas from the trash can. I don’t even look at the ideas they liked. Because the trash can is a treasure trove of things they’re afraid to do.

It’s a kind of concentration of sleep, dreams and eroticism. If you are not passionate in life, you can’t be passionate in art. If you have this sexual or erotic energy in a very strong and condensed way, you project this energy in your work….Making