Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

by Marina Abramović

There I met such important performance artists as Joan Jonas, Charlemagne Palestine, Simone Forti, and Luigi Ontani, and the key Arte Povera figures Marisa and Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis, Luciano Fabro, Giovanni Anselmo, and Giuseppe Penone. It was heady company. But as my horizons broadened and I understood how conceptualism was taking hold, I yearned to make my own art more visceral. That meant using the body—my body. In Rome I performed Rhythm 10 once more, this time with twenty knives and even more blood than before. Once again I got a big reaction from the audience. My mind was ablaze—it felt as though the possibilities for performance art were infinite.

first gallerist in Europe to invite artists like Vito Acconci, Gina Pane, Chris Burden, and James Lee Byars to give performances. And she was subsidized by the Dutch government (as was the television show), so money

Another phone booth, somewhere in Europe: an assistant at de Appel said an invitation had arrived in our box asking us to participate in the International Performance Week, in Bologna. A lot of important artists were going to be there—Acconci, Beuys, Burden; Gina Pane, Charlemagne Palestine, Laurie Anderson; Ben d’Armagnac, Katharina Sieverding, and Nam June Paik. We wanted to come up with a major new

piece. It was June 1977. We drove up to the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna ten days early, on our last drop of gas. We parked in front and went to talk to the museum director about a place to stay. (We could always sleep in the van, but sometimes it was nice to have bathroom facilities.) He said we could bunk in their janitor’s closet. Perfect. We set to work on planning our performance. The result was Imponderabilia

In developing the work, we thought about a simple fact: 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. Ulay built two tall vertical cases in the museum entrance, making it substantially narrower. Our performance would be to stand in this reduced opening, naked and facing each other, like doorposts or classical caryatids. Thus everyone coming in would have to turn sid...

to participate in documenta, the once-every-five-years avant-garde arts exhibition. When we arrived we discovered that—for whatever reason—we weren’t on

It was the height of punk, the time of the Mudd Club, W, CBGB, of the Ramones and Blondie and Lydia Lunch and the Talking Heads. Seeing and hearing these people play simply blew my mind. Edit was friends with the Ramones, and the Ramones were crazy about Alba—they put her in a video! There

I was always one to take things as they came, though that didn’t mean—at all—that I was happy with every part of my walk. There were many, many difficulties. And I had expected no less. This was pre-Tiananmen Square China, a China that very few Westerners had seen. I had to pass through twelve provinces that were forbidden for foreigners. There were areas that were polluted by radioactivity. I saw people tied to trees, left out to die, as a form of punishment. I saw wolves eating corpses. This was a China that nobody wanted to see. The

the Wall to the ley lines, the energy lines in the earth. But I was also becoming aware of the changes in my own energy as I walked over different kinds of terrain. Sometimes there was clay under my feet, sometimes iron ore, sometimes quartz or copper. I wanted to try to understand the connections between human energy and the earth itself. In every village I stopped in, I would always ask to meet the oldest people there. Some of them were 105, 110 years old. And when I asked them to tell me stories about the Wall, they would always talk about dragons, a black dragon fighting a green dragon. I realized that these epic stories

the ground: the black dragon was iron, the green dragon was copper. It was like the Dreamtime tales of the Australian desert—every inch of land was full of stories, and the stories all related to the human mind and body. The land and the people were intimately

French magazine that did an article about the house. 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 love is an important part of my life—eroticism, sexual desires, passion—the bedroom has to be a space where these things happen.

But we got the video! My lament while I chewed the onion: I am tired of changing planes so often. Waiting in the waiting rooms, bus stations, train stations, airports. I am tired of waiting for endless passport controls. Fast shopping in shopping malls. I am tired of more career decisions, museum and gallery openings, endless receptions, standing around with a glass of plain water, pretending that I am interested in conversation. I am tired of my migraine attacks, lonely hotel rooms, room service, long-distance telephone calls, bad TV movies. I am tired of always falling in love with the wrong man. I am tired of being ashamed of my nose being too big, of my ass being too large, ashamed of the war in Yugoslavia.

want to go away, somewhere so far that I am unreachable by fax or telephone. I want to get old, really old so that nothing matters any more. I want to understand and see clearly what is behind all this. I want to not want anymore.

I had put my whole soul into this piece. In my acceptance speech, I said, “I’m only interested in an art which can change the ideology of society….Art which is only committed to aesthetic values is incomplete.

tourists had taken all the island’s seashells away, the hermit crabs were using discarded plastic sunscreen containers instead of shells for their homes. I felt so bad for them (and for myself) that I took a two-hour boat trip to a nearby island and bought bags and bags of shells at the market to bring back for the crabs. When I

got back, I scattered the shells around the beach and watched for ten days to see if they would change their habitat, but they liked the plastic better. From

“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.” So

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. And life

The night I finished re-performing Thomas Lips, the museum guards threw the blocks of ice onto the street. Later I learned that some Brooklyn artists had collected the ice with my blood and sweat, melted it, and tried to sell it as Abramović Cologne. I got one bottle for free.