Marina Abramovic Quotes - Page 3

It's very important that young artists push boundaries, because sometimes you have this urge to do something - like the impulsive and dangerous urges I had as a child - and if you don't follow through with it you might miss out on a developmental experience.

I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.

When you're 50, the best thing to do is dance the Argentinean tango.

If you are really true to yourself and really follow your intuition in the most rigorous way, there is a moment that becomes universal, that reaches everybody. That’s the real magic of Björk-she teaches us the courage to be ourselves.

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.

We are used to cleaning the outside house, but the most important house to clean is yourself - your own house - which we never do.

You know how you feel somebody looking at you, and you turn, and somebody actually is? It's the same at an art gallery. You're looking at one portrait, turn around, and there is a work of art directly behind you. Because it's all energy. Every single thing has energy.

I believe that life is shorter; that is why we have to make experience longer.

A powerful performance will transform everyone in the room.

To control the breathing is to control the mind. With different patterns of breathing, you can fall in love, you can hate someone, you can feel the whole spectrum of feelings just by changing your breathing.

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.

In the performer's body, you don't care how you look. It doesn't matter if you're old, fat, beautiful, or ugly. It doesn't change anything. The only thing is your charisma and how you express your idea.

Typically, the performance has a story - a beginning, the crescendo and the end.

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.

All my inspiration comes from life. That's how it never stops, in a way.

If you see a Renaissance body, this is completely ugly in this time. Everybody has to be skinny. But the Renaissance body with incredible flow of the meat everywhere, it was beauty.

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.'

I am obsessive always, even as a child. On one side is this strict orthodox religion, on the other is communism, and I am this little girl pulled between the two. It makes me who I am. It turns me into the kind of person that Freud would have a field day with, for sure.

My mother and father had a terrible marriage. They celebrated their wedding anniversary one year with their friends. Why did they celebrate? Maybe because they had lasted so many years without killing each other.

First of all, to do performance art, you really have to give 100 percent. I only know that I have to give 100 percent and then what happens, happens.

From the moment you are born, you could die. I think as an artist it is important to meditate on that.

There are two kinds of loss of hope, one is the feeling when your pulse slows down and you are going to die, and there's nothing else left. The other loss of hope is when you're living in a country which becomes insecure, and you don't know what the future is. That's existential.

I hate kitchens. I don't understand these enormous American kitchens that take up half the living room and then they just order pizza.

Do you know what's most interesting? Working with the very strong restrictions of the institution. In the Renaissance, the aristocrats would order paintings from the artist. They would order the Crucifixion of Jesus. The restrictions were amazing. Jesus had to be in the middle, three apostles on the left, four apostles on the right - and still you had masterpieces. It's really interesting to work within restriction, and see what you can do with restriction.

Talking about performance is such a strange thing because it's so immaterial. We are talking about soft matter. We are talking about something that is invisible. You can't see it. You can't touch it. You just can feel it.