Marina Abramovic Quotes

People have so much pain inside them that they're not even aware of.

You know, James Franco is one of the most interesting figures because he has no rules. He breaks all the borders.

Woody Allen has a wonderful line: 'Today I'm a star. What will I be tomorrow? A black hole?' That's very important to know - that you have the moment, then you lose the moment. You have to see your chances, you have to take them, and you also have to see when you don't have chances to take.

Travelling makes a person young because he doesn't get time to get old.

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

I made a tape recording of a bridge collapsing and I wanted to play it suddenly and very loudly when people were walking over a big bridge in Belgrade. The council forbid it. Their imagination is tiny; mine is big. I want always to shake everything up.

When Lady Gaga says I am her inspiration, you reach kids between 12 and 18. Now I am like a brand - jeans, Coca-Cola.

I don't do husbands. I don't do children.

If you're a baker, making bread, you're a baker. If you make the best bread in the world, you're not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you're an artist. So the context makes the difference.

Immaterial art is the strongest because there's no obstacle; there's just energy, and I believe in energy.

Theatre is fake ... The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.

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.

We always want to do things the way we like, that's why we never change.

If you do performance and music, it's not performance as music.

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

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

I am only interested in the ideas that become obsessive and make me feel uneasy. The ideas that I'm afraid of.

I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long. She edited out, maybe burned, every single photograph where I'm naked.

I came to believe in the idea of parallel realities. I think that the reality we see now is a certain frequency, and that we're all on the same frequency, so we're visible to each other, but that it's possible to change frequencies. To enter a different reality. And I think that there are hundreds of these realities

The experience I learned was that ... if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed ... I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.

To me the pain and the blood are merely means of artistic expression.

<...> you can tell the most terrible truths if you first open the human heart with humor.

We are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute.

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.

Performance has to be mainstream art. This is what I'm fighting for.

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

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.

A powerful performance will transform everyone in the room.

If we go for the easy way, then we never change

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 am pure performance, and Robert Wilson is pure theater.

Every party is the same, too many people, too little food, and you have to wait around. I'm extremely bored with parties.

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

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

Even now, I have traces of the good little girl. When I am not performing, for instance, I am really very quiet and ordinary.

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.

Artists should never think of themselves as an idol. Fame is a side effect of one's work.

Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative. You're not creative from happiness, you're just happy. You're creative when you're miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.

I believe stories are very important to all performances. The life story of the performer shapes their work, and the life stories of the audience alter how they receive the work, what they read into the performer.

I want to dominate the man's world.

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.

I didn't get paid for performances most of my life. If I did, I would be billionaire now, and I'm not.

It's okay that we're not perfect. It's okay that we all have problems. It's okay to cry, to show emotions.

People ask why there are so few female artists who succeed. It's because women are not ready to sacrifice as much as men. Women want a man, they want a family, they want to have children, they want to be loved, and to be an artist. And they can't; it's impossible.

You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important - in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language.

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. It was so impossibly beautiful - all three of us breathing the same rhythm, the days going by...

I am very clear that I am not a feminist. It puts you into a category and I don't like that.

The big problem of our modern society is that we feel that we are separated from the nature. But it's just the opposite. We are interrelated and our DNA is the same. And only when human beings understand that, the nature will not be obstacle.

But what is art other than revealing human nature?

I hate repetition. Even when I am home and have to buy milk, I go a different way each time to avoid having a habit of anything. Habits are really bad. So to me it is really important to live in what I call the spaces in-between. Bus stations, trains, taxis or waiting rooms in airports are the best places because you are open to destiny, you are open to everything and anything can happen.

To really change the way society thinks, you have to give your entire being to it until there's nothing left.

Because we never stop silently loving those who we once loved out loud

The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.

I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral in Montparnasse in Paris. It was rainy. It was all wrong. And I was thinking, 'God, she loved life so much.'

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.

The brother of my grandfather was the patriarch of the Orthodox Church and revered as a saint. So everything in my childhood is about total sacrifice, whether to religion or to communism. This is what is engraved on me. This is why I have this insane willpower. My body is now beginning to be falling apart, but I will do it to the end. I don't care. With me it is about whatever it takes.

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 by changing your breathing.

What you get is the opening of your mind. I'm not preaching any new religion; I'm ritualizing everyday activities. You drink the water. You count the rice. You sit in Crystal Cave. You lie in Levitation Chamber. You push yourself to a new level.

People in New York never have time for anything.

I really don't like art where you need to know so much theory to understand. If the theory is removed, it doesn't do anything. That means that this work is an illustration of theory, and I don't believe in the power of the work itself.

Happiness comes from the full understanding of your own being.

An artist should not fall in love with another artist.

Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.

I realise the power of art that does not hang on the walls of galleries.

With classical ballet you are literally injuring yourself.

Cancer is an emotional disease.

What you're doing is not important. What is really important is the state of mind from which you do it. Performance

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.

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 had a very difficult relationship with my mother. She used to wake me up in the middle of the night if I wasn't sleeping straight and was messing up the sheets. Now when I stay in hotels I sleep so straight they don't even think I've used the bed.

I believe so much in the power of performance I don't want to convince people. I want them to experience it and come away convinced on their own.

Art comes from life, not from the studio

Sometimes people are ashamed to talk about these things, but I know so many people who would never throw away their old shitty T-shirts or pullovers that are falling apart because of the comfort they get from those clothes. Everybody is vulnerable.

From the very early stage when I started doing performance art in the '70s, the general attitude - not just me, but also my colleagues - was that there should not be any documentation, that the performance itself is artwork and there should be no documentation.

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.

I really think there's no difference between an art piece made by a man and one made by a woman. Is it a good art piece or a bad art piece? Of course, if you're female, you're maybe dealing with different issues.

If you're a woman, it's almost impossible to establish a relationship. You're too much for everybody. It's too much. The woman always has to play this role of being fragile and dependent. And if you're not, they'are fascinated by you, but only for a little while. And then they want to change you and crush you. And then they leave. So, lots of lonely hotel rooms, my dear.

The public is in need of experiences that are not just voyeuristic. Our society is in a mess of losing its spiritual centre.

You know, everyone is always talking about plastic surgery, or the technology, what to do. I really think it's important to help yourself with the technology if you want to feel better, but I am absolutely against any kind of monstrous cuts of the body, lifting that is beyond recognition, this kind of stuff.

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.

Don't even ask me why. I do not know, I have no answer to this insane behaviour.

I believe the artist has an obligation to society.

An artist has to look at the future, to see what we can do better.

We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.

For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make.

Why am I not feminist? Maybe because I come from a country where my mother ruled my life. I never felt in any way that I couldn't achieve what I want.

The mind is crazy thing. To be focused is the most difficult thing.

People put so much effort into starting a relationship and so little effort into ending one.

True love for whatever you are doing is the answer to everything.

Some couples buy pots and pans when they move in together. Ulay and I began planning how to make art together.

In real life, you just work for the ordinary self, but in the front of audience you become the superself. That's a completely different thing.