Top 100 Abramovic Quotes
#1. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#2. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#5. 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.'
Marina Abramovic
#6. I'm interested in asking: 'What does feminine energy mean?' I don't have answers - I just have questions and interesting examples.
Marina Abramovic
#7. The only way to change consciousness and the world around us is to start with yourself.
Marina Abramovic
#8. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#9. For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make.
Marina Abramovic
#10. When you're 50, the best thing to do is dance the Argentinean tango.
Marina Abramovic
#11. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#13. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#16. Television is completely another medium. For me, Lady Gaga and HBO are bringing us to mass culture.
Marina Abramovic
#17. What you're doing is not important. What is really important is the state of mind from which you do it. Performance
Marina Abramovic
#18. I'm interested in utopian communities of the past. Many of them didn't survive and I'm examining closely the reasons they failed.
Marina Abramovic
#19. I had so much fear of blood, and the first thing I did was to cut myself to see what happens. That's the only way to rebuild yourself.
Marina Abramovic
#20. Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.
Marina Abramovic
#22. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#24. Theater is something that as a performance artist you have to hate.
Marina Abramovic
#25. There's nothing more tragic than artists from the 70s still doing art from the 70s.
Marina Abramovic
#27. Don't even ask me why. I do not know, I have no answer to this insane behaviour.
Marina Abramovic
#28. Being an artist is not easy - I have always said that to the students I have taught over the years. It's a huge sacrifice.
Marina Abramovic
#29. To really change the way society thinks, you have to give your entire being to it until there's nothing left.
Marina Abramovic
#30. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#31. When I was 14, I thought I looked terrible. I wore these typical Slavic shoes with metal bottoms so you could always hear me coming and this really ugly princess skirt and blouse with the top button closed. I had a boy haircut, a baby face covered with pimples, and a really big nose.
Marina Abramovic
#32. We are used to cleaning the outside house, but the most important house to clean is yourself - your own house - which we never do.
Marina Abramovic
#33. For me, performance is a holy ground. When I perform, I really step into a different state of consciousness.
Marina Abramovic
#34. You know, James Franco is one of the most interesting figures because he has no rules. He breaks all the borders.
Marina Abramovic
#35. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#36. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#38. 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.'
Marina Abramovic
#40. I test the limits of myself in order to transform myself, but I also take the energy from the audience and transform it.
Marina Abramovic
#41. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#42. The most revolutionary ideas are not sellable, but only mind-changing.
Marina Abramovic
#43. Once you live in New York, you can't live anywhere else. Living in Paris is like going in slow motion. It's so bourgeois. I get so bored.
Marina Abramovic
#44. Happiness comes from the full understanding of your own being.
Marina Abramovic
#45. When Lady Gaga says I am her inspiration, you reach kids between 12 and 18. Now I am like a brand - jeans, Coca-Cola.
Marina Abramovic
#46. The public is in need of experiences that are not just voyeuristic. Our society is in a mess of losing its spiritual centre.
Marina Abramovic
#47. With classical ballet you are literally injuring yourself.
Marina Abramovic
#48. The hardest thing to do is something that is close to nothing.
Marina Abramovic
#49. Immaterial art is the strongest because there's no obstacle; there's just energy, and I believe in energy.
Marina Abramovic
#50. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#51. An artist has to look at the future, to see what we can do better.
Marina Abramovic
#52. I didn't get paid for performances most of my life. If I did, I would be billionaire now, and I'm not.
Marina Abramovic
#53. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#54. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#55. Most of the time, the artists are not supposed to wear the fashion. It is always seen as a vanity. But I think I don't need to prove anything in my life. I can honestly say I love fashion and I can be many things at the same time.
Marina Abramovic
#56. I realise the power of art that does not hang on the walls of galleries.
Marina Abramovic
#57. True love for whatever you are doing is the answer to everything.
Marina Abramovic
#58. In theater, blood is ketchup; in performance, everything's real.
Marina Abramovic
#59. A powerful performance will transform everyone in the room.
Marina Abramovic
#60. We make such terrible mistakes with visual choices about beauty.
Marina Abramovic
#61. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#62. It's okay that we're not perfect. It's okay that we all have problems. It's okay to cry, to show emotions.
Marina Abramovic
#63. When you have a nonverbal conversation with a total stranger, then he can't cover himself with words, he can't create a wall.
Marina Abramovic
#64. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#65. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#66. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#67. In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible.
Marina Abramovic
#68. I am only interested in the ideas that become obsessive and make me feel uneasy. The ideas that I'm afraid of.
Marina Abramovic
#69. Even now, I have traces of the good little girl. When I am not performing, for instance, I am really very quiet and ordinary.
Marina Abramovic
#70. We are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute.
Marina Abramovic
#71. The only theatre I do is my own. Somehow, my life is the only life that I can play.
Marina Abramovic
#72. You know, art is very emotional business. But mostly it becomes not emotional, the fabric of commodity. It becomes business. It becomes so many different things. Because we forgot there was emotions involved.
Marina Abramovic
#73. People have so much pain inside them that they're not even aware of.
Marina Abramovic
#74. Some couples buy pots and pans when they move in together. Ulay and I began planning how to make art together.
Marina Abramovic
#76. Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It's so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.
Marina Abramovic
#77. Artists should never think of themselves as an idol. Fame is a side effect of one's work.
Marina Abramovic
#78. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#79. One of the most wonderful things for me is to watch somebody else perform, where I am the audience - I love this more than ever.
Marina Abramovic
#80. So many artists say they're not aware of audience. For me is unbelievable.
Marina Abramovic
#81. The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing because it is demanding all of you.
Marina Abramovic
#83. I notice if I'm too fat or if I'm too ugly or there's skin hanging or whatever. When my clothes start not fitting, I get really self-conscious about what I eat.
Marina Abramovic
#84. If you do performance and music, it's not performance as music.
Marina Abramovic
#85. I think communication starts when words are not present at all ... I think we put so much emphasis on language, actually silence is so much more important.
Marina Abramovic
#86. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#87. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#88. All my inspiration comes from life. That's how it never stops, in a way.
Marina Abramovic
#89. To me the pain and the blood are merely means of artistic expression.
Marina Abramovic
#91. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#92. You can't choreograph death, but you can choreograph your funeral.
Marina Abramovic
#93. Performance has to be mainstream art. This is what I'm fighting for.
Marina Abramovic
#94. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#95. I used to have a recurring dream where I was at a party in a country house, surrounded by the same people each evening. Everyone would be singing and dancing and after a while I came to know the people; though, of course, they never really existed.
Marina Abramovic
#96. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#97. 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.
Marina Abramovic
#99. I hate kitchens. I don't understand these enormous American kitchens that take up half the living room and then they just order pizza.
Marina Abramovic
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