You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'
Interpretation
Marina Abramovic uses performance art to confront fears and pain, encouraging the audience to face their own challenges.
In this quote, Marina Abramovic expresses her goal as a performance artist: to bring the audience face to face with fundamental human fears such as pain and death. By staging these difficult experiences in a controlled environment, she aims to reflect the audience's struggles and inspire them with the message that if she can confront her own fears, they too can face their challenges in life.
In practice
In a motivational speech addressing overcoming fear.
All the aggressive actions I do to myself I would never dream of doing in my own life - I am not this kind of person. I cry if I cut myself peeling potatoes. I am taking the plane, there is turbulence, I am shaking. In performance, I become, somehow, like not a mortal.
I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.
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.
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.
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.
I want people to come to me open and vulnerable. When they come to the gallery, they have to leave their watches, their computers, their Blackberrys, iPads, iPhones, because we are so incredibly used to technology, and I wanted to remove that.
When the punk thing came along and I heard my friends saying, I hate these people with the pins in their ears. I said, Thank God, something got their attention.
Music is the heart of life." She speaks love; "without it, there is no possible good and with it everything is beautiful.
It occurred to me that every work of art is a synecdoche, there's no way around it. Every creative work that someone does can only represent an aspect of the whole of something. I can't think of an exception to that.
Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.
It's really, always, the story and the characters that come first, and the other things are kind of dealt with in time or, in fact, driven by the story.
I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.
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