Walk Through Walls: A Memoir - Softcover

Abramovic, Marina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1101905069 ISBN 13: 9781101905067

Verlag: Crown, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

“I had experienced absolute freedom—I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all—and it intoxicated me.”

In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramović’s MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit across from her and communicate with her nonverbally in an unprecedented durational performance that lasted more than 700 hours. This celebration of nearly fifty years of groundbreaking performance art demonstrated once again that Marina Abramović is truly a force of nature.

The child of Communist war-hero parents under Tito’s regime in postwar Yugoslavia, she was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was beginning to build an international artistic career, Marina lived at home under her mother’s abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m. curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor—all of which informs her art and her life. The beating heart of Walk Through Walls is an operatic love story—a twelve-year collaboration with fellow performance artist Ulay, much of which was spent penniless in a van traveling across Europe—a relationship that began to unravel and came to a dramatic end atop the Great Wall of China.

Marina’s story, by turns moving, epic, and dryly funny, informs an incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. A remarkable work of performance in its own right, Walk Through Walls is a vivid and powerful rendering of the unparalleled life of an extraordinary artist.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Raised in Yugoslavia, legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic now makes her primary residence in New York and in the Hudson Valley.

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1.

I was walking into the forest with my grandmother one morning. It was so beautiful and peaceful. I was only four years old, a tiny little one. And I saw something very strange—­a straight line across the road. I was so curious that I went over to it; I just wanted to touch it. Then my grandmother screamed, so loud. I remember it so strongly. It was a huge snake.

That was the first moment in my life that I really felt fear—­but I had no idea what I should be afraid of. Actually, it was my grandmother’s voice that frightened me. And then the snake slithered away, fast.

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.

I come from a dark place. Postwar Yugoslavia, the mid-­1940s to the mid-­’70s. A Communist dictatorship, Marshal Tito in charge. Perpetual shortages of everything, drabness everywhere. There is something about Communism and socialism—­it’s a kind of aesthetic based on pure ugliness. The Belgrade of my childhood didn’t even have the monumentalism of Red Square in Moscow. Everything was somehow secondhand. As though the leaders had looked through the lens of someone else’s Communism and built something less good and less functional and more fucked-­up.

I always remember the communal spaces—­they would be painted this dirty green color, and there were these naked bulbs that gave off a gray light that kind of shadowed the eyes. The combination of the light and the color of the walls made everyone’s skin yellowish-­greenish, like they were liver-­sick. Whatever you did, there would be a feeling of oppression, and a little bit of depression.

Whole families lived in these massive, ugly apartment blocks. Young people could never get an apartment for themselves, so every flat would contain several generations—­the grandmother and grandfather, the newlywed couple, and then their children. It created unavoidable complications, all these families jammed into very small places. The young couples had to go to the park or the cinema to have sex. And forget about ever trying to buy anything new or nice.

A joke from Communist times: A guy retires, and for having been such an exceptional worker, he is awarded, instead of a watch, a new car, and they tell him at the office he’s very lucky—­he’ll get his car on such and such a date, in twenty years.

“Morning or afternoon?” the guy asks.

“What do you care?” the official asks him.

“I have the plumber coming the same day,” the guy says.

My family didn’t have to endure all this. My parents were war heroes—­they fought against the Nazis with the Yugoslav partisans, Communists led by Tito—­and so after the war they became important members of the Party, with important jobs. My father was appointed to Marshal Tito’s elite guard; my mother directed an institute that supervised historic monuments and acquired artwork for public buildings. She was also the director of the Museum of Art and Revolution. Because of this, we had many privileges. We lived in a big apartment in the center of Belgrade—­Makedonska Street, number 32. A large, old-­fashioned 1920s building, with elegant ironwork and glass, like an apartment building in Paris. We had a whole floor, eight rooms for four people—­my parents, my younger brother, and me—­which was unheard of in those days. Four bedrooms, a dining room, a huge salon (our name for the living room), a kitchen, two bathrooms, and a maid’s room. The salon had shelves full of books, a black grand piano, and paintings all over the walls. Because my mother was the director of the Museum of the Revolution, she could go to painters’ studios and buy their canvases—­paintings influenced by Cézanne and Bonnard and Vuillard, also many abstract works.

When I was young, I thought our flat was the height of luxury. Later I discovered it had once belonged to wealthy Jews, and had been confiscated during the Nazi occupation. Later I also realized the paintings my mother put in our apartment were not very good. Looking back, I think—­for these and other reasons—­our home was really a horrible place.

My mother, Danica, and my father, Vojin—­known as Vojo—­had a great romance during World War II. An amazing story—­she was beautiful, he was handsome, and each saved the other’s life. My mother was a major in the army, and she commanded a squad on the front lines that was responsible for finding wounded partisans and bringing them to safety. But once during a German advance she came down with typhus, and was lying unconscious among the badly wounded, with a high fever and completely covered by a blanket.

She could have easily died there if my father hadn’t been such a lover of women. But when he saw her long hair sticking out from under the blanket, he simply had to lift it to take a look. And when he saw how beautiful she was, he carried her to safety in a nearby village, where the peasants nursed her back to health.

Six months later, she was back on the front lines, helping to bring injured soldiers back to the hospital. There she instantly recognized one of the badly wounded as the man who had rescued her. My father was just lying there, bleeding to death—­there was no blood available for transfusions. But my mother discovered that she had the same blood type, and gave him her blood and saved his life.

Like a fairy tale. Then the war divided them once more.

But they found each other again, and when the war was over, they married. I was born the following year—­November 30, 1946.

The night before I was born, my mother dreamed she gave birth to a giant snake. The next day, while she was leading a Party meeting, her water broke. She refused to interrupt the meeting until it was over: only then would she go to the hospital.

I was born prematurely—­the birth was very difficult for my mother. The placenta didn’t come out completely; she developed sepsis. Again she almost died; she had to stay in the hospital for almost a year. For a while after that, it was hard for her to continue working, or to raise me.

At first, the maid took care of me. I was in poor health and not eating well—­I was just skin and bones. The maid had a son, the same age as me, to whom she fed all the food I couldn’t eat; the boy became big and fat. When my grandmother Milica, my mother’s mother, came to visit and saw how thin I was, she was horrified. She immediately took me home to live with her, and there I stayed for six years, until my brother was born. My parents only came to visit me on weekends. To me they were two strange people, showing up once a week and bringing me presents I didn’t like.

They say that when I was small, I didn’t like to walk. My grandmother would put me in a chair at the kitchen table while she went to the market, and I would be there in the same place when she came back. I don’t know why I refused to walk, but I think it may have had something to do with being passed around from person to person. I felt displaced and I probably thought that if I walked, it meant I would have to go away again somewhere.

My parents’ marriage was in trouble almost immediately, probably even before I was born. Their amazing love story and their good looks had brought them together—­sex had brought them together—­but so many things drove them apart. My mother came from a rich family and was an intellectual; she studied in Switzerland. I remember my...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1101905069
• ISBN 13: 9781101905067
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Three Rivers Press; https://www.adolfodominguez.com/en-us/legal-notice.html; ; Plaza europa, 46-48; l'hospitalet de llobregat; Barcelona; 8902; Spanien