Marina Abramovic Quotes

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.

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

I have a problem with being a hero, but that's another problem.

If we consider art as oxygen in our society, we have to deliver this oxygen.

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.

When I first had a video camera to document a performance, it was in Sweden and I remember it was really crucial for me.

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

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

In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I am pure performance, and Robert Wilson is pure theater.

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

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'm talking about intellectually and emotionally challenging, but at the same time it's actually not that challenging. So there's this dichotomy.

My work is immaterial. It's not painting, it's not sculpture, it's emotions. I'm giving you something to experience yourself.

I am not a therapist. I am not a spiritual leader. These elements are in the art: it is therapeutic, spiritual, social and political - everything. It has many layers. But art has to have many layers. If it doesn't, then forget it.

Television is completely another medium. For me, Lady Gaga and HBO are bringing us to mass culture.

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

The hardest thing to do is something that is close to nothing.

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

If you look at the lives of artists, sitting in nature, painting, having the freedom. I think it's over. I think we're living in such a difficult moment of human development. Artists have more responsibility than ever before.

I don't know anything about the afterlife because I haven't been there yet.

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.

One thing I learned from his holiness the Dali Lama is the importance of humor.

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.

But what is art other than revealing human nature?

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

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

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

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.

We always think of our own profit, but not in connection to others.

I've always asked myself since I was young, what is my duty on this planet? What am I there for? Just to hang around? Everybody must have some purpose.

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 want to dominate the man's world.

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.

We make such terrible mistakes with visual choices about beauty.

With classical ballet you are literally injuring yourself.

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

When you have so much pain, you think you will lose consciousness. If you say to yourself, ‘So what, lose consciousness,’ the pain goes away.

Americans aren't accepting of black humor, it's terrible.

Cancer is an emotional disease.

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.'

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.