Let’s get this out of the way: Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović is a controversial figure, and much as I’d love to shove her ghostwritten memoir into everyone’s hands, I must admit that there are plenty of people who will remain thoroughly unmoved by it, and that’s completely fine. 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.

And then there was my father’s love of women, the thing that had drawn him to my mother in the first place. An artist’s notebooks are arguably the most authentic means of understanding her process, techniques, and impulses.

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. Abramović suggests that in part she took extreme physical risks in art because she was very controlled as a child and adult before she left home to become an art student in Belgrade.

Their amazing love story and their good looks had brought them together—­sex had brought them together—­but so many things drove them apart.br>Devin Zuber is Associate Professor of American Studies, Religion and Literature at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, and George F. It combines new interviews, never-before-seen images and fascinating ephemera from Abramović’s personal archives to create a visual landscape of her personal and artistic life. 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.

Abramović tells us that “communism mixed with mysticism” was very much part of her DNA – an uncanny mix we can also see in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, and in the theatre of the Polish director Tadeusz Kantor.Sie haben sich erfolgreich zum "Mein Buchentdecker"-Bereich angemeldet, aber Ihre Anmeldung noch nicht bestätigt. In 2012 she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields. Adrian Heathfield is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton, London.

Marina Abramović is the creator of pioneering performance art which transcends the form’s provocative origins.The works include reenactments of Vito Acconci's Seedbed (1972), in which the artist occupied the space under a false floor, masturbating and speaking through a microphone to visitors above; Valie Export's Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) in which Export walked through a movie theater in crotchless pants, challenging the audience to turn from the images of women on the screen to a real female body; and Abramovic's own Lips of Thomas (1975), in which she ate a kilogram of honey and drank a liter of red wine before breaking her glass with her hand, incising a star in her stomach with a razor blade, whipping herself until she "no longer felt pain," then lying down on an ice cross while a space heater suspended above her caused her to bleed even more profusely. Six months later, she was back on the front lines, helping to bring injured soldiers back to the hospital.