Podcast #136: Marina Abramović and Debbie Harry on Doubt and Diaries
Marina Abramović is one of the most celebrated performance artists alive today. In 2010, a major retrospective of her work, "The Artist is Present," was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, and she performed for over seven hundred hours. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, she joined Debbie Harry, the frontwoman for Blondie, to discuss reaching new audiences, diary writing, and doubt.
Photo credit: Rob Roth
One of Abramović's most recent creative works is a memoir called Walk Through Walls. She revealed her hope that the book find a readership in an audience beyond the art world:
"This was not about art. I didn't want to reach art audience. I want to reach general audience. I want to make the book inspirational, the book who actually if I came from some sort of third, fifth world, back from the ex-Yugoslavia and I came that far, then everybody else can do it if you put the willpower and love what you do. It's the most important. And the wisdom you get through this road has been difficult. It's not been easy. But you know, my main motto in my life has been, 'If you say no to me, it's just the beginning.'"
Documenting her own life has long been a practice for Abramović who has kept a diary. She recalled reading a diary from her adolescence and finding that very little had changed:
"It was incredible. I found a diary when I was fourteen. I was writing everything. But the most frightening thing about this fourteen diary which I was reading recently: I think that when you're fourteen you write your heart out and then you think you've done such important work and you've changed because you've become so smart, and I looked at these diaries of fourteen, and I'm the same as I always was. Same kind of suffering. Everything is the same. Only pages, change of names. Everything stays the same. It's horrible, but this is really true."
Many emerging artists might wonder if Abramović has faced doubt about becoming an artist. Abramović insisted that art has been coupled with certainty for her entire life:
"I didn't doubt. The moment I was born, and when I was already four, five, six years old, I was making paintings all over the wall and everywhere I saw I was making drawings. For me, making art was like breathing. I didn't want to do anything else. I've been criticized because I had three abortions because I didn't want to be a mother because I would probably be terrible mother; I just want to do art and nothing else, and this was all what I wanted. But you know, just if you want to do art doesn't make you anywhere. You have to have more than that. You have to have fever. You have to be completely kind of obsessed, literally, like a fanatic in many ways... It's also the real power, some kind of deep intuition, that what you do, you're right."
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