Walk Through Walls by Marina Abramovich (June 2017)
This memoir chronicles the life and work of Marina Abramovich, a Yugoslavia-born performance artist. She is perhaps most well-known for her piece The Artist Is Present, performed in New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, for all you museum and/or acronym nerds). This performance lasted over seven hundred hours, each minute of which featured Abramovich sitting silent and motionless in a chair. Throughout the piece, audience members were invited to sit across from her in a second chair and communicate non-verbally with her for as long as they wished (1).
One of the themes of her work came through an observation made early on about fear. She notes how most children learn fear through parents, peers, or surroundings. Thus, to become fearless, an adult must make a conscious effort to break down this entrenched feeling. Many of Abramovich's performance pieces- The Artist Is Present being perhaps the best example- challenged both participant and audience to do the difficult work of confronting and overcoming the many obstacles created by fear.
Abramovich seems always ready to question constant success. If an artist was always doing well, how many risks were being taken in the work? Was the success due to inspired work or repetition? For her, repetition and creativity could not co-exist in the same work.
A passing comment she makes about her friendships caught my eye. In her experience, though three or more people could get together and have a good time, only two people are truly able to have a conversation.
One up: Like many artists, Abramovich advocates embracing solitude and finding time to reflect. Only in these moments will artists come up with the one good idea they'll have in their life (though she concedes: a genius may have two good ideas). The mind unburdened with the demands of the body is free to wander into all kinds of surprising territory.
For her, training the body was crucial in allowing the brain to 'check out'. This process might have taken days or weeks. The key was to remain patient with the process and understand the strength in resilience; as a Chinese saying goes, weak birds fly first.
One down: I enjoyed reading this book. Abramovich probably has enough interesting stories to fill several bookshelves and those included here kept me hooked throughout.
But I found it a little lacking in terms ideas or thoughts for later use. This is the tricky part for me when I read a memoir; since the book is a true story, insights and reflections often give way to descriptions or anecdotes.
Just saying: The saddest observation in a book full of them was a note about how well children understand war; the fact is plainly evident anytime kids get together to 'play war'.
Perhaps the ability of children to do this points to another of her insights: emotional pain shoved aside for too long becomes physical pain. Children, by acting out the complex and difficult emotions of war through play, are perhaps doing so partly to help process pain in ways their families or communities are unable to do for them.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Tim Concannon, senior economics major and wannabe performance artist
A number of long-time readers will recall I performed a similar piece each day in my senior year economics class. The professor would ask me a question and I would sit, motionless and silent, communicating non-verbally on various topics of supply, demand, and the Laffer curve, until the collective discomfort of my classmates and the professor would prompt me to restore equilibrium with the sheer force of my words.
I believe I've written about this before.
