Marina Abramović

About 10 years ago I attended the theater production “the life and death of Marina Abramovic”, a production by Bob Wilson, starring Marina Abramovic herself and Willem Dafoe. And that still is one of the most imaginative visual spectacles I have ever seen. This autobiography has been on my want-to-read list for a long time. Reading it has clarified quite a bit, especially her sheltered childhood in a “Red Bourgeois” environment in what is now Serbia (then Tito's Yugoslavia) and her eternal obsession with getting love and attention from her very cold mother. A psychologist/psychiatrist can probably explain perfectly why Abramovic always pushed the physical and mental boundaries in her artistic performances, even to the point of sadomasochism, and explicitly went on an exhibitionistic tour. Her ‘performance art’ is not my genre, I must admit, but it remains intriguing. Like any autobiography, at times this work is strongly apologetic. Abramovic finds it necessary to reveal her love life in great detail and she also settles some scores along the way. The regularly recurring magic-realistic elements are also not really my thing. Towards the end you can notice that she starts to see herself more and more as an institution, and shows off her successes and her parties in the artistic jet set. That means that this book gradually loses its momentum and eventually becomes a narcissistic self-aggrandizement. All in all, a readable overview of one of the most intriguing artists of the past 50 years.… (meer)