Walk Through Walls: A Memoir
By Marina Abramovic, Crown Archetype, 384 pages, $28
At first glance, Marina Abramovic has made a career from doing the opposite of Elena Ferrante, whose identity, as we all know, has been investigated by a journalist. If the lack of Ferrante’s corporeal presence is the subject of the investigation, Abramovic has made it her life’s project to place her body at the centre of her exploration of the limits of fear, exhaustion, pain and endurance.
Her extraordinary work across a number of media is very personal, maybe spiritual, certainly political; its subjects raise questions rather than provide answers — about intimacy, war, mortality, mourning, delusion, illusion and time itself. These big subjects are all aired in this engaging memoir, in which the reader is invited to walk through perceptual and conceptual walls with her. It is a wry invitation to trace how such themes have been a preoccupation over five decades of groundbreaking performance art.
Abramovic has a great sense of humour, and she puts it to work right from the start by dedicating her memoir to both friends and enemies. Born in postwar communist Yugoslavia, she shares a childhood joke: “A guy retires and his award for being an exceptional worker is to be told he will receive a car in 20 years’ time. ‘Morning or afternoon?’ the guy asks. ‘I have the plumber coming the same day’.”
She noted the advice given by the Dalai Lama at a lecture she attended, and made good use of it: “You can tell the most terrible truths if you first open the human heart with humour.” Both her parents were war heroes of the regime under Tito; they were courageous, physically strong, rode horses and knew how to use a pistol. In fact, it is the early childhood chapters in the memoir that are the most interesting and, in a sense, the book’s centre of gravity. Her handsome, philandering father was appointed to Tito’s elite guard; her mother, who was a major in the army, became director of the Museum of Art and Revolution.
Abramovic 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.
Abramovic was an ardent reader in her teens: “Extreme narratives fascinated me. I loved reading about Rasputin, whom no bullet could kill.” Her mother, who was quite extreme too — stern, strict and unhappy with domestic life — often beat her precocious little daughter black and blue, then sent her to live with her grandmother for a while.
“Walk Through Walls” begins with a memorable forest walk that Abramovic takes with her grandmother when she is four. She sees something lying in the road, and runs to touch it. Her grandmother screams at her, and she discovers it is a snake. It turns out that the anxiety in her grandmother’s voice was more frightening than the snake: “It is incredible how fear is built into you, by your parents and others surrounding you.”
Abramovic asks an interesting question on the very first page, a question she has explored all her life: how do we learn to fear? How do we unlearn to fear?
Decades later, in a performance with her collaborator and lover for 12 years, the West German performance artist Ulay, she worked with a live python and try to entice it towards her. As she lies on her stomach on the gallery floor, Abramovic comes face to face with the python. When it sticks out its tongue, she sticks out her tongue. The performance lasts four hours and only ends because the python slithers away.
In one “durational” performance, she declared herself an object and endured crazed audience members cutting her. Abramovic 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. Working with all the dimensions of discomfort was a way to confront, release and liberate her own pain.
If a memoir offers fans an opportunity to make a connecting conversation between the life and the art, it will never live up to the experience of witnessing Abramovic’s live performances, which are always bigger than biography and psychology. To make up for this, she knowingly throws into the mix hilarious intimate encounters, various property deals, famous friends, a few husbands, a Perry Como record, posing in a swimming costume on a red tractor for Annie Leibovitz, Givenchy throwing a party for her, another party on a yacht in the Venetian lagoon.
“Walk Through Walls” spans five glorious decades in the life of one of the most distinguished artists in the world. It includes the well-documented project in which Abramovic and Ulay walked the length of the Great Wall of China from opposite ends, the plan being to meet in the middle and marry. In fact they met in the middle and ended their relationship.
Part shaman, part joker, she is cerebral as well as physical in her approach to art: “I believe that universal knowledge is everywhere around us. It’s only a question of how we achieve that kind of understanding ... you only have to tune out of all the noise around you. In order to do this, you have to exhaust your own system of thinking, and your own energy ... When your brain is so tired of working that it can no longer think — that’s the moment when liquid knowledge can enter. That knowledge has been very hard for me to win, but I have won it. And the only way to win it is by never, under any circumstances, giving up.”
While Abramovic’s skills as a performer obviously require physical training, it is the quality of her presence that actually moves people and draws large audiences. This valuable memoir also documents the most famous of her recent exhibitions — “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA in 2010, and “512 Hours” at the Serpentine Gallery in 2014 — in which she herself was the main exhibit.
For the former, Abramovic wore a long dress in the style of a high priestess, her long shiny black hair drawn back from her face, her skin pale and ghostly. The exchange of energy between herself and the thousands of people who elected to sit still and stare into her eyes was both very ordinary and extraordinary. It seems that audiences worked with her to figure out, in the present tense, the habits we have to lose to be truly in silent conversation about something that matters. In these exhibitions, she designed a secular ritual that demonstrates how hard it is to let go of our own highly evolved strategies, or perhaps walls, to conceal personal pain.
To return to the journalist who thought he was unmasking the real Elena Ferrante: it is tragic he did not understand that Ferrante was fully present to readers in her books. The absence of her identity was conceptually part of the writing. Likewise, although Abramovic is famous and highly visible (“Time” magazine named her one of the world’s 100 most influential people, alongside Barack Obama and Pope Francis), she is aware that her investigation into all the dimensions of presence requires the absence of her own ego. The act of writing a memoir as enjoyable as “Walk Through Walls” allows her to play with this paradox.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
