Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

Arts & Photography

Abramović, Marina

Performing Arts

Fig Tree

“I had experienced absolute freedom—I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all—and it intoxicated me.” In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramović’s MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit across from her and communicate with her nonverbally in an unprecedented durational performance that lasted more than 700 hours. This celebration of nearly fifty years of groundbreaking performance art demonstrated once again that Marina Abramović is truly a force of nature. The child of Communist war-hero parents under Tito’s regime in postwar Yugoslavia, she was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was beginning to build an international artistic career, Marina lived at home under her mother’s abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m. curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor—all of which informs her art and her life. 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. Marina’s story, by turns moving, epic, and dryly funny, informs an incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. A remarkable work of performance in its own right, Walk Through Walls is a vivid and powerful rendering of the unparalleled life of an extraordinary artist.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Penguin Books, Ltd.

A collection of fascinating and provocative quotations from the world-renowned performance artist Marina Abramovi&#263; is arguably the most important and influential performance artist of our time. For decades, she has broken boundaries in iconic works such as The Artist Is Present (2010), where she sat in silence across from members of the public at the Museum of Modern Art for eight hours a day for three months, and Rhythm 0 (1974), a six-hour performance in which she stood next to a table holding seventy-two objects, including a scalpel and a loaded gun, and a sign suggesting audience members could do to her whatever they wanted. Gathered from interviews, lectures, writings, and other sources, Abramovi&#263;-isms is a unique collection of quotations that offers a window into the mind of this iconic trailblazer. "Artists have to be free human beings. They have to have the complete freedom to express their ideas with no restrictions." "Our body is an absolute replica of the Universe, and this is why I took to studying myself--by studying myself, I can understand everything else and everybody else." "Beauty doesn't have a definition. What is important is what moves you." "Don't ever call me the grandmother of performance art. Just call me a warrior."

Abramović-isms

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

Assembled from the wisdom of 36 legendary art teachers – all of them artists or critics at the top of their field – Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life is an ideal curriculum for the aspiring artist.
Each of the book’s "tutors" has provided a unique lesson that aims to provoke, inspire and stimulate the aspiring artist. These lessons cover some combination of the following: technical advice (e.g. don’t make a sculpture bigger than your studio door), assignments (some of which will take five minutes to complete, others five years), tips for avoiding creative ruts (including suggestions for mind&amp;hyphen;expanding materials to read, watch or listen to), principles of careful looking (demonstrated with images of artworks, photographs, films or even billboard advertisements), advice on the daily practice of art (how to balance time alone in the studio with building an artistic community), career pointers (how to prepare for a studio visit from a curator or gallerist) and personal anecdotes (e.g. stories from the instructor’s own humble beginnings). Taken together, these lessons offer the reader a set of tools for thinking, seeing and living as an artist.
Not only is Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life the first illustrated text book of its kind for artists, but it will also appeal to anyone interested in contemporary art, providing first hand revelations into the philosophies and techniques of some of the world’s best artists and writers.

Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life

Eliasson, Olafur

Graham, Dan

Studio Raqs Media Collective

Phaidon Press

Humor & Entertainment

Random House Audio |

Limited to 1,970 copies in print, numbered and signed by the author and legendary artist Marina Abramović. • Lavish packaging: Encased in a bright red slipcase with die-cut holes, this deluxe edition makes for a chic and artistic literary presentation • Hand-signed cover: Each deluxe edition cover will be hand-signed by Marina Abramović and feature elegant color endpapers, two full color 8-page inserts, and over 100 black and white photographs throughout the book “I had experienced absolute freedom—I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all—and it intoxicated me.” In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramović’s MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit across from her and communicate with her nonverbally in an unprecedented durational performance that lasted more than 700 hours. This celebration of nearly fifty years of groundbreaking performance art demonstrated once again that Marina Abramović is truly a force of nature. The child of Communist war-hero parents under Tito’s regime in postwar Yugoslavia, she was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was beginning to build an international artistic career, Marina lived at home under her mother’s abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m. curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor—all of which informs her art and her life. 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. Marina’s story, by turns moving, epic, and dryly funny, informs an incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. A remarkable work of performance in its own right, Walk Through Walls is a vivid and powerful rendering of the unparalleled life of an extraordinary artist.

Walk Through Walls Signed and Numbered Collector's Edition

Crown/Archetype

Combining brand-new interviews, never-before-seen images and fascinating ephemera from her personal archives, this book creates a visual landscape of Marina Abramovic's personal and artistic life. Illustrated with more than 700 photographs, Abramovic provides insight on her most important works and some of her most difficult personal experiences, conveying the story with her signature emotion and wit. Fittingly blurring the lines between artist and art, this book acts as a keystone in the life of one of the most important performance artists in the world.

Marina Abramovic: A Visual Biography (-)

TYLEVICH, Katya

Laurence King Publishing

During the late 1960s and 70s, a paradigm shift occurred within visual culture: photography and the moving image were absorbed into critical art practices. In particular, these mediums were used to record ephemeral or performative events and to render visible conceptual systems or to question the supposed objectivity of representation itself. This volume focuses primarily on artworks from the last decade and proposes that the extensive use of reproducible mediums in today's art has its roots in an earlier formative period. By the end of the 70s, many artists turned to photography as a vehicle through which to critique photographic representation and to subvert an art system premised on the notion of the original. While this practice came to define much of the 80s postmodern art, its legacy for the 90s was essentially the license to indulge in photographic fantasy, image construction, and cinematic narrative. Artists working today freely manipulate their representations of the empirical world or invent entirely new cosmologies. They process their subject matter through conceptual systems or use digital processes to alter their images. Some directly intervene in the environment, subtly shifting components of the found world and establishing their quiet presence in it; others fabricate entire architectural environments for the camera lens. This current state of the arts and its recent history are represented via more than 150 works by 55 artists, including Nam June Paik, Kara Walker, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Fischli &amp; Weiss, Ann Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Elger Esser, Andreas Gursky, Candida H fer, Thomas Ruff, J rge Sasse, Thomas Struth, Olafur Eliasson, Roni Horn, Gabriel Orozco, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Matthew Barney, Gregory Crewdson, Anna Gaskell, Sam Taylor-Wood, Oliver Boberg, James Casebere, Thomas Demand, Vanessa Beecroft, Wolfgang Tillmans, Patty Chang, Trisha Donnelly, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, William Kentridge, Steve McQueen, Shirin Neshat, John Pilson and Gillian Wearing.

Moving Pictures: Contemporary Photography and Video from the Guggenheim Collection

Walker, Kara

Nauman, Bruce

Acconci, Vito

GURSKY, ANDREAS

Gonzalez-Torres, Felix

Hanhardt, John G.

Smithson, Robert

BARNEY, Matthew

Paik, Nam June

Young, Joan

Villaseñor, Maria-Christina

Guggenheim Museum

Book by Abramovic, Marina, Goldberg, Roselee, McEvilley, Thomas, Elliott, David

Objects Performance Video Sound

Goldberg, RoseLee

ELLIOTT, David

MCEVILLEY, Thomas

Individual Artists

Distributed Art Pub Inc

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Abramović, Marina. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Abramović, Marina