Description
The grandmother of performance art tells all. Marina Abramović’s Walk Through Walls is the memoir of a life lived at the extreme: the Belgrade childhood under Tito, the 1970s performances that tested the limits of the body (and the audience), the twelve-year collaboration and brutal breakup with Ulay, the MoMA retrospective where she sat in silence with 1,500 strangers.
Abramović writes the way she performs — fearlessly, without self-pity, with total commitment. The stories are astonishing: the arrow pointed at her heart, the 72 objects of Rhythm 0, the Great Wall walk that ended a love affair. Through it all runs the question that drives her art: what are the limits, and what happens when you cross them?
The essential performance-art memoir: intense, strange, and oddly inspiring. For anyone who has ever wondered what it costs to make art from your own body — and what it gives back.
Marina Abramović is the “grandmother of performance art” — the Serbian-born artist who has spent five decades testing the limits of the body, the mind, and the audience. In this candid memoir, written with James Kaplan, she tells her story in her own unflinching voice.
From her strict childhood in postwar Belgrade to the breakthrough performances of the 1970s — Rhythm 0, in which she surrendered control to the audience — and the twelve-year collaboration with Ulay that ended with their walk toward each other along the Great Wall of China, Abramović recounts the works that made her legendary. She also takes readers inside The Artist Is Present, her 2010 MoMA retrospective in which she sat silently for 736 hours, meeting the gaze of thousands of strangers.
Honest, intense, and deeply human, Walk Through Walls is an essential portrait of one of contemporary art’s most fearless figures — a memoir for art lovers and anyone drawn to a life lived without compromise.
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