Untitled post (Marina Abramović)

Matthew Stone: How has durational work, transformed you?
Marina Abramović: We live thinking about the past or thinking about the future, but somehow, we always miss the point of being in the present. Performance is about the present. When you are really in the present, time doesn’t exist. That is a very important realisation I have had. I also realised that we are surrounded by universal knowledge, which is always there and accessible, except that we never choose to receive it. By not moving and not thinking and being in the present this knowledge is revealed. The only way to really communicate these realisations is through experience. The only way to experience it is through long durational work. So actually in the end the artist, needs time, to get to a space where there is no time.

Matthew Stone: And how can the audience best experience these realisations?
Marina Abramović: The audience have to give themselves unconditionally to experience it. During my performance at MoMa “The Artist Is Present” there was an enormous participation of the audience. You sit on the chair and look at me, but after a while, it’s not me anymore. I am just the trigger for you to introspect yourself.

Matthew Stone: Why do you think that it takes you to place yourself in the centre doing nothing to instigate this in others?
Marina Abramović: You, in your own life, can do this, but you don't. You make any excuse not to face yourself. But in this situation, there was no escape, you only focus on my eyes and then my eyes disappear too. You are alone with yourself. No time, no thinking. Everything is together. So many people went into a kind of catharsis and became incredibly emotional. I had these hells-angels types, who came to me suspicious and angry. But after ten minutes they cry like a baby and completely lose themselves.

Via Dazed Digital