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Staff Pick
Marina Abramovic, of The Artist Is Present fame, is one of the most fascinating artists working today. Her memoir is as surprising, raw, gripping, and forceful as you would expect, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Recommended By Lucinda G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
"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.
Review
"In The Heart Sutra, Buddha says, 'Our life on earth is like a morning star, a bubble on water, a drop of dew, lightning in the summer sky, a dream in this floating world.' For Marina Abramović, there is no difference between art and life, life is a dream while it lasts, an absolute presence made in a vacuum." Alejandro Jodorowsky
Review
"Marina Abramović is famous for fiercely throwing herself, body and soul, into transformation through her art. In this intimate memoir, I hear her voice as I read. She confesses, confides, complains, instructs, and reflects with intelligence and humor on her difficult but ultimately magical life and liberating work." Willem Dafoe
Review
"The memoir’s most powerful moments come when Abramović shares the most intimate details of the romantic heartaches she’s endured. Marina pulls no punches about the men she’s loved and the artist feels feels more present than ever." Smithsonian Magazine
Review
"Marina’s role as an artist, she believes, with a hubris that can sound naïve and a humility that disarms any impulse to resent it, is to lead her spectators through an anxious passage to a place of release from whatever has confined them." Judith Thurman, The New Yorker
Review
"Abramović may be the only superstar performance artist in the world at the moment, and…the book itself has the veneer of an ambitious performance piece, as Abramović exposes her deepest personal wounds and places them next to her artistic triumphs, in order to create a kind of epic mythology around her work. The author turns blank pages into a museum of the self, cutting herself open for the sake of the narrative. But in Abramović’s case, the performance feels even more extreme. She has actually bled for her life story, onto pristine gallery floors….This Marina is the most charming one, the voice that makes Walk Through Walls propulsively readable." New Republic
Review
"Walk Through Walls testifies to larger struggles than those of a young, visionary performance artist in an object-oriented art world…It is hard not to read Abramović’s work as an unconscious enactment of upending patriarchal norms." Los Angeles Review of Books
Review
"In her new memoir, Walk Through Walls, [Marina Abramović] exposes herself as provocatively and fearlessly in language as she has done for many years in her largely nonverbal performance art. Her page-turner of a narrative [is] at times shocking…genuinely moving, and always coruscatingly honest." Elle
Review
"Marina has lived like an unstoppable force of nature, with the kind of power that leaves me feeling breathless and disquieted — while at the same time profoundly impressed, awed, and inspired. As I turn the pages of her book, I hear her voice in my head, as if she were actually narrating the words. When Marina speaks, it sounds as if you’re listening to a legendary folktale from the ancient landscapes of the Balkan Mountains. Her voice is soothing, calm, and centered. It belies the trauma, fear, and darkness coiled at the root of her impulse to express and expunge." Annie Lennox, Vanity Fair
About the Author
Raised in Yugoslavia, Marina Abramovic now makes her primary residence in New York and in the Hudson Valley.