When Marina Abramovic Dies: A Biography

"I have known and admired Marina for the last thirty years, both as an artist and as a person, and in reading this remarkable book I recognize a clear insight into both aspects of her personality. With great and obvious love tempered by a sense of humor Mr. Westcott looks back over the life of this unique artist, and insightfully traces the way her personal experiences are reflected in her art, and how her ever-growing dedication to her art in return changed her life. This book honors the legendary career of a fierce and fearless performer, and at the same time celebrates the warm, generous human being she is and the many myths and fables that have accumulated around her (not a few the result of her own self-deprecating sense of humor)."--Robert WilsonMarina Abramovic, the legendary performance artist, is legendary for a reason. She has spent four decades making traumatic and transcendent artworks using her own body as a material, breaking through the boundaries of the acceptable in visual art. In the early 1970s alone, she lost consciousness while lying in the center of a burning five-pointed star (symbol of the communism of her native Yugoslavia), took pills to induce hyperactivity and then catatonia, and remained determinedly passive as an audience member pushed a loaded gun to her neck.When Marina Abramovic Dies examines the extraordinary life and death-defying work of one of contemporary art's most important and pioneering performance artists. It chronicles the artist's formative and until now undocumented years in Yugoslavia and looks closely at Abramovic's partnership with the German artist Ulay--one of the twentieth century's great examples of the fusion of artistic and private life. In their final performance, Abramovic and Ulay walked toward each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China until, after ninety days, they met in the middle and said goodbye.In one of many performances of the renewed solo career that followed, Abramovic famously lived in a New York gallery for twelve days without eating or speaking, nourished only by eye contact with the audience. It was here, in 2002, that author James Westcott first encountered Abramovic, beginning an exceptionally close collaboration of biographer and subject. For When Marina Abramovic Dies, Westcott draws on his personal observations of Abramovic, his unprecedented access to her archive, and hundreds of hours of interviews with the artist and the people closest to her. The result is a unique and vivid portrait of the charismatic self-proclaimed "grandmother of performance art.""Since she conceived of her first performance in 1969, Marina Abramovic has been a prime mover in the development of what became known as performance art, a source of its invention like none other, a force. What fuels that dynamism and has shaped its uses and defined its far-reaching impact is the subject of James Westcott's portrait of the artist and account of her work. Gaston Bachelard warned against trying to explain a flower by its fertilizer, but absent Westcott's vivid description of Abramovic's extraordinary childhood among the Communist elite of the former Yugoslavia, her challenge to the authority of Eastern Block orthodoxies, her departure for Western Europe and her subsequent exploration of cultures from Asia to Australia to the Americas, our grasp of her motives and our appreciation of her audacity would be much less detailed or critically well informed. Exceptionally candid and articulate in conversation - the artist's voice echoes throughout this book -- and performances, Abramovic is a public mystery, a contemporary Sphinx. Rather than destroy that mystery, Westcott deepens it. Rather than contain her art, he opens it up."--Robert Storr, Dean, School of Art, Yale University (Robert Storr )"This book is a magnificent way to get to know Marina's work. To experience not only the better known iconic / monumental side of it but also unite with it the spiritual and the emotional. An invaluable document in the hard-to-document world of performance art."--Bjork (Bjork )"Since she conceived of her first performance in 1969, Marina Abramovic; has been a prime mover in the development of what became known as performance art, a source of its invention like none other, a force. What fuels that dynamism and has shaped its uses and defined its far-reaching impact is the subject of James Westcott's portrait of the artist and account of her work. Gaston Bachelard warned against trying to explain a flower by its fertilizer, but absent Westcott's vivid description of Abramovic's extraordinary childhood among the Communist elite of the former Yugoslavia, her challenge to the authority of Eastern Bloc orthodoxies, her departure for Western Europe and her subsequent exploration of cultures from Asia to Australia to the Americas, our grasp of her motives and our appreciation of her audacity would be much less detailed or critically well informed. Exceptionally candid and articulate in conversation -- the artist's voice echoes throughout this book -- and performances, Abramovic; is a public mystery, a contemporary Sphinx. Rather than destroy that mystery, Westcott deepens it. Rather than contain her art, he opens it up." Robert Storr, Dean, School of Art, Yale University