#MUTILATE A DOLL 2 FULL SCREEN SERIES#

(The van, incidentally, was tracked down and displayed at the MoMA retrospective, which caused AbramoviД‡ to completely freak out. For decades, AbramoviД‡ was poor and beyond the art world, obscure, living out of a van for the best part of 10 years with her then life-partner, Uwe Laysiepen, a German artist who performed under the name Ulay and with whom she drove around Europe, collaborating on her seminal work of the 70s. It is only recently that any of this has hit the mainstream, and AbramoviД‡ as rock star вЂ“ as well as knocking around with Lady Gaga, who she helped develop strategies to stop smoking (such as counting grains of rice), she is on the cover of fashion magazines and her Maria Callas-esque profile on the way to becoming iconic вЂ“ is the fruit of a 40-year struggle. 'You have to be in a state in which you are completely secure about your ability create this kind of charismatic space,' she says, and is currently lying awake at night 'in total panic' about doing it again at the Serpentine. It is the opposite of sensationalism or exhibitionism вЂ“ a gesture of self-erasure in the Romantic sense вЂ“ and to sit still for three months, inviting connection with strangers is something that, in the context of the harried and distracted lives we live, makes perfect sense.

'The medium is the body,' she says, which is what all performance artists say, but when AbramoviД‡ cuts herself with a knife, or slams her body into a wall, it is done with such purity of purpose the viewer is lifted temporarily out of themselves. Since her early days in Serbia, AbramoviД‡ has put herself under extreme physical and mental duress to jolt viewers out of ordinary patterns of thinking.

#MUTILATE A DOLL 2 FULL SCREEN SERIES#

It looks like nothing on paper a woman wanders around a gallery вЂ“ where's the artistry in that? Those tempted to scoff should watch the HBO documentary on AbramoviД‡'s MoMA show, to see how an unpromising premise turned, in reality, into an extraordinarily moving series of encounters. When performance art is bad, it is worse than almost anything and even the good stuff is vulnerable to ridicule.

'There's nothing more tragic than artists from the 70s still doing art from the 70s.' Photograph: Mike McGregor 'I've never done anything as radical as this. 'It's the public and me and nothing else,' she says. Instead, all day every day from 11 June to 25 August, AbramoviД‡ will wander around the gallery where, after being asked to shed their coats, watches and all their devices, visitors will be invited to come in and peer at her. She'll need it the London show, which is called 512 Hours for the duration of time she will spend in the gallery, will remove even the few shreds of structure the MoMA show clung to. She is on a strict diet, and will shortly be leaving for Brazil to meet up with some sort of shamanic adviser. For her Serpentine show, AbramoviД‡ has to be fit, both mentally and physically. Now here she is on a dull morning in a studio in Brooklyn, dressed head to toe in Givenchy, her favourite designer, and nibbling on what looks like a pellet of astronaut food. Fox News got very cross about what it all meant and referred to her as 'some Yugoslavian-born provocateur,' while a curator at the Whitney Gallery called her 'one of the most significant artists of the second half of the 20th century.' For her part, AbramoviД‡ sat. For three months, Abramovic sat there, impassive, during which time The Artist is Present drew record crowds to the gallery and became one of the most famous and controversial pieces of performance art ever staged. At least one took off all her clothes and had to be removed by security. Then, AbramoviД‡ sat in a chair in the gallery for eight hours a day, while visitors streamed in and, one by one, occupied the chair opposite her. This June, AbramoviД‡, who at 67 sometimes refers to herself as 'the grandmother of performance art', will open an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London, her first original performative show in the UK, in which, she says, she will be more daring and more vulnerable than she was both in Belgrade and at MoMA in New York, four years ago. 'How lucky I am,' she says in her still heavy accent, and laughs. I was ready to die.' At the end of six hours, she walked away, dripping with blood and tears, but alive. 'I had a pistol with bullets in it, my dear. Some of the items were benign a feather boa, some olive oil, roses. At a gallery in her native Belgrade, Serbia, she laid out 72 items on a trestle table and invited the public to use them on her in any way they saw fit.

In 1974, Marina AbramoviД‡ did a terrifying experiment.

Mutilate a doll 2 full screen