AOTW: Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović is an performance artist who was born in Belgrade, Serbia on November 30, 1946. Her main focus is on performance art rather than art that is done on a canvas. Marina Abramović mainly uses her body as part of the performance piece rather than anything else. She pushes her mental and physical limits by looking and actually going through pain to see the relationship between them.

Looking at her work in the past, most of her

is based on photography. Looking at most of them, they are all black and white, and involve some kind of risk when it comes to herself or another person. I believe Marina Abramović's main goal is to simply see the relationship between the mind and the body itself. In one of her work, Rhythm 10, she stabbed the spaces between her fingers, and in Rhythm 5, she had taken some drugs to knock herself out and pass out right in the center of a star shaped wood that happened to be on fire. Although she did loose consciousness, due to the drug or the lack of oxygen, the performance was cut short. She also did a performance called clown torture, where the viewer sees a clown, with voices coming out from the speakers shouting "no, no, no".

Although I am somewhat disturbed by these performance art pieces, I can't stop looking at them. It's like when people watch scary movies, its not enjoyable but for some reason we just cant resist the urger. I like Marina Abramović's piece because it gets the curiosity side of me interested, and to see what can happen when a person pushes her own limits. But at the same time, I don't like it because I hate seeing people get hurt or worse inflicting pain to themselves.