For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make.
Interpretation
The hardest part of creativity is starting on a new project.
This quote by Marina Abramovic emphasizes the psychological challenge that artists face when beginning a new piece of work. It suggests that the uncertainty and pressure to create something meaningful can make the initial stages of a project the most difficult, as one must confront their own expectations and fears before successfully expressing their creativity.
In practice
In a speech about overcoming creative blocks, one might use this quote to illustrate the common struggles faced by artists.
All the aggressive actions I do to myself I would never dream of doing in my own life - I am not this kind of person. I cry if I cut myself peeling potatoes. I am taking the plane, there is turbulence, I am shaking. In performance, I become, somehow, like not a mortal.
I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.
The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.
First of all, to do performance art, you really have to give 100 percent. I only know that I have to give 100 percent and then what happens, happens.
Theatre is fake... The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.
I want people to come to me open and vulnerable. When they come to the gallery, they have to leave their watches, their computers, their Blackberrys, iPads, iPhones, because we are so incredibly used to technology, and I wanted to remove that.
There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.
I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity; in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It's about bringing order to complexity.
All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.
Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.
I have a vast 'bone pile' of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical.
Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.