The experience I learned was that … if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed… I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the vulnerability and courage required to face public judgment and aggression.
Marina Abramovic's quote conveys the intense emotional and physical risks involved in exposing oneself to public scrutiny and decision-making. It highlights how in a confrontational environment, the potential for violence exists when individuals are left to act upon their impulses, yet it also underscores the artist's resilience as she chose to confront the public despite the hostility faced during her performance.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the importance of artistic expression despite societal pressures.
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.
It was my duty to shoot the enemy, and I don't regret it. My regrets are for the people I couldn't save: Marines, soldiers, buddies. I'm not naive, and I don't romanticize war. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL. But I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job.
The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.
Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in a fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?
You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.
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