To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. 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.
Interpretation
Performance art emphasizes raw, genuine emotions over the often artificial nature of traditional theatre.
Marina Abramovic's quote highlights the fundamental difference between theatre and performance art. While theatre often relies on scripted performances with props and rehearsed emotions that can feel detached from reality, performance art seeks to engage the audience with authentic, visceral experiences that convey the true, unfiltered essence of human emotion, often using real-life elements that confront the audience's perceptions and emotions in an immediate way.
In practice
During a discussion on the differences in artistic expression at an art symposium.
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.
Someone once told me that the '…Baby One More Time' video should be me as a superhero fighting a giant robot monster.
Her other mother smiled brightly and the hair on her head drifted like plants under the sea.
In song and dance, man forgets how to walk and speak and is on the way into flying into the air, dancing... his very gestures express enchantment.
But then, that's the beauty of writing stories-each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.
As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made molded him. Had left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace.
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.
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