 Hello, and I'm the feminist. So the Shelby Wyden, the amnesty director of the Brooklyn Museum, ninth weekend, and I couldn't be more excited to welcome all of you to our annual Women in the Arts Session. Thank you for being here. So many of you know that for over nearly 200 years since our founding, the Brooklyn Museum could be defined by four adjectives. Actually, it could be defined by many adjectives. But for the purpose of today, I'd call them the four Cs. Cutting edge, commitment, courage, and chutzpah. We are in Brooklyn, after all. The four Cs are exemplified in the work of the Elizabethan Sacros Center for Feminist Arts. It's the first of its kind in the nation and probably in all likelihood in the world. And the center is committed to showing and supporting cutting edge women artists. And it is with courage and chutzpah that we also work toward women's equality. And it is because of all of you who are here with us today that we have been able to show literally thousands of artworks by women and men through a feminist lens. And we presented hundreds of public programs that take on the big issues of our day, from incarceration of women in the United States to the education of our girls around the globe to issues of human trafficking. And why are we doing this? It's because we believe that culture leads social change. And that means that culture precedes policy and political change. So we're keeping our gaze focused on the issues of women's equality. And we have to do this. After all, until there are equal rights for women, our work will not be done here at the Brooklyn Museum. Marina Abramovich exemplifies all that we hold dear and true at the Brooklyn Museum. Throughout her career, she has been a courageous trailblazer disrupting dominant narratives and the status quo. And I want to thank my dear friend, Marina. She can hear me from behind there for the love and goodness that she brings to the world and into our lives. It has deeply felt like many of us. So we applaud Marina today. Now this special day would not be possible without Marina, but it also wouldn't be possible without some very special friends. And I want to particularly have you join me in thanking our incredible co-chair, our trustee and the Center for Femin arts council member, Leslie Booth. Leslie, where are you? Yeah, Leslie. She's a girl. A college that they have raised more money for this event than ever existed before. And I also want to thank everyone in the Council for Feminist Art and this year's benefit committee for their enthusiasm and their generosity. And I thank our devoted board, in particular, our board chair, Elizabeth A. Sather, who we meet momentarily. President Stephanie and Gracia, thank you, Stephanie. That together, they have all of you have set a new record for this event, raising nearly $200,000. But our goal is to raise $200,000. So I'd love to see at the end of the day for us to get to our final goal. So if you're a guest and have not contributed, I hope people consider doing so. And believe me, you won't regret it. You'll be so proud of the exhibitions and the programs that you helped to support. And you'll also help us at the museum build a movement for cultural change. In fact, all you have to do is look at our Zanella Maholi exhibition at the Sackler Center. It was set to close last week, but we decided to extend it just for you. And actually, I found out this morning that the show is so popular that somebody climbed the facade of the museum last night and stole our banner. Talk about success. And all you have to do is see that show to also understand how arts contribute to greater understanding and love and empathy in the world. Now, it was a great pleasure that I introduced you to our board chair and the founder of our center, Elizabeth Sackler. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. It's delightful to have you here. And welcome Ann to our Women in the Arts Luncheon. This is actually our 13th annual Women in the Arts Luncheon. And the Sackler Center opened in 2007. So we're just coming into our ninth year. The reason we have 13 Sackler Women in the Arts Luncheon is because the community committee of the Portland Museum, when the announcement was made in 2001 that there was going to be a Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the community committee decided that it was time to have a Women in the Arts Luncheon. And they began the first luncheon, and that's why we are now into our 13th year. And I'd like to thank our first story, which is the community committee and the women who show us we stand on, who start this wonderful event. And I want to thank also Leslie Puth again one more time, and Carol Robinson again one more time, and all of you for participating with us. Thank you. And he said, what your matronage provides for us. And it provides for the incredibly progressive program that we do at the Sackler Center, as well as the public and educational program that we do throughout the museum. And we have one other major event that is connected to the Sackler Center. This one is particularly connected to the Council for Feminist Art. And I thank all of the council members of the Feminist Art group because it's been a tremendous opportunity for all just to get to know each other. And we have bonded and done some incredible work over the years. And also this award, this particular award is also part of the Board of Trustees of the Brooklyn Museum. But the Sackler Center first award is a Sackler Center first award. And it's the fourth wing, the virtual wing, of the dinner party. And for those of you who may have been here last year, you know that we honored Miss Piggy. And for those of you here before you know that we honored Anita Hill and before Danju and Tamar. And our fifth anniversary, we honored 14 of the most astounding and wonderful women. And the fourth wing then becomes the women who would be on the dinner party if the dinner party was then in the 21st millennia. So you can see it actually in all of their bios up on the Sackler Center in the forum. And I'm going to announce right now, and you're getting a cut off my press, is that June 2nd, market calendars is going to be our 2016 Sackler Center first award. And we are presenting to the award to DDDD, feminist, activist, academic for social justice, Angela Davis. So for you who worked a lot when Angela was doing her do, you will learn. For those of you who were and thought she really understood what was going on, you might find out more than you knew. And it is going to be a very, very extraordinary event. We will be showing a documentary on Angela. And she will be then in dialogue with the one and only and our favorite, Gloria Stein. By the way, little plug here must be for Gloria. Gloria's new book is out. And it's called On The Road. And it is fan, as she would say, fan fucking text. So if you haven't bought it yet, go out and get it. It is a great read. It will really fill in things that you didn't know. It's going to excite you about what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how much more there is to do. So we are here, a hotbed of action. And I invite you to join the Council for Family Star. This is kind of what we all do when we get together. And I hope you will consider that. Miami Basil is the next stop. And today, we are here. And it's an extraordinary pleasure for me that we are honoring Marina Abramovish. It was a pleasure to meet her last year. I met her last year. And we discussed many aspects of her work and also of her research. And she's in discussion today with Katherine Morris, the Sackler Family Curator of the Elizabethay Sackler Center for Family Star. Katherine, since 2010, when she arrived here, has curated 15 of our exhibitions. They have all been critically acclaimed. And they have been very important additions to the artistic and social and theoretical dialogue of both feminist art and feminism and, indeed, world culture. And if you don't know it already, our mantra is equal pay, equal wall space. Marina Abramovish. Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramovish has been a pioneer in performance art, creating some of the forms most important early works. The body has always been her subject and her medium. Exploring her physical and mental limits, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in quest of emotional and spiritual transformation. I think for many women, we understand pain, exhaustion, and physical danger. Abramovish was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist of the 1997 Venice Biennale. And in 2008, she was decorated with the Austrian Commander Cross for her contribution to art history. In 2010, Abramovish had her first major US retrospective and simultaneously performed more than 700 hours in the exhibition The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Of course, obviously. In 2014, she completed the three-month performance, 512 hours of the Serpentine Gallery in London. Abramovish founded the Marina Abramovish Institute and AI, a platform for immaterial and long-duration work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers in all fields. In 2015, the Institute realized its most complete form to date. Please join in welcoming Marina Abramovish with Catherine Morris. Thank you. Being here, thank you, Anne and Elizabeth and Leslie and Carol. It's an honor to be sharing the stage today with Marina Abramovish. And we have a series of slides that we're going to scroll through and talk about as we do or we don't in the conversation. And I thought in thinking about how to begin a conversation with Marina that I was curious after knowing Marina's work for decades to start at the beginning. I feel like oftentimes when you interview an artist, you dive directly into the work, you get the basic biography out of the way immediately. But it seems to me that Marina's story is so integral and so appears so many ways in the work that I think the audience and I know I would love to sort of start there. And the first place I thought I would start is that you have a birthday coming up at the end of this month. Everybody has a birthday once a year. Right. Everybody has a birthday once a year. But for a good number of years in your life, as I understand it, you thought your birthday was a different day than what it actually was. That's the story you want to make. So anyway, maybe we should start slides. Slides are just kind of background. We don't stop them. We're just going to come in maybe very fast. This is where my family come from, just from Montenegro. This is my mother and father, the most national heroes and partisans in Tito time. To be the daughter of the parents, national heroes is a hell to tell the truth. This is my mother, my father, my soldier. And my father was general. My mother was major of the army. And then she became the director of the Museum of Art and Revolution. I was very broad, very strict. This is the first carnival when I was four years old. Everybody looks beautiful, but my mother dressed as a devil. Which I don't understand, which I don't understand at all. And I was very concerned. Looked at the hair of my father, so well elaborated. He was very handsome and a difficult way I was very proud of my father in this little photo. Again, I was at age, maybe four. And here, I don't know, here was 36. But everybody think I was 16. And then I was very happy in this moment in my life. I had to be major and the cut of my face was just for the fire. I was trying to cook something. This is my mother and the cap of my mother, which I wear. And I was starting as a painting and I was painting. So I maybe don't comment any more slides, but tell me the story. Slides just go on. So I was born on the 13th of November. But my mother was always celebrating my birthday on the 29th. And on the 29th of November is when the president of Ex-Yugoslavia formed the country. And for that day, every child who was born on the 29th of November would go to Tito and get the presents and get candies and take photographs. It was a big day. And every time the 29th of November come, I was not invited. And my mother was telling me that I was not good enough. And only much later, I understood that I was never even born on the 29th, I was born on the 30th. And it was just a way of punishing me. So that's my little story. OK? From the beginning. You know, I didn't know the part about the punishment. I might not have started there. The punishment flourished. I was never good enough. I always had to be better. And even if I was better than everybody else, I was still not good enough. But then you also, at one point when you moved to Amsterdam, you decided also to announce a different birthday. Is that accurate? Or you? No. Then I really find out that my birthday, I should celebrate my birthday. But I never liked it because I was never comfortable with this birthday. So when I took Amsterdam, I met Ulay. He was my partner for 12 years. And I met him on my birthday. And he said, well, this is my birthday too. I said, it's not true. I can't believe. But that was true. I've been falling in love for 12 years. And separate the Great Wall of China. And everything became very dramatic and so on. He's a good one. Actually, you can't divide my art work in life. Everything is interrelated. That's true. And even the beginning of your life, the sort of drama, politics, spirituality, because there's an important vein of spirituality. And you're running through your family as well. This was my incredible strong relation to my grandmother. You know, just to tell you, for an artist, it's very important the biography. And my theory is the worst biography and the worst childhood you have, the better artists you get. Because you have the material to work with. I mean, nobody makes work of pure happiness. Because happiness is state. It's beautiful, you're happy, and you don't need to do anything. But when you really have trouble, dramas, difficulties, you know, then this is good material. And if you survive all that, then it's really even better. So I had a really difficult childhood. One of the things that you ask students is how they know they're an artist. I teach more than 25 years in different countries, in both the high in Paris, in Germany, in Japan, in Amsterdam, in lots of places also here in America. And for me, it was really important when a student come to me to understand really true and pure reasons. Why somebody want to be an artist? And they will say to me, oh, I like to be an artist. But mostly, the kids like to be rich and famous, which is the worst reason for somebody to be an artist. And I said to him, you can't become an artist. You can't actually say to yourself, I want to be an artist. Because art is like a breathing. You don't question yourself if you breathe or you're not. You have to breathe. So you don't question yourself when you wake up in the morning and you have all these ideas. And these ideas are emerging, and you need to realize them. And it's stronger. It's like a fever. It's like you're obsessed. You can't do anything else. As you don't question the breathing, this is the same way I don't question creativity. So that means you're really an artist because you can't do it any other way. Not because you want to come. You just are. But then there's another question, if you're just an artist, how are you a great artist or just an artist? That's a whole different level of sacrifice that you have to make to step to the other category. So when did you know you were an artist? Says always, I am not marriage material. I'm the worst. I can't do anything else. I just don't, I just work. I just mean, I think when I was, you know, I start doing drawings and paintings just ever. But then when I was 14 years old, I made my first painting exhibition. I paint my dreams because dreams is given to me. So it was easy. I dream and then I paint them. And with 14 I had my first show. And I was so jealous of Mozart because he made it with seven. You know, I was like, okay. And you signed your paintings? Oh, the signing was the worst part because I was so impressed by Picasso. So I was signing these horrible paintings with huge marina like in Picasso. I was so actually ashamed of that. And my mother had them all. And when she died, you know, I actually inherited them. And I'm just thinking how to burn them now because they're really bad. And... But you haven't burned them? No, not yet. I'm just thinking to make some kind of conceptual work out of this. But then also, you know, my mother, you know, because later on I started doing performances and my lots of work have been naked. And, you know, when my mother and I went to, you know, to clean the house and all this, and I found all my books. And you know this, I made lots of books. I made more like 56 of them. And catalogs from different exhibitions and some of them very big ones. And she re-edited them. She actually took all the photographs where I'm naked. So the books of like 600 pages would be 35. This is the only way that she's done it. Because she could not show them to the viewers. So you decided, at some point, you were painting and you decided you didn't like the studio. You didn't like being in a studio space. It's not like that. This was gradually, you know, I had, you know, I was painting. I went to the, you know, the normal academy and studied five years and did two years post diploma. And I really wanted to be a painter. But then, you know, I had a different kind of part of playing my dreams. I was painting, you know, truck accidents and then I started playing clouds. And I was really obsessed with clouds. I was obsessed with universe. I was not interested more about the universe itself. There's always a big question, what is behind universe? Are there multiple universes? What is behind all this? What is the meaning of life? I was always interested in these big, big questions. And I looked at the sky very often. And then I discovered all these clouds were coming and going and projections and black holes and clouds were hitting the ground. You know, I made all this theory of clouds. And I was lying on the field in the countryside looking the sky. And this particular moment was just blue sky. There was nothing there. And out of nowhere came 12 military, you know, the ultrasonic planes and they made this boom sound. And you see how they made the drawing from the air in the past. And then I saw this drawing being formed and then disappeared and the blue sky again come. And it was for me like a spiritual revelation. And I really remember very well this moment. I stood up from the, I stand up from the field and I said to myself, I will never go back to studio. I'm not going to do something too dimensional when art is for this incredible freedom that we can do things from anything, from dust, from earth. I can use the sun, I can use the fire, water, myself, whatever. And then I went to the military base and I asked if I can get 12 planes to make my own drawings in the sky. They called my father and said, get your daughter out of here, she's crazy. You know how much cost fell military planes to make the drawings for her in the sky. So they sent me home. But then I never really was interested in studio for me. Studio for me was a trap. I think that art comes from life. You have to do life. Studio is just to realize already ideas that you have from somewhere else. And that's how I actually, I started more of my body, more and more in work. But you had to be home at 10. Always. So you started doing these radical performances and were invited to do them in galleries but you still had to be home at 10 o'clock at night. You're according to your mother and so that's what you did. This is why I escaped home when I was 29. And my mother went to police and said, you know, the daughters escaped home and they say, but what is your age? And then he said 29 and said, you know, camera the brown, which we have more important things to do. Can you just make this about time where she leaves? But I had to be at home at 10 always. So I was doing these performances, but she, you know, cutting communist style in the stomach of burning it in the square. It was a big deal. And you know, my father and my mother being criticized of communist party for bad education. My professors was, you know, thinking that I was ready to go to mental hospital. I was a complete black sheep and rebel from the beginning, from day one when I started working with the performance. But I could not give up. I really was thinking I'm in the rice truck. You know, performance, I just, maybe to tell to the public what I mean, what is the performance? Because there's so many explanations, you know, in many artists in different statement. But you know, the Vito Conchi, which is great American artist, he did this in the early 70s. He said, body is the place where work can happen. And this is how came the title, The Body Art. And I belong from the 70s to this group of the very early body artists. And the body was the work. The blood was the color. The tools used on my body was, you know, like a pen, like a chisel or the brush. So the body was the place where everything happened. And which is incredible, but performance is such a material form of art. It's not like a painting you come home and you know, painting is there. You go to the museum the next day, this painting is still there. But here is a time base art. If you're not there to see it, it don't exist. And then when you see it, all what is there, it's your memory. And that's really software, you know. So it's one of the most difficult, you know, the form of art that exists. And it's very hard to be there for a long time. So I'm thinking about some of the early pieces that you did before you formed your partnership with Ulle. One of the ones that I think stands out for many of us is Rhythm Zero. Is it Rhythm Zero or Rhythm O? Rhythm Zero, Rhythm O, whatever. Rhythm Zero. And it's a remarkable piece that, would you like to describe it or? No, I love you to describe it. But you'll help me. I've done too many times. The work is one in which, in a gallery, standing in a gallery in Naples in 1974, you laid out a selection of objects, range 76. 76, with sort of an attendant range of implications. From a feather to a rose to a gun at the other end, with one bullet, not loaded. And one bullet is enough. One bullet is more than enough. And you stood in the gallery for six hours and invited the public to interact. To do whatever they want, you would kill me. And I think it was very simple. Very simple, very dramatic. And what's fascinating, there's so many things that is fascinating about it, but what's so interesting about it in the telling of the stories I've read at numerous places is people started off gently, perhaps. And as time went on, and in the response to your passiveness, became more aggressive. And in one of the interviews I saw with you, you said that the men were more aggressive, that they were often being told what to do by their wives, who they brought with them. But also it was interesting, it was interesting. The first of all, this performance came out of reaction that in those days, in the 70s, performance artists was being so much attacked by the press. And the public to see the mass of history there, some is there, the exhibitionist that this is not any kind of art, this worship, this song. And I really wanted to see what would happen if I'm dressed standing in the middle of the space of the normal gallery, and with these small objects, giving to the public possibility to see how far they can go, how far they can even go to kill an artist. And it was a really courageous day, I was 23, and you know, 23 you do these things. And you know, and also doing this in Italy. And in Italy it was really interesting because everything that had been done to me, it was a reaction of the three, actually iconic ideals in Italy. This was the mother, the core, and Madonna. And it was like the three images that the public were reacting. But also in the beginning of the time is very important, in the beginning you're just in normal gallery, you do two, three things. But six hours is enough time for the people to develop all kinds of emotions and aggressions. And I remember that they cut my clothes, they put the pins of roses in my body, they cut me, and the neck is still scarred of my blood, they hold me around the gallery, put me in the table and put the knife in my legs. They didn't rape me because there was with their wives. And after six hours of my complete passivity, you know, the gallery say, you know, they, the performance is finished. I start walking towards them, and I look like hell. I was full of blood, and then half naked. And they just run away, every single one there. And I remember coming to the hotel, looking in my mirror, and I have a gray hair. I just piece of gray hair. And I knew the public can really kill you. So, which is really interesting, my relation to public change since then until now. Because if you can actually get worse out of the public, or you can get the best out of the public. This was the really example of getting worse out of the public. And we are just looking right now, the artist is present. This is how you can elevate the public's spirit. And now you can get actually best of the public. So I'm learning to deal with public in different ways. And what's so remarkable to me is that, that image of, that you just described, of kind of what happens after the performance. That when you regain your personhood in a way, and move towards these people, their instinct is to flee. No, they could not deal with me as a person. Because I was a passive element in the space. And then we come first. Well, and they were also probably feeling, immediately it gets turned into guilt. Or fear. They call the gallery, they don't know what happened to them. Why they put the bullet in the pistol? Why they put it in my temple? I mean, there was so many questions. Because they actually got surprised by the only reaction. And did you have an expectation that this would happen? Is that what you thought would happen? I never, you see, I never tried the performance. And I never rehearsed. Because if I rehearsed any of these performances, I would never do them. Because it was too difficult, too impossible. You know, for me, one element that I have to count, that I can push my limits of the body as far as I can, I have to count the energy of the public. The more public, the more energy the better I can get. Because new energy is for me incredibly important as a performance artist. If I just deal with my own energy, I don't have this kind of energy to do these things. It's very important. You know, in the beginning, we had the audience 10 people, 20, 30. And now, I mean, I'm having hundreds of thousands and such a huge difference. And what's also interesting to me about that is, so when you did your seven easy pieces at the Guggenheim several years ago, you re-enacted Valley Exports action pants. Which, if you don't know, it is a famous performance that Valley Exports performed in a movie theater in Berlin, I believe, in which she walked around a movie theater in a pair of crotchless black leather chaps holding a machine gun. And she was up at Horneau Theater, I believe, and she would approach the men in the theater. And you re-enacted a photograph of her that was taken afterward where she's sitting in a chair with her legs spread sort of holding the gun in her lap. And seven hours. Seven hours. Guggenheim. In the Guggenheim with hundreds of people, as you said, but it's, in that experience, too, people, I think again because of the passivity, because you were willing to sit there, people did get a little bit aggressive again. And you also did me the decision, and then I'm sorry, but not to enact the action, but to enact the photograph. I think you said with some knowledge that you didn't want the aggression. But the important thing is the context of why I've done these seven easy pieces. I've done seven easy pieces as a variation to a young artist and everybody else was copying the artists from the 70s without giving any kind of credits to the original material. And even young critics will prize the young artists with the stuff that already all the artists did, saying that it was original, it was unique, and so on. And then the performance art was also copied by the fashion, by the MTV industry, by the theater, the design, all kinds of different, you know, they would take the images, they would kind of change them, and actually they would give kind of this original work. So I was thinking I need, as in one of the, actually almost, I don't know, anybody in my age is still performing, basically, nobody. So I was still, you know, I wanted to put some kind of order in this whole thing. So I asked to perform the classical pieces of the performance art, but I never saw it myself, but I don't experience them. I asked permission, the Malia export, I asked permission from her to do this piece, pay for permission, and to my own version, but always mention the original material. But you know, Malia export, the context of her work was really important because she come from Vienna, and this was at the time in the late 60s and early 70s which Vienna's Axialism, like Hermann Nietzsche, Interpruss, Dottemür, all these people was working, and there was no space for the woman artists to be there, and she was really fighting just this kind of macho thing there, on the top doing incredible, strong, radical pieces, and the one piece with congenital panic would open in her vagina, and with the machine gun it was such a strong image, and I felt that this image can actually live through different times, and I asked her, and she was very willing and happily told me, yes, you could perform this piece, which I did. And you also performed Seat Bed. Consciousness. No comments on this. It's too complicated this way. So, but it does raise the issue, which is, I think, important also of how you feel about... So, in the experience of the Guggenheim, you re-performed five other people's performances. Yeah, Bruce Nauman and Vito Conci, and Joseph Boyce, the Gino Plane, and the ballet export, and then two white pieces, one old piece, and I make a new piece. But it was really, I actually wanted so much to perform Chris Burden, the Transfix, but he's actually crucified with the golden hands on the back of Volkswagen. And I asked him for so many times the permission, and he actually never answered my letters, never gave me permission. Later on, when he was alive, I asked him, but why you never want to give me permission? And he said, why you ask for permission? Everybody's copying my work anyway. And this is the point. I didn't want to do something to copy his work. I want permission because, to me, performance art is the living form of art. And if you don't re-perform, it's just that image in the inner, and bad video in the history. And I think that even if you put your own personality, even if you put your own charisma, change something, still is life. Marta Graham, she also had a lot of promise to give permission to people to perform her dance, but performers have to be performed. And I had lots of my contemporary, but totally against this idea, this was my work, nobody can touch it. And I think it's a question of ego. I give permission to everybody to perform my work, except the one who is in danger of their life. I don't want to be responsible to make their life in danger. But the rest of the work, I give it. And I think this is the way how the work can live, and even different in your lives. And you couldn't re-perform Rhythm Zero at the Guggenheim because they... America, pistol, gun, are you crazy? Okay, just to tell you how difficult it's here. You know, some of the major pieces of the performance are... It's not in Europe because there's much less restriction here. Everything's restricted here. I mean, I remember a luminosity piece when you sit in the bicycle, the moment the work, I asked the different artists to re-perform. And just like the day before the performance came, six lawyers said to me, okay, this piece have to be performed in the helmet, safety belt, and only 15 minutes, which I did originally six hours. And I signed the release that if anything happened, I have to pay one million or something. I signed so many of these releases. I'll be completely bankrupt in prison if anything ever. Thanks God. So what was it like having these incredible experience of having other people re-perform your pieces for your own retrospective? That's sort of the flip side of that. It's really incredible. I just now in China, the Chinese artists re-perform the 12 different Chinese girls perform the work. It must be beautiful, it must be beautiful. In Chinese and English, it was amazing. It's like you see the life of work. You see the work, this is life. And the one thing that I am very proud of myself that I really have young audience, I have audience, I have letters in my email boxes from the kids 14, 16, 17, who really followed the work, and especially the new advertisement of the new work I'm doing. You know, in this summertime gallery, 512 hours, I work directly in the public. So when you come to the gallery, you have to put in the lockers your telephone, your watch, your computer, and then you get a pair of headphones, and the pair of headphones completely block the sound. So the kid of 16 years old put the telephone in the locker, come to the space, put his headphones. They're looking at me, he said, but it don't work. But of course they don't work, it's about science. But this kid never had science in his entire life if he put headphones, he's listening to something. So he's introduced to the science for the first time, and this is incredible. So I start kids bringing the children, the friends, and the other friends, it became this huge public of the kids listening to science. And this is really something I'm proud of. Do you think that started with the momo show? The momo show is, it's another thing, it's, you know, change also, everything. The momo show change. You know, I've been really criticizing this whole idea of passing through the normal artists of the kind of celebrity. But it looks like, it's my fault, I didn't do anything. It's the public fault that put me there. It's just that the amount of people change is not in one art public. But there's lots of people in different cultures, different backgrounds, different education, not even just in art. There is something there that is touching people in different ways. Because I understood the need of the public. Public in the 70s was a normal passing public that looked things on the stage would happen. But now the public need more. They don't need to look at something. They need to be part of something. And I'm giving them that. You haven't, you've given them an introduction to, going back to the 70s, the idea of duration. The idea of sticking with something for hours on end or for six hours at a time. And I think that that's a very unusual experience for most of us. To me, long duration of thinking is just something. You know, let's say if I die tomorrow, what will happen? I think that if I will be remembered for a few things, I will remember to introduce re-performance, that you can re-perform and leave the piece. Look at this family. That's all three generations with the headphones blocking the sound, standing for hours there, just by themselves. This is 512 hours. This is when the public actually come to be with themselves. This little kid was incredible story. He was coming every day. And I asked him, and he just stand there. And with his headphones, and I said, but why are you coming every day? He said, if you know, it's really important. I was going so bad in school. Now I go to my room, and before anything has started, I still stand still in the middle room with headphones listening to silence. And then I can do everything. And he was 12. I mean, 12 years old. There is a need of some other kind of understanding. You know, before this kind of re-reaction with the public was not possible. The public was not ready for this. Nobody was ready. But now our life is so fast. We are living in such a stress that life is getting shorter and shorter. Art had to go longer and longer. This is why long-duration work is so important, not just for the artist to get into the state of mind, but also for the public to get to the same state of mind. We need time. We need time without technological interruption. One of the things that I also heard you talk about was after the serpentine piece that you know, this taking away of props to go back to that earlier piece, this sort of taking away of things, which actually ends up in a strange way becoming very baroque in your hands, which is, I think, sort of interesting. You know, this is what you say, removing props. That's really important. You know, when you're a young artist, you're insecure. So you need lots of things. You need the slight projections of music, and you need this prop, and you need that prop, and you're costy, whatever. But the more you understand, the performance is all about energy, is all about me and you, is all about this, is all about, you know, being in a press of standing here, and you don't need anything. You just need to establish energy dialogue. It is all that happened. I mean, let's do it one minute. Just be with your mind and your body here and now. And that's it. You see, it's short time, but how the mind is not still, how many souls just pass through the mind doing this moment? Are we, anybody here can have the mind that is still and we're not thinking, and just being in here at our moment, which is the only reality we are ever going to have? That we're always in the past, which happened already, or in the future, we didn't have them. But the only reality, the only thing that we can absolutely ensure that we exist is in the present, because next second, the old ceiling can fall down. Asteroid could hit this planet, and we're all dead. We don't have the future, and past happened. Present is the only reality. And we are so neatly in that present. We are doing everything to not to be in the present. And the performance which I'm trying to do is to lift human spirit through that moment of presence. Wow, this deep, okay. I'm also funny. Well, so I find that incredibly difficult. Did anybody else find that difficult? Just sitting here for a minute as a group? This is why you need a time. You see, this is why you need to count in the rise, which I'm proposing to people. Counting the rise is essential. You have this rise in lentils, and you have to separate writings in lentils, and you have to count separately in another. And this process that takes like anything between three, four, five, six hours. And you have to, before you count rise, you have to decide what you're going to do. Are you going to just separate lentils and rice? That's it. Or you're just going to separate lentils and rice and only count lentils or only count rice, or you decide to do everything. That decision you have to make in front of it, it's very important. It's like life. If you give up in the middle, you can't do life either. This is the old thing. And in the process of counting lentils and rice, it's so many things that can happen. You go crazy. In the beginning it's interesting, and I'm using it, that you get bored. Then you close patients, and you say, what is she's absolutely out of her mind? What are you doing this? Here, then you start breathing because you get angry. And then time pass, and time pass, and you get more and more calm. And because of that repetition, your body getting the same amount of oxygen, and same amount of oxygen goes into every atom you sell. And you become quieter. And the breathing becomes quieter. And you need time to get stillness, and then you're in presence. So the counting lies, it's just a tool. So that's one, another performer, Gina Pahn, is seven hours like that. So she originally made this performance 28 minutes, but I add time to every single piece I did. So I made it seven hours each of these performances, one after another, seven days. And apparently that was also one of the few times you, I don't know if this is the correct terminology before it, but sort of broke character in your performance because you... And I chose a voice, this one. That was the crazy piece, because first his wife said no. But no, for me, it's just the beginning. So I went to... I went to this door, and I said, and I stand there on the door and I said, because Guggen have said permission, we know the letters that we want, permission, and so on. And then she said always in the letter, no, no, no. And this is this, this piece is called how to explain to dead hair art. And then I went to her home and it was in the suitcase in the front of the door. We knew the winter. She opened the door and said, Frau Abramovich, my answer is no, but you can have coffee as you can have tea. And five hours later, I had permission. But it was a complicated piece. It was lots of fun because dead hair, because of the protection of animals, have to die natural dead. So this hair was dead on the highway in Texas, and pulled by the plane, completely frozen. Wait, that was one of the criteria for the hair? Yes, it had to be dead, natural dead. So it was hit by car. This is natural dead anyway. So it was hit by car. Did you have people out in the room? Well, there was no research. So this was really, really safe. He was dead and he was hit by car, frozen, and then by plane from Texas. He arrived in the morning, so I'm holding him. And then during seven hours he'd be free, and then become problem. Never mind. So that piece was a guy. I'd done originally one hour, and I'd done seven hours. You see, I'd done one hour of this piece when I was at 24, 25. And when I was 65, I'd done all these pieces, seven hours, which is so much more difficult. So people said to me, you know, I didn't have this wisdom and the will concentration power to have an arm. You know, is that the body is giving up, but actually the will power is stronger. So you can do pieces longer and more tougher than you've done when you're young. Even though you look at the young, it's all spectacular because, you know, blood all over the place. But this is easy because you have this one hour, and you can rest for, you know, months. But if you do something three months, it's alive. Like it's a great wall of China. Like wall of China where this is present. You know, everybody say we wall of China and I worked with this part for 12 years and then we decided to separate the wall of China. And I remember William DeFoe, he said to me, why have you just left my phone call? It's so easy. So what are you... I don't ask audience three questions. I love, but only three questions, no more. Anybody have something to ask me? You can ask anything. I can ask for anything. Anybody have anything? Yes. Wow, that's interesting question. The question was, is there anything you regret doing? I actually don't because I never look the past. You know, everything have the reason why things are happening. Even the worst experience, even the things that I made wrong decisions in my life. I will still do them again because they have the reason why things are happening. You know, I'm more and more interesting how I can live my life in synchronicity. That I am here, when you are in the moment, things happen in kind of fluid, and, you know, without obstacle way. But when you resist, then you really have problems. So I done things that I actually was huge mistakes. But I done them, and I learned from them. And if I didn't do them, I would not learn from them. So it's okay. You have to do everything you wanted to do. The idea of freedom, it's very important that, you know, that you have this freedom as an artist that you can make work out of nothing. You know, the performance is literally about energy, and it's nothing. It's just there, that's it, and to tap to that energy. And you have to do this by going through the really bad experiences. And the most important is failure. Failure in everybody's life is important. You have to learn to fail. Because if you don't go to the territory, you never been, and experimenting and being curious, you are always doing the same thing over and over again. And you're repeating yourself that your life is boring. But if you do things you don't know, and the things that are mystery, and the things that are exciting, you can make fail, because how you can know what is another side. So the failure is very important. You have to fail many times in your life. Okay, second question. It's a good question. You know, it's really important to understand the mind of an artist who is a private person, and the mind of an artist in the performance. Because, you know, I have this, the kind of statement, the kind of, let's say, what performance is. Performance is mental and physical construction which an artist step in in the precise time and space in the front of the audience, and energy now is happening. So this is a shift. You go from your simple self, you know, little Marina's self, who cries, she cuts cucumber, and then she a pain out of the finger. But another Marina who can do anything in the stage, because she's using audience energy. And that Marina is a different Marina. And then when you perform a step, you go into this other, you know. So from that Marina you can do anything. You can even die. But then comes the other Marina. It's different because that one is performing Marina. You know, it's like you really shift into another reality. I mean, I learned this so much from the Tibetan Buddhists, from the Shamans in Brazil that I studied, from the different ancient cultures. But the two ceremonies, they go into that different state of mind which everything is possible because they become divinity. The mask which Shamans have on his head, in that state of the mind when he is presenting certain divinity, he is limitless. But the moment he takes the mask, this is this old man that he can't even jump or walk. So that kind of shift of energy is happening with the performance. And then, you know, the more the shift you make, the performance, the better. Because you are not yourself. You're not your ordinary self. You're from the highest self possible. You know, it's also an example. You know, sometimes you meet a writer and first you read a great book and you say, oh my God, I have to meet a writer. And you go to meet a writer, a writer is at the bar. He's unshamed. He didn't wash himself for 20 days. He drank like hell. And he's total rubbish. And he's crazy. And you could not absolutely identify that the same writer can write a supreme book. How is this possible? Because when you write the book, this is the best of him comes in. This is like giving birth. And then you go to the ordinary self. Sometimes the ordinary self is not pleasant at all. Third question. Yes. Different things, you know. I mean, I made some performances in my life. They're so bad that you could not even believe. And the public was there and I was doing them. And I said, what the hell? I was thinking. And I could not stop. And it was getting worse and worse. And then I stopped. It was terrible. You know, the migraine attack and fever. And I don't go out for months home because I'm ashamed. You know, that's the failure. But I had to experience. I had to see to the other side. You know, then my failure with my private life, I could not succeed to have home children. You know, sit and meet pullovers for my husband. Or, you know, just be normal. I don't think I try so much. But I can't. It doesn't work. I think it may be one day. But who knows? And you know, it's lots of failures. You know, it's failures that you go to see things. You go to certain trips. You're getting some ideas. And they're not good. And they're, you know, falling apart. But you still wanted to have this process. And you wanted to know what is on other side. But you don't know what the failure in the beginning. You have to first get to the journey to know what is on that. So you can't just have, you know, any kind of... There's no rules at all. This was three questions. I have three questions. You know, I hear this story about three questions. Because you go to Sweden of these countries. They don't talk at all. So you ask them three questions. And then they really answer them. Because if you ask them seven, they can't deal with seven. But then three, you get the measure. Thank you for the three questions. And thank you Marina. For your wisdom. Thank you for philosophy. Thank you for identifying the restrictions that we live in. And for giving us the courage to face them. Thank you very much. I'm really touched by this word. I'm touched by different reasons. You know, this is 45 years later. 45 years of real struggle. That I put all my energy and my work into this idea that performance has become the mainstream art. It's never been mainstream art. It means so much, you know, time that photography and video was also not mainstream art. It became. But performance was always this kind of nobody category. We was always between everything. It was, you know, you were getting the letter and saying, oh, we are doing opening. Can you do performance with opening? It was like an ideal entertaining. Stand up comedy. But not understand really how performance can have transformative force. How the performance can really change, not just performing the life of the artist, but also the other big lives. And when this happened, and when I get this kind of reward, please, just this word is not just for me. This word is for that all young artists were coming and having the same struggle. I kind of wanted to clear the path. I wanted to make it easy. So if I can make it, then I can make it too. And really a big touch. And I just want to say that I am very sentimental today because I'm realizing that in 1979, I was performing the first performance I made in America was appeared in Brooklyn, New Zealand, suddenly 36 years ago. So it was really, at this performance was made with Ulai and was dedicated to the go on the clock, which was that time dying artist. And I remember this very well. So coming here and being here with all of you and getting all these memories, it's a long time. And I really like to thank Yvonne Pastermak and all of you and Sakri Foundation for this work and all my office. And I'm with Alisson Bernat, who is here at the John Allen channel. All the people who work with me. Because, you know, doing performance you have to have is not just come for yourself. It's a huge group team work. Thank you.