pure presence

In some of my new pieces, when there is nothing happening, I try to take every possible kind of expectation out of the piece. There is no beginning, development, and end. It’s just nothing. It’s just presence, pure presence.
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Failure is such a great territory to learn because if you don’t risk you will never go anywhere…So to include failure in your own process of work, it’s essential.
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Being an artist, you can make things from anything. You can make things from dust. You have this miracle, possibilities.
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Beauty doesn’t have a definition. What is important is what moves you.
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I hate when artists from my generation become tired, depressed, and complain about art being dead. It is nonsense. Art is intrinsic to the human being; it is impossible for it to die.
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You get what you get from me. I don’t hide anything. There is no dark side, because I tell it all.
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I’m not pretending.
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To me, good art has to have not just one but many lives.

—Maria Abramović, Abramović-isms (Princeton U. Press, 2024), edited by Larry Warsh