Walk Through Walls

Starred review from August 22, 2016
Performance artist Abramovic´ shares the remarkable experiences of her life and background on some of her best-known art pieces in this enchanting and emotionally raw memoir. Her story begins in 1940s Communist Yugoslavia, where her Partisan parents’ stormy relationship cast a pall over her childhood. This is followed by a glimpse of freedom at Belgrade’s Academy of Fine Arts in the 1960s, where Abramovic´ began to engage with the avant-garde first as a painter and then by staging her first piece at the Belgrade Youth Center in 1969. She then spent a decade touring with her lover, fellow artist Ulay. She provides fascinating glimpses into her experiences living with Aboriginal Australians and her walk of China’s Great Wall, sharing illuminating notes from her performances diaries and giving insight into her teaching technique. She o
utlines the
conceptions and orchestration of the blood-soaked knife game Rhythm 10,
the marathon sitting performance Nightsea Crossing, reprised as The Artist Is Present for her 2010 MoMA career retrospective, and the ingenious, cow bone-littered Balkan Baroque. Abramovic´ is brilliant with atmospheric details, coloring the narrative with macabre Slavic jokes and descriptions of the thick glasses and “horrible, socialistic” orthopedic shoes that marred her adolescence; an early living space with a bucket and hose for a shower. She is confessional but unsentimental, admitting to insecurities and failures with refreshing candor. This is an honest, gripping, and profound look into the heart and brilliant mind of one of the quintessential artists of the postmodern era. Photos.

Legendary performance artist Abramovic unveils her story in this highly anticipated memoir.When she was growing up, the author lived in an environment of privilege in Yugoslavia, which was on the verge of ruin. Her parents, two fervent communist partisans and loyal officers during Josip Broz Tito's rule, were not the warmest people. Abramovic was put under the care of several people, only to be taken in by her grandmother. "I felt displaced and I probably thought that if I walked, it meant I would have to go away again somewhere," she writes. Ultimately, she carried this feeling of displacement throughout most, if not all, of her career. Many remember The Artist Is Present, her 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during which she sat in front of museumgoers for 736 hours, but her work started long before then. As a woman who almost single-handedly launched female performance art, the author has spent the better part of her life studying the different ways in which the body functions in time and space. She pushed herself to explore her body's limits and her mind's boundaries ("I [have] put myself in so much pain that I no longer [feel] any pain"). For example, she stood in front of a bow and arrow aimed at her heart with her romantic and performance partner of 12 years, Ulay. She was also one of the first people to walk along the Great Wall of China, a project she conceived when secluded in aboriginal Australia. While the author's writing could use some polishing, the voice that seeps through the text is hypnotizing, and readers will have a hard time putting the book down and will seek out further information about her work. Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: "every time she tells a story, it gets better," and one can't help but wait in anticipation of what she is concocting for her next tour de force. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from October 1, 2016
Daring, crazy, stoic, magnificent: all have been applied over the past four decades to the radical performance art of Yugoslavian Abramovic, who subjects her body and mind to punishing regimens to express the vulnerability and strength of the human spirit. She attained new heights of renown in 2010 when she performed The Artist Is Present at New York's Modern Museum of Art, during which she sat without moving for eight hours a day for three months, gazing into the eyes of 1,500 individuals who sat, one-by-one, across from her in eloquent silence. Abramovic now tells the galvanizing story of how she reached this strange place of excruciatingly painful stillness, beginning in communist Belgrade, where her fierce partisan parents inculcated her with walk-through-walls toughness. Attuned to the unseen world and hungry for freedom, she stunned audiences with works involving nudity, knives, whips, rats, snakes, fire, and ice, taking serious risks in the belief that art must be disturbing, art must ask questions. Abramovic chronicles her demanding performances around the world, both solo and with her former lover and collaborator, the German-born artist Ulay, tracing the deepening of her performances from raw shock to profound communion. Candidly and vividly sharing her personal struggles as well as her artistic and spiritual discoveries, Abramovic presents a uniquely intense and affecting art memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2016

Preeminent performance artist Abramovic has been stripped, burned, and cut and has sat with a loaded gun to her head--all in the name of an art that pushes past borders. Raised in Communist Yugoslavia by parents who passionately saved each other's lives during World War II but then grew chilly (and, in her mother's case, abusive), Abramovic escaped to create a dramatic art rooted in pain and climaxing in a MoMA retrospective that boasted $14 million in ticket sales.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2016

Art can be difficult to define; performance art exceptionally so. However, its significance is well acknowledged, and contemporary artist Abramovic is recognized as one of its key trailblazers, who broke boundaries to discover the far-reaching possibilities of the form. In this absorbing memoir, she candidly recounts her journey. Raised in communist Yugoslavia within a troubled, autocratic family, she struggles to develop her own transformative concepts of expression. Individually, and with longtime partner and lover Ulay, she creates works that blend multiple components to interact provocatively, sometimes shockingly, with and challenge audiences, pushing her body and mind to dangerous extremes: enduring self-inflicted wounds; scrubbing a skeleton; walking the Great Wall of China; silently communicating one-one-one with thousands of visitors at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Abramovic's story is thoroughly detailed, with brutally honest descriptions of her life and performance pieces, all providing deep insights into her work. VERDICT This is not for readers who prefer a more mainstream approach to cultural subjects; however, others will find it an informative, eye-opening look at the larger world of art. Well-chosen photos complement the narrative. Large art history/academic libraries will find this a useful addition to their collections. [See Prepub Alert, 4/18/16.]--Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2016
Legendary performance artist Abramovic unveils her story in this highly anticipated memoir.When she was growing up, the author lived in an environment of privilege in Yugoslavia, which was on the verge of ruin. Her parents, two fervent communist partisans and loyal officers during Josip Broz Tito's rule, were not the warmest people. Abramovic was put under the care of several people, only to be taken in by her grandmother. "I felt displaced and I probably thought that if I walked, it meant I would have to go away again somewhere," she writes. Ultimately, she carried this feeling of displacement throughout most, if not all, of her career. Many remember The Artist Is Present, her 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during which she sat in front of museumgoers for 736 hours, but her work started long before then. As a woman who almost single-handedly launched female performance art, the author has spent the better part of her life studying the different ways in which the body functions in time and space. She pushed herself to explore her body's limits and her mind's boundaries ("I [have] put myself in so much pain that I no longer [feel] any pain"). For example, she stood in front of a bow and arrow aimed at her heart with her romantic and performance partner of 12 years, Ulay. She was also one of the first people to walk along the Great Wall of China, a project she conceived when secluded in aboriginal Australia. While the author's writing could use some polishing, the voice that seeps through the text is hypnotizing, and readers will have a hard time putting the book down and will seek out further information about her work. Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: "every time she tells a story, it gets better," and one can't help but wait in anticipation of what she is concocting for her next tour de force.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.