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Od završne „tačke“ se osloba- đanje emocija i moglo očekiva- ti. Od nas hiljada je zatražila da na rame fizički najbližeg gleda- oca stavimo ruku, zatvorimo oči i ćutimo sedam minuta. Gestom je htela da nas nauči da volimo celo čovečanstvo, a ne samo de- vojku, muža, rodbinu... Kroz mi- sli su mi promicali svi poznati ljudi, pa i neprijatelji, koje je te- že empatijom obuhvatiti, po re- čima dalaj-lame, koje je Marina reinterpretirala u svom umetnič- kom manifestu rečima da „umet- nik mora da nauči da oprosti“. Šta sam prenela prvoj do sebe, govo- ri podatak da mi se ona na kra- ju zahvalila. Ipak je za mene najpotresniji Marinin i Ulajev rad Ljubavnici, ko- ji su izveli hodajući jedno ka dru- gom po Kineskom zidu. „Ideja je bi- la da se venčamo kad se sretnemo, ali smo na dozvole tadašnjih kine- skih vlasti čekali sedam godina, za vreme kojih se naša ljubav ohladi- la“, tako je Marina rekla, iako ni ta- da nije bila ravnodušna. Susret je stoga značio rastanak, koji je stra- stvena umetnica teško prebolela. Nakon završnog ekstatičnog aplauza svi smo se polako razišli, uglavnom uz komentare da je pre- davanje bilo izvrsno. Ja sam ćuta- la, jer umetnost doživljavam iz sto- maka, kako Marina i preporučuje, a stomaku treba duže da svari vi- đeno i doživljeno. I tek onda izne- dri racionalni zaključak, bez uticaja njene neodoljive harizme.
rina found tough. But she left it up to us to discern whether the visitors were ashamed of their actions, or whether they’ve entered a trance, just like her. She then decided that in future she would provoke only positive emotions and would no longer risk her life. However, she continued striving for extremes of endurance, so in one work she and Ulay screeched at each other for hours. In a desire for us to al- so feel some of the energy of the per- formance, Marina gave us an exercise – to release our voices with all our might. I didn’t spare myself, so I ended up crying. The release of emotions from the nal“point”could have been expected. She asked the thousand of us to place a hand on the shoulder of the viewer closest to us, to close our eyes and re- main quiet for seven minutes. With this gesture she wanted to teach us to love humanity as a whole, and not just our girlfriends, husbands, relatives... Stirring through my thoughts where all the peo- ple I knew, even enemies, which it’s hard- er to comprehend with empathy, ac- cording to the words of the Dalai Lama, which Marina reinterpreted in her artis- tic manifesto by saying that “the artist must learn to forgive”. What I conveyed rst to myself is testi ed to by the fact that she thanked me in the end. Still, Marina and Ulay’s most shock- ing work for me was‘Lovers’, which they performed by walking towards one an- otheralongtheGreatWallofChina.“The idea was to get married when we en- countered, but we waited seven years for the permits from the then Chinese authorities, during which time our love turned cold,”said Marina, though even nowshewasnotindi erent.Theirmeet- ing, thus, meant breaking up, which this passionate artist struggled to overcome. After the nal ecstatic applause, we all slowly parted, mostly with comments about how the“lecture was fantastic”. I was silent because I experience art from the stomach, as Marina recommends, and the stomach requires longer to di- gest that which has been seen and ex- perienced. And only then does a rational conclusion emerge, without the in u- ence of her irresistible charisma.
order to get inside, just as Marina and her partner Ulay had stood at the doors of the Modern Gallery in 1977. I over- come a certain discomfort and stroked the handsome young man on the back of his hand. Her works with Ulay and depar- ture for the Netherlands were preced- ed by a series of Marina’s performanc- es at the Students’ Culture Centre in Belgrade, which Belgrade artists had fought for from Tito in the early ‘70s. Instead of the chess games of senior o cers and their wives’gossip parties, here a new, conceptual form of art was developed. Marina’s most famous per- formance from this period is Rhythm 5, in which she laid within a burning ve- point star and almost su ocated.“I fell unconscious from the smoke, and the ames are already caught my leg when a doctor from the audience reacted,” said Marina, revealing her sacri ce in settling accounts with history. Her “Rhythm 0” work is also well known and was performed by our star in Naples, when she o ered objects for visitors to the city’s Gallery 72 to use do whatever they wanted to her. Initially constrictive, over the course of the six- hour performance they became increas- ingly ruthless.“They cut my clothes, in- jured me with a razor blade, placed a gun in my hand to see if I would dare to shoot myself”. In order to be able to emotionally endure all of this, Marina anaesthetised her consciousness. Upon the culmination of the per- formance, the audience ed. “No one wanted to communicate with me while Iwasbloodyandhalf-naked,”whichMa-
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