Performance artist Marina Abramovic is known for putting her body on the line – from walking thousands of kilometres along China's Great Wall to having a loaded gun pointed at her.
All her current fame, Abramovic credits the months spent in quiet remote Australian Aboriginal communities in the 1980s as being one of the major influences on her life's work.
"This really changes our lives, connection with this kind of people," Abramovic explains of the time she spent with German artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay, in the central Australian desert regions.
They lived for close to a year in Australia, mostly with the Pintupi and Pitjantjatjara tribes near the giant red monolith Uluru and in big Outback cattle stations.
Aboriginal "idea of here and now; that everything is happening in the present" struck a chord with Abramovic, who reached for the same experience in her art.
It ultimately helped her develop the thinking behind her 2010 blockbuster New York performance called "The Artist is Present", in which she sat silent and immobile for seven hours a day, six days a week for three months.
"(When) Aborigines are explaining to us the meaning (of myths), they would always say it's happening now, it's not happening in the past, it's not happening in the future... it's happening now and is always happening now," she explains. In this 700-hour endurance test Abramovic sat silently projecting unconditional love to whoever was in front of her at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Thousands turned up, many people cried.
"They are sitting in front of me, they are photographed, they are filmed, they are watched by me, they have nowhere to escape except within themselves," she explains of her visitors. "And when this happens... emotions come up and this is what I wanted to provoke in them."
The performance required incredible discipline and concentration from Abramovic.
“What about sitting for three months? That's so difficult because you have to deal with your mind. If you don't move for three hours, your ribs are going into your organs because you are sinking slowly on the chair. It's just incredibly painful," she says.
Belgrade-born Abramovic says as she nears 70, she wants to keep going with her work, which is moving away from physical performance to having a mental discipline.
She advocates practices such as counting the grains of rice in a bag or writing one's name so slowly the whole process takes an hour to heighten consciousness.AFP
