Martina Abramovic in conversation with Laurence Ringer Berkeley Art Museum SF

Balkan spirituality was communicated by this pioneering performance artist, who used the body to express and experience pain, starting with a red star representing the Soviet domination of her home Serbia, as a child.  Death and pain is something she lived with, as a child; her grandmother always prepared the dress in which she would be buried, and it would change each year with the fashion.   She says all Balkan people live with death and dying as a part of life.  As for nudity, she says Americans have a problem with it, but she does not, and her performances find less constraints when performed in Europe. .  "We come into the life, naked".  She revealed that a turning point has come to her after 40 years, that she now believes the body has a life of its own, and is not controlled by the mind; this illumination has recharged her energies.  She denies being masochistic.  She now knows it is not necessary to experience pain, or inflict pain upon herself, to test herself.  She wants to transfer engergy to an audience, and says it is necessary to respect the public, because without them, there is no "performance", no art.

Martina  has just returned from studying shamanism in Brazil, and plans a desert solo camping retreat in the desert of Qatar, in October.  She reveals that she has spent considerable time in India, learning their practices and also with the Aborigines in Australia. 

Judith Thurman wrote a piece about Martina in the March? 2010 New Yorker at the time of her retrospective at the MOMA.  She sees MA as a diva, of a privileged background, her mother being a director of the Zagreb Museum, and her being able to go to the Venice Bienelle at an early age.  Both her parents were officials in the Serbian government of the former Yugoslavia.  

Martina concluded with a description of the Institute she is creating in order to pass on her knowledge and experience to other performance artists. She feels the art has come of age, and now needs copyright or at least credit to those artists whom other artists imitate, or whose work they adapt.   She hopes to create this institute in Hudson, New York, and has bought the building, for which the famous architect Rem Koos will create the Master Plan.