PERFORMANCE LECTURE
by Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramovic's visit is under the auspices of The Politics of Action Stanford Humanities Center Workshop and Humanities Research Network. Additional support comes from the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, the Cantor Arts Center and the Department of Drama.
Marina Abramovic is one of the most important performance artists in the world. For more than thirty years her work has challenged the limits of the body, its endurance and revelation in the face of others. This work often provokes an audience to profoundly reconsider its relationship and responsibility to the live event. She began conceiving solo performances in 1973, creating works that are seminal to the body art movement of that decade. Between 1976 and 1988 Abramovic joined the artist Ulay in a series of collaborative performances investigating their shared presence and effect upon one another. These culminated in the Great Wall Walk of 1988 during which the artists traversed the length of the Great Wall of China on foot. More recent solo works by Abramovic include The House with the Ocean View (2002 winner of a Bessie Award for the best performance event of the year) and last year's Seven Easy Pieces, a project at the Guggenheim in New York in which Abramovic re-performed seven classic pieces by performance artists from the 1960s and 1970s. Abramovic is also a dedicated teacher and the leader of the Independent Performance Group, an artists' collective comprised of her students that performs internationally.