Marina Abramovic //

750,000 spectators crowded the Museum of Modern Art last year to watch Marina Abramović sit in a chair. In her MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) exhibit, from which the movie draws its name, Abramović spent nearly eight hours a day for three months last spring sitting motionless in the wide open room at the entrance to her exhibit. Anyone in attendance -- or at least those willing to wait in an increasingly jammed line -- could stare back at the performer for as long as they saw fit.

Interesting, yet strange things about Marina:

- Marina played Russian Roulette with her mother's pistol when she was 14 years old.

- When she was younger, she tried to break her nose to force her parents to pay for plastic surgery.

- Before she learned about performance art, she pursued painting as a child and used to paint "big socialistic trucks crashed together" and "little innocent socialistic toy trucks."

- In 1997, she performed a piece called Balkan Baroque, where she scrubbed 1,500 cow bones for six hours a day.

- For one of her pieces, she carved the five-point Communist star on her stomach with a razor blade.

            --> In the early '70s Marina Abramovic performed Lips of Thomas, a piece where she carved the five-point Communist star on her stomach with a razor blade, whipped herself, and then layed on a bed of ice (shaped like a cross) on a heater for 30 minutes. Her grandmother once found her passed out while doing the performance, and she had burned off her hair.

My Own Opinions:

I first started to learn about Marina Abramovic in High School, I was really fascinated with her, and towards her work. I first learned about her carving a Communist star on her stomach, I found this really outrageous, but in a way really interesting and completely unique. I like the idea of performance art, I think that it is a really interesting art form and movement in itself.  I believe that all of her other artwork as well, is fascinating. I think that it is really strange to do these kinds of things to your body to be noticed and for people to see it, and also inflict pain on the artist like Marina has done in past experiments. However, I think that this is truly interesting and I like knowing about all the other bits of work that she has done in the past.