women artists

Laurie Anderson Interviewing Marina Abramovic

LA Exactly the same. But let’s talk about the audience for a minute. How do you see the audience? When I was working with actors I learned about the audience through them. They would ask about the motivations of their characters and this really drove me crazy. I kept thinking of that great series of essays called “True and False” that David Mamet wrote about talking to actors. He said that directors should just tell the actors to speak loudly and clearly and forget about their motivations, forget about their “pasts.” They don’t have any pasts! Anyway, there was one actor I was working with who kept asking me, “Who are you when you perform? Who is your audience?” And I kept saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Then I realized—I had never put this into words before because it seemed too stupid—I’m talking to a sadder version of myself, sitting in the middle of the theater. I’m trying to cheer her up, or say something inspiring or funny or sad. That sounds narcissistic, but I don’t know who other people are, and I don’t like it when they assume they know who I am. It’s a very tricky thing when you’re giving somebody something; how open are you to them and how open are they to you?

MA It’s such an important question, because the relation to the audience is the essence of performance. In my case, the need to be completely open and vulnerable, to give everything I can, 100 percent, is extremely strong. Every single person in the audience is important. I don’t have this kind of feeling in real life, but in performance I have this enormous love, this heart that literally hurts me with how much I love them. In the last performance, when I lived for 12 days, totally exposed, in the Sean Kelly Gallery, almost nothing happened. But just being there, with this openness—there is just skin and bones; there’s nothing else but being there for them. I was there to be projected on. The whole thing has to be almost an invisible exchange. You asked what the connection was like in that performance. I really looked at the people in the gallery. To me the eyes are a door for something else, and whatever is happening in their lives, I pick it up. You can’t imagine how much I cried in that piece. This sadness comes because they project their own sadness onto me and I reflect it back. And I cry out in the saddest way, so they are free. People would come like drunks—instead of a shot of vodka they came to have a shot of this connection with the eyes. They came in the morning; at quarter to nine they were there waiting, in business suits. The gallery would open at nine, and they would come in, look at me for 20 minutes and go away. A lot of them told me later that they are not even connected to art. I was thinking that people usually don’t look at them in this intimate way, so maybe they just needed to be looked at in that way before going to work.