MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ BY LAURIE ANDERSON (II)

Balkan Erotic Epic - Marina Abramović (2005)

LA - One of my favorite baffling quotes comes from Lenin: “Ethics is the aesthetics of the future”. I guess it means that sometime in the future we’ll all be good to each other and communicate so clearly that we won’t need those things that we put in the beauty category. They’ll just be fetishes, relics. In my paper I talked about how belief and beauty rub up against each other to make something, and how uneasily they rest together. I used the Parthenon as an example. When the Parthenon was a place of worship, everybody brought their beautiful statues to dedicate to the gods, their kouri, to celebrate their victories, their dedications and their prayers. They propped them up all around the Parthenon, which quickly came to look like a museum, there was so much stuff there. So they all went back to the caves and the woods and the rivers where they could find the gods, because they couldn’t find them in the Parthenon anymore.

Tesla Coil - Marina Abramović

 

MA - You know, there was a very interesting breakfast in the ‘70s, which a friend of mine, Lutz Becker, invited me to. This old man was sitting there, and I didn’t realize for half of the breakfast that he was Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. He was just out of prison and he was helping with the maquettes for a movie about Hitler that Lutz was making, called Double Headed Eagle.

LA - Lots of symmetry in that, by the way.

MA - And I asked Speer a question: “Why did you use concrete for all those buildings?” I’ll never forget his answer. He said, “When they get destroyed, they still look good”. The concrete collapse looks better than bricks: there is more momentum; they fall into big pieces. That an architect, who builds his stuff for forever, was thinking of destruction as part of the process! The other funny thing about worshipping — I was in Thailand, in one of their fantastic old temples where you can go outside and buy a little piece of gold leaf to put on a sculpture. I was looking through this huge place, and in a dusty corner was a big fuse box with all the electrical wires, which somebody had covered in gold leaf. I loved the idea of worshipping electricity as a mystery. And why not?

(aqui)

(2010)