I’m reading this new (to me) book I picked up at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston this past weekend. “After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art” details the careers of 12 women artists and how their work relates to, influenced and was influenced by feminism. I’m devouring it because it’s so readable and I feel like I’m getting a good sense of the history of recent contemporary art. A few of the artists have intrigued me, but Marina Abramović stands out for the raw emotions her work elicits from me. Abramović is a Yugoslavian-born performance artist known for pushing her body to the extremes of pain, hunger and deprivation. If you saw that Sex and the City episode when Carrie meets the Russian at the performance piece of the woman fasting and living in the gallery, that’s Abramović. The piece referenced in that show is “House With Ocean View”, and Abramović won a New York Dance and Performance Award for it in 2003.

They walked this entire thing. Swoon.

Abramović met Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen) in 1975 when she was 29 and still living at home with her overbearing mother, who enforced a strict 10 PM curfew. In spite of or possibly due to this restrictive life, she created and performed horrific performance pieces that often resulted in bodily harm. A few months after meeting Ulay she ran off with him to Prague and began an intense working and romantic relationship. The two performed many pieces that explored relationships and sexuality, but after 12 years they decided to part ways. OK, get out your Kleenex. Rather than go about it the way the rest of us would, Abramović and Ulay decided that they needed to do something monumental and spiritual to signify the end of their relationship. Each one started on an opposite end of the Great Wall of China, Ulay in the Gobi Desert and Abramović at the Yellow Sea, and they began on a spiritual journey of 90 days, walking in solitude 2500 km each to meet in the middle of the wall to say goodbye. The whole thing is like a fairy tale.

I’m getting choked up just writing this, which is crazy because I am never affected this emotionally by a piece of art. But that journey they took to end their relationship, it’s such a powerful symbol of their love and at the same time their future without one another. They went to tremendous lengths to pay tribute to their love, and yet the act of the lone trek set them on their paths apart. It’s so movie-perfect I can hardly stand it. It also got me thinking that the piece is symbolic of any departure. Once you have made the decision to part, from home, from any situation, you are in a sense alone in the pursuit until you say goodbye.

I am fascinated and scared by Abramović and I can’t wait to dig into more of her work.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user robysaltori