Marina Abramovic Quotes
I don't think anyone does anything from happiness. Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative. You're not creative from happiness, you're just happy. You're creative when you're miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.
Abramović, Marina. Walk Through Walls: A Memoir. Crown Archetype, 2016, p. 119.
The translation into the word "love" includes love of things as well as people. The Eigen translation is "All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of those relationships with people and those thiongs about which a person is passionate." The Greeks had 7 diffferent words for love od different kinds and things. But the Latin in which this was written is a much less precice lanaguage, quite like English in that respect. The object of the passion might be people, a political movement, a area of study and inquiry like science or mathamatics, the production of something as in art music or literature--even a sport. But if the quality of the object of the passion is poor, the happiness rarely lasts.
Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist, philanthropist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work explores body art, endurance art and feminist art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art.