marina abramović

red book dialogue with lee robbins
tonight's discussion focused more around marina's intent in making art
than it did on jungian principles in action

a lot was said about fear and confronting it,
a lot was said about duration and how extended periods of time make a space where things evolve that could not have occurred otherwise,
mindfulness was also mentioned

and these 3 things have particular relevance for me in this moment;
today i left my job
(it wasn't so many hours a week but it seemed to occupy a large space in my life)
so that i can commit fully to the studio
i have talked about having this kind of life for years, decades actually
and in certain moments, i have
but it has now become necessary to confront the fears that have often kept me from committing fully to myself

duration is something that i have always felt important to making the work...
having extended periods of time to enter the process and exhaust it
work to the edge to create the space for something new that can only come when everything else has been completely used up.
ironically, when thinking about planning my life/time going forward
i have been foreseeing structuring time in the studio into manageable chunks,
to allow myself to feel as if i have met a goal, completed something
so that i can say that my work is done for the moment
there is a balance here that needs to be considered

mindfulness to keep from wandering aimlessly and getting too lost in minutiae
mindfulness to constantly re evaluate
as the things i anticipate
manifest in ways i could not have foreseen
a certain fluidity is going to have to develop:
not my strong point

at one point marina talked about art and how she found music to be the highest form because of the purity and directness with which it addressed the human spirit
(my interpretation)
and then she felt performance art came next
because, after all doing what she did was much harder than
for example
going into one's studio with a cup of coffee, turning on the music and painting
i love that
because for me
that very activity
on many days
is the hardest thing
i can imagine doing
and the scariest
but more importantly
the only thing possible