Marina’s sitting there talking about Columbus and failure and presence, and here’s the thing that’ll piss off half the MFA programs in Brooklyn: she’s actually right, even when she’s being provocative as hell.
This bit about Columbus, fuck yeah, it’s problematic, we all know the colonialism lecture by heart, but strip away the historical baggage for a second. What she’s driving at is that beautiful, terrifying space between intention and accident. The asshole thought he was going to India and stumbled into a whole different continent. That’s not about celebrating imperialism; that’s about the creative process being fundamentally about fucking up in interesting ways. Every site-specific installation I’ve ever built, every frame I’ve shot that actually mattered, it came from being willing to be catastrophically wrong.
The “one good idea” thing? That’s the kind of statement that sounds elitist until you’ve been in the weeds long enough to realize it’s kind of true. Most of us, and I’m including myself here, are recycling, remixing, iterating on that one core obsession. If you get two genuinely original impulses in a lifetime, you’re Beckett. You’re Pina Bausch. The rest is craft, which matters, really really matter, but let’s not confuse craft with vision.
What gets me is this insistence on presence. Not “mindfulness” in some commodified wellness-retreat sense, but the actual phenomenological demand of performance: you are HERE, in this body, in this space, with these witnesses, and there are no second takes. As a photographer and theater-maker, I know this viscerally, the difference between documentation and event, between the thing and the record of the thing. Abramović‘s spent fifty years making work that exists only in the durational now, that can’t be possessed or replayed, only remembered or missed entirely.
Her advice to avoid routine? That’s not some motivational poster platitude. That’s survival strategy. Routine is death for artists, it’s the comfortable groove that becomes a rut that becomes a grave. Do the work that scares you. Not the work that gets you grants or gallery representation, but the work that makes you question whether you can actually pull it off.