Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

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The works include reenactments of Vito Acconci's Seedbed (1972), in which the artist occupied the space under a false floor, masturbating and speaking through a microphone to visitors above; Valie Export's Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) in which Export walked through a movie theater in crotchless pants, challenging the audience to turn from the images of women on the screen to a real female body; and Abramovic's own Lips of Thomas (1975), in which she ate a kilogram of honey and drank a liter of red wine before breaking her glass with her hand, incising a star in her stomach with a razor blade, whipping herself until she "no longer felt pain," then lying down on an ice cross while a space heater suspended above her caused her to bleed even more profusely.

Over the past half century, Marina Abramović has earned worldwide acclaim as a pioneer of performance art.As though the leaders had looked through the lens of someone else’s Communism and built something less good and less functional and more fucked-­up. Let’s get this out of the way: Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović is a controversial figure, and much as I’d love to shove her ghostwritten memoir into everyone’s hands, I must admit that there are plenty of people who will remain thoroughly unmoved by it, and that’s completely fine. I always want to hear someone’s story in their own words when possible and I do feel a bit bitter that I was denied that, even if the result is a spectacular story. Adrian Heathfield is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton, London. Her work - notorious for its feats of endurance, pain and intense physical encounter - has pushed the boundaries of contemporary art and cemented her reputation as one of the most significant artists of the past 50 years.

Her handsome, philandering father was appointed to Tito’s elite guard; her mother, who was a major in the army, became director of the Museum of Art and Revolution. You can also use the external lift near the Artists' Entrance on Southbank Centre Square to reach Mandela Walk, Level 2.The definitive guide to the life and work of Marina Abramovic, the world's most famous performance artist.

Not being an art lover, I did find the lists of people she had worked with as about as interesting to read as the Old Testament genealogy. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages.

These big subjects are all aired in this engaging memoir, in which the reader is invited to walk through perceptual and conceptual walls with her. But once during a German advance she came down with typhus, and was lying unconscious among the badly wounded, with a high fever and completely covered by a blanket.

Abramović asks an interesting question on the very first page, a question she has explored all her life: how do we learn to fear? Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". Photograph: Paola + Murray View image in fullscreen ‘You have to exhaust your own system of thinking’ … Marina Abramović in New York in 2015. Later I discovered it had once belonged to wealthy Jews, and had been confiscated during the Nazi occupation.Abramović has a great sense of humour, and she puts it to work right from the start by dedicating her memoir to both friends and enemies. If you’re interested in Marina Abramović but aren’t a big nonfiction reader, the novel The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose is a brilliant depiction of her 2010 show The Artist is Present. I don’t know why I refused to walk, but I think it may have had something to do with being passed around from person to person. Personally I would wrap it in paper as well as the space fillers but in all it arrived in good condition.