To Make and Then Unmake

To Make and Then Unmake

She was 14. Marina Abramovic was under the teachings and tutelage of Filo Filipović, an abstract landscape artist.

In Marina's first lesson, Filo walked her through the very detailed process he goes through to create. He layed down a canvas and began to give it life. It took time, it was slow and tedious, to a degree. After much attention and focus devoted to this canvas, Filo dumped gasoline on

the canvas, lit a match and dropped it on the canvas. In seconds the canvas became nothing.

In her memoir, Marina would write, "and then he left," after burning the canvas, she explains in ‘Walk Through Walls.' She waited for the charred remains of the canvas to dry and she pinned it to the wall. She would leave with her family on

a short vacation and her return revealed a dried arson, that had taken place. Nothing left but ashes.

"Later on I understood why this experience was so important,"

Marina would write. "It taught me that the process was more important than the result, just as the performance means more to me than the object. I saw the process of making it and then the process of unmaking it. There was no duration of stability to it. It was pure process."

We talked yesterday about Tommy Kail, director of the musical

'In The Heights' that realized the same thing. Its the process of making, the love of that 'game.' Not the finished product.

As a creator the end matters, but we only get there by going through the process of making it.