Art Must Be Beautiful/Artist Must Be Beautiful

The artist enacts a simple, painfully persistent process, repeatedly brushing her hair with a metal brush and a metal comb until she draws blood. The action is accompanied by the equally insistent statement “Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful”. Marina Abramović is a pioneer of body and performance art, using her own body as medium and subject matter. Her performances explore the physical, mental, and emotional limits of being, awakening our awareness of life and death, pain and beauty – universal conditions, which may also be rooted in specific political events. The work was originally created for the Women’s Exhibition XX at Charlottenborg in 1975. The fascinating and controversial, performance attracted great attention and helped outline the positions in the ongoing feminist discussion.