Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm San by a legendary artist Marina Abramovich.

Marina is a pioneer in performance art using her body as both the subject and the medium. She's been doing this work since the

1970s in what was then called body art, which saw performers pushing their own physical limits in ways we hadn't seen before.

In that historic movement, she did everything from putting razor blades to her stomach in

lips of Thomas to taking pills for schizophrenia in

rhythm two to laying down inside a blazing frame of a wooden star in rhythm five.

Now in these early years, many believed Marina was more fit to be in a mental hospital

than an exhibition space.

Skeptical critics of which there were plenty

could not see the value in what she was doing but what she was doing was a blend of epic struggle and self-inflicted violence as Nancy Specter of the Guggenheim writes, though personal in origin, the explosive

force of Abramovich's art spoke to a generation in Yugoslavia undergoing the tightening

control of communist rule.

That explosiveness, as Specter describes, has remained in Marina's work through the years,

culminating in 2010 with her seminal piece,

the artist is present. For this performance,

Marina sat silently at a wooden table across from an empty chair

inside the mama atrium in New York City.

She waited as people took turns sitting in the chair and locking eyes with her.

Over the course of nearly three months for eight hours a day, she met the gaze of

over a thousand strangers, many of whom were moved to tears. This piece would

garner Marina International Recognition, putting Performance Art into the mainstream conversation.

Now, 12 years later, Marina is representing the artist as present at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York.

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