"I like to get rid of the fear of pain by staging the pain in front of the audience...."

Here's a big article in the Arts section of the Sunday NYT about Marina Abramovic, an aging performance artist who is currently into reenacting classic performance art pieces of yore:

"We are afraid of dying, and we are afraid of pain, so much," she said. "I like to get rid of the fear of pain by staging the pain in front of the audience, going through this pain and showing them that it's possible. It turns into something else. Then you have this energy to do it."

Partly to prove that she is as committed to these ideas as she was in her 20's, Ms. Abramovic had wanted to include not only Mr. Burden's crucifixion piece but also a re-creation of what she considers her most radical work, called "Rhythm 0." Performed only once in Naples in 1974, its premise was terrifyingly simple: She agreed to stand in a gallery for six hours while anyone who came in could choose any of 72 objects around her - including knives, scissors, a needle, a loaded gun - and do anything they wanted to her with the objects. It was her only work in which she essentially ceded control over her body, and over the pain to be inflicted, to her audience.

The participants became involved slowly at first, but after a while Ms. Abramovic's clothes were cut off, and her body marked, burned and cut. Finally, a man took the gun and made her put it up to her head, trying to force her to squeeze the trigger. She didn't resist, but a fight ensued as other spectators intervened. "This was the only performance where I was really ready to die," she said. Trying to explain why, she repeated a well-known quotation from the artist Bruce Nauman, one of whose performance pieces will also be recreated in her show: "Art is a matter of life and death. This may be melodramatic, but it is also true."

Back in 1973, Chris Burden had his outstretched hands nailed to a Volkswagen.

Mr. Burden - who long ago retired from performance but in his prime was almost drowned and once shot in the arm for the sake of art - was not so agreeable. "I don't even know the reasons why - he didn't answer," said Ms. Abramovic, who planned to replace the Volkswagen with a Chaika, a kind of Russian-made limousine she remembered from her youth in Yugoslavia.

"He only had a secretary answer in a letter saying, 'Mr. Burden is not talking publicly these days, and he doesn't give permission to repeat this piece or any other pieces.' I can't tell you how disappointed I was."

By the way, a dead rabbit appears in this story too. Abramovic will be reenacting Joseph Beuys's 1965 work, "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare."

[S]he will cover her head in honey and gold leaf, cradling a dead rabbit and whispering to it about pictures on the wall (a meditation on rationality and language - and a kind of in-joke about art scholarship).

Sounds too serioso to me. I'd rather listen to a comedian.

Which reminds me: Did you see George Carlin's new HBO special last night? I loved the part where he mocked people who commit suicide.