"For the past 25 years Marina Abramovic's career has been a personal investigation of physical limits and mental potential through the performance medium. Her extensive travels and encounters with non-Western cultures as diverse as Tibet, the Aborigines of Australia and Sufism have led to the realisation that all these cultures pushed the body to the physical extreme in order to eliminate the fear of death, pain and the physical limitations of Western society. 'Performance was the form enabling me to jump to that other space and dimension'. This concentration of mind and body has been realised in a series of spectacular performances such as Night Sea Crossing and The Great Wall of China Walk. Abramovic's works have increasingly centred on the mental and physical conditioning of the artist and the audience. Cleaning the House is an inner cleansing and self organisation in the form of a deeply personal scrapbook of images of people, places, texts designed in close collaboration with herself. There are very few books that consider the artist's motivations and emotions. Many different impulses and inspirations can produce an artwork. This book shows the processes you never see."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved