...[an] engaging memoir, in which the reader is invited to walk through perceptual and conceptual walls with her. It is a wry invitation to trace how such themes have been a preoccupation over five decades of groundbreaking performance art ... the early childhood chapters in the memoir that are the most interesting and, in a sense, the book’s centre of gravity ... although Abramovi? is famous and highly visible, she is aware that her investigation into all the dimensions of presence requires the absence of her own ego. The act of writing a memoir as enjoyable as Walk Through Walls allows her to play with this paradox.
Abramovi?’s memoir doesn’t reconcile these seemingly different versions of her, but it gives insight into why they can’t be reconciled ... The book is undeniably self-absorbed...Yet the memoir is frank and frequently endearing, Abramovi?’s humor keeping her romanticism in check ... For those familiar with her work’s history, [the] lack of context might frustrate. This book is written for people interested in Abramovi? alone, not performance art more generally. Near the end, her chronicle of projects becomes almost exhausting, for her and the reader.
Abramovic’s narrative is most compelling when she writes about her childhood ... Her memoir reveals a chaotic and fractured psyche, and, unfortunately, some of her New Age digressions border on incoherent. In some ways her writing style mirrors her performance pieces; the reader feels like a victim to the force of her blunt trauma ... One senses she has difficulty considering the needs of anybody else; she is mercilessly self-involved. The insights and reevaluations we look for in a thoughtful memoir simply aren’t present ... one can’t help but sadly recognize that the more optimistic part of her spirit has surrendered to the enveloping darkness.
Abramovi?'s page-turner of a narrative—at times shocking, even off-puttingly weird, genuinely moving, and always coruscatingly honest—feels particularly timely at a moment when a flawed but indomitable woman is poised to become the first female president of the United States ... Although Abramovi? describes subsequent pieces and a second marriage, the heart of Walk Through Walls is her love story with Ulay ... gives context to Abramovi?'s need in both art and life for uncompromisingly dangerous intensity, controversy, strong reactions, and even violent negativity.
A tolerance for a certain amount of pomposity is a prerequisite for keeping up with serious art...Ms. Abramovic pushes this tolerance to its limits ... There’s a self-help aspect to this memoir that blends poorly with the implicit injunctions to warm one’s hands on the blaze of her greatness ... [a] shallow and misconceived memoir.
Abramovic’s engrossing new memoir makes us realize how partial our knowledge was ... Abramovic writes touchingly about romantic heartbreak, about the pain of separation from Ulay and her sense of betrayal when her husband, the Italian artist Paolo Canevari, left her ... Perhaps what’s most unexpected are the flashes of humor.
The book itself has the veneer of an ambitious performance piece, as Abramovi? exposes her deepest personal wounds and places them next to her artistic triumphs, in order to create a kind of epic mythology around her work ... both dramatic and deeply controlled, an act of naked exposure and also a narrative that is at times a bit too fascinated with the dazzle of high art. And there are moments in the book, just as there are in her more dangerous performances, when everything goes off the rails ... This [warrior] Marina is the most charming one, the voice that makes Walk Through Walls propulsively readable...It is also only present in one part of the book ... when Abramovi? confuses the Bullshit for the Spiritual, trouble is never far.
Bafflingly, Ms. Abramovic does not speculate on the psychological origins of her work in her book ... Ms. Abramovic is not a polished writer. Her prose is blunt, occasionally breathless and sometimes cloying. But no matter what one thinks of her writing, her aesthetics, or even of her recent celebrity, this is a woman who has lived one hell of a life.
While you’d have a hard time finding an artist so deadly serious about her work’s tremendous personal, communal and cosmic consequences, she also has a born raconteur’s way with an anecdote ... While her take on her girlhood is rife with self-pity, her accounts of her breakthrough into transgressive-subversive performance can be exhilarating ... You don’t necessarily have to be in tune with her aesthetic to enjoy this hectic account of her torturous adventures.
