17 Things You Didn't Know About Marina Abramovic

Get to know the grandmother of performance art even better.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Yesterday, Marina Abramovic successfully funded her $600,000 goal on Kickstarter, which ended up getting a total of $661,452 for the Marina Abramovic Institute. She's released a few videos leading up to this final victory, including one of Lady Gaga performing the Abramovic Method naked in the woods. While you may have caught her spinning around onstage with Jay Z during his "Picasso Baby" performance at Pace Gallery or saw her name dropped on Frank Ocean's "Versace" remix, there's a lot more to the self-proclaimed grandmother of performance art. Throughout her career, she's been passionate and focused on her medium, more often than not risking her life for art, and she continues with her new institute. Read on for 17 Things You Didn't Know About Marina Abramovic.

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She played Russian Roulette with her mother's pistol when she was 14 years old.

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When she was younger, she tried to break her nose to force her parents to pay for plastic surgery.

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Before she learned about performance art, she pursued painting as a child and used to paint "big socialistic trucks crashed together" and "little innocent socialistic toy trucks."

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After she escaped Belgrade at age 29, she knitted sweaters for a living.

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She lived with Aborigines in the outback of Australia for one year.

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During that time, she raised a baby kangaroo.

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She believes that artists shouldn't fall in love with other artists.

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In 1997, she performed a piece called Balkan Baroque, where she scrubbed 1,500 cow bones for six hours a day.

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For one of her pieces, she carved the five-point Communist star on her stomach with a razor blade.

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For another piece, she masturbated at the Guggenheim underneath the floor that an audience walked on.

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Her work inspired an episode of Sex and the City.

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She sold one of her three lofts in SoHo to Givenchy Creative Director Riccardo Tisci for $3.06 million.

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She was also in a Givenchy ad alongside Kate Moss.

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People think she is a vampire.

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James Franco is giving her complete creative control to make a movie about his life.

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She's in an Antony and the Johnsons music video.

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In August 2012, Marina Abramovic appeared in the Antony and the Johnsons video for "Cut the World," directed by Nabil Elderkin and acted by Willem Dafoe and Carice van Houten. The video is about women taking the world back from men.

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