Sublime

Rhythm 10 (performance, 1 hour), Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Villa Borghese, Rome, 1973

The crowd stared, dead silent. And a very strange feeling came over me, something I had never dreamed of: It was as if electricity was running through my body, and the audience and I had become one. A single organism. The sense of danger in the room had united the onlookers and me in that moment: the here and now, and nowhere else.

OPENING THE DOOR. For three hours, very slowly open a door, neither entering nor exiting. After three hours the door is not a door anymore.

Afterward, we did a twenty-one-day retreat in Vipassana meditation. Vipassana is about mindfulness: of breathing, thoughts, feelings, actions. We fasted, and we did everything—sitting, standing, lying down, walking, even eating—in slow motion, in order to better understand what we were actually doing. Vipassana would later become one of the

The workshops taught endurance, concentration, perception, self-control, willpower, and confrontation with mental and physical limits. This was the core of my teaching.

Pilot Baba had amazing abilities. In particular, he could slow down his breathing to a point that enabled him to be buried underground or to stay underwater for days at a time.

the gallery should be completely empty. That the public would come in and I would take them gently by the hand and bring them to a wall in the gallery, just to look at the blank space in front of them. That the public would become the performing body instead of me.

Twelve artists in all were there, including several I admired—Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Chris Burden, Brice Marden, Joan Jonas, and Pat Steir—and I formed some new friendships with John and Joan and Pat, and especially with Laurie, whom I’d first met in Bologna when Ulay and I performed Imponderabilia.