The Body in Motion: Between Making and Unmaking

Is art an act of making—or an act of unmaking?

To make is to bring something into existence. To unmake is to strip something away until only its essence remains. But what if these are not opposites? What if to create is also to dismantle? What if art is not a thing, but the act of revealing what was always there?

Marina Abramović’s father survived the Igman March. A journey that should have been impossible. A movement against the limits of the body, against the certainty of death. When she told him she would walk the Great Wall of China, a three-month endurance piece, his response collapsed time itself. “One night,” he said. His march—an event so extreme, so unimaginable—was not remembered as suffering, but as a moment already past, already erased.

The body unmade itself that night. It lost heat, lost its ability to feel, lost the certainty of survival. And yet, it endured. Is this not the nature of creation? To push against annihilation, to hold presence in the face of disappearance?

Abramović’s performances are built on this paradox. The body exists only as long as it moves, suffers, resists. Her work is not an object—it is a process. Like painting, but without a canvas. Like architecture, but without a foundation. A performance exists only in time. It is not preserved; it is not repeated. It is an image that dissolves as it appears.

In Guston’s words, a painting must constantly prove its right to exist. It must erase, revise, destroy itself in order to be alive. A work that is too certain, too resolved, becomes stagnant—it loses its ability to move, to breathe. Perhaps the body functions the same way. It must struggle, it must resist, it must unmake itself in order to remain real.

The march, the wall, the painting, the body. What is the difference? Each one is an endurance, an act of erasing limits, of testing what remains when everything else has been stripped away.

If making is about defining, giving form, holding something in place—then unmaking is about undoing that certainty. And yet, they are the same process. The partisan march, the wall walk, the act of painting, the body in performance—none of them exist in their final state. They only exist in motion.

So I wonder: Is there anything in art, in the body, in space, that is ever truly still?

Best,
İlke