The artist is a sort of emotional athlete who is constantly stretching the limits of what is felt and what can be expressed. — Marina Abramović
—What lingers after this line?
Training the Inner Life
Marina Abramović’s remark recasts the artist not as a passive dreamer but as a disciplined performer of feeling. Just as an athlete trains muscles through repetition, strain, and recovery, the artist repeatedly enters difficult emotional territory in order to expand sensitivity and control. In this view, emotion is not merely experienced; it is practiced, tested, and refined. From the beginning, the comparison suggests endurance as much as inspiration. Abramović’s own performance work, including The Artist Is Present (2010), demonstrates how sustained attention can become a form of emotional labor. Consequently, art appears less like spontaneous expression and more like a rigorous exercise in vulnerability.
Stretching the Boundaries of Feeling
Building on that athletic metaphor, Abramović emphasizes stretching limits—an image that implies discomfort, discipline, and growth. Artists often push themselves toward sensations that ordinary life encourages people to avoid: grief, shame, longing, fear, or ecstatic joy. By going further into these states, they enlarge the emotional vocabulary available to everyone else. This is why powerful art can make familiar feelings seem newly visible. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel (1965) each transform private intensity into language that feels startlingly precise. Thus, the artist’s task is not simply to feel deeply, but to extend the range of what a culture can recognize as human experience.
Expression as a Discipline
Yet feeling alone is not enough; Abramović also points to what can be expressed. Here the artist resembles an athlete mastering form, technique, and restraint. A runner must convert raw energy into movement, and similarly an artist must shape unruly emotion into image, gesture, sound, or narrative. Without craft, intensity remains inarticulate. Accordingly, artistic expression becomes a disciplined translation of the inner world. Beethoven’s late string quartets, composed in the 1820s, channel profound struggle into highly structured music, while Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits turn pain into exact visual symbolism. In both cases, expression is not the opposite of emotion but its most demanding training ground.
Risk, Exposure, and Vulnerability
As the idea develops further, the phrase “emotional athlete” also highlights risk. Athletes risk injury when they test physical limits; artists risk exposure when they test emotional ones. To make something honest, they often reveal instability, desire, or suffering that social life teaches people to conceal. That vulnerability is part of the labor Abramović honors. Her performance Rhythm 0 (1974), in which audience members were invited to act on her passive body, starkly illustrates how artistic experimentation can involve genuine danger. In turn, the quote suggests that artistic courage lies not only in technical ambition but in the willingness to stand defenseless before others.
Why Audiences Need Such Artists
From there, Abramović’s insight opens onto the social function of art. If artists stretch the limits of feeling and expression, they become pioneers for collective emotion. They articulate states that audiences may sense but cannot yet name, and by doing so they widen public empathy. The artist’s private exertion therefore becomes a shared human resource. This helps explain why certain works endure across generations. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), for example, gives haunting form to trauma, memory, and love in ways that reach far beyond one historical moment. Ultimately, the emotional athlete matters because their effort enlarges what society is able to feel, face, and communicate.
Art as Endurance and Renewal
Finally, Abramović’s comparison implies that artistic life is ongoing rather than occasional. An athlete does not train once, and an artist does not confront feeling only when inspiration appears. The work requires repetition, resilience, and the ability to return after exhaustion. Each new project becomes another test of emotional stamina and expressive reach. For that reason, the quote carries both admiration and warning. It celebrates the artist’s unusual capacity, yet it also acknowledges the cost of living so close to extremes. In the end, Abramović presents art as a lifelong practice of endurance—one that continuously renews the boundaries of human feeling by daring to exceed them.
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