grand gestures; Pioneering performance artist Marina Abramovic re-creates history this month at the Guggenheim.

Marina Abramovic spends her summer vacations on Stromboli, an island off the coast of Sicily, in a little house tucked under an active volcano. "I'm very attracted to places of power," she explains, "natural power, like waterfalls, craters, and volcanoes, and human power, like the spot where Tibetan monks come out of ten years' deep meditation. Just being close to them puts your mind in a certain state-very peaceful and receptive."

Peace, for Abramovicc, is earned through hard work. The Yugoslavian-born daughter of an army general and a mother who directed Belgrade's Museum of Revolution and Art, she's spent much of her more-than-30-year career pushing at the limits of self and body. In 1974, she sat in a Naples gallery at a table covered with 72 objects, including a feather, a gun, a razor blade, and lipstick, and invited the audience to use them on her. Later, with the German artist known as Ulay (her lover and partner from 1975 to 1988), she did things like stand naked in a doorway while people passed between them, or walk from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China to meet in the middle, a three-month journey after which they parted.

More recently, in 2002, she lived for twelve days straight in three spare, open rooms built on a balcony against the far wall of Chelsea's Sean Kelly Gallery. She drank only water, abstained from eating, reading, and conversation, and showered and used the toilet in full public view, imbuing her smallest gestures with grave dignity. "I wanted to change my energy and the energy of the space, so that people would experience time differently," Abramovicc said. "I called the piece The House with the Ocean View, though there was no ocean and no view beyond the immensity of the mind itself."

This month ...