Yugoslav-born artist Marina Abramovic is among the most original performance artists today. Her work includes such classics as her 1974 piece Risen 0, performed in Milan, in which she invited the audience to deal with her using such objects as razor blades and a loaded gun. But this week she's doing something else—from today through next Tuesday, she is re-creating other artist's classic performance-art pieces from the 1970s in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum.

Playfully titled Seven Easy Pieces, the series is anything but. Many of these works are essentially endurance tests. Take Gina Pane's 1973 Self-Portraits: It consists of lying on a bed frame suspended over a grid of lit candles. In addition to re-creating Pane's pains, Abramovic is reproducing pieces by Bruce Nauman, Valie Export and Joseph Beuys. Brazenly, she is even doing her version of Seedbed, Vito Acconci's 1972 performance in which he masturbated under the floorboards of a gallery as visitors walked overhead.

But why let others' works steal the show? Abramovic will also re-perform one of her own pieces, Lips of Thomas, which, back in 1975, involved eating a kilo of honey, whipping herself, cutting a five-pointed star on her stomach and lying on blocks of ice. To round out the series, Abramovic will create an entirely new work on the series' final day.

How did you choose the pieces you wanted to re-perform?

They fascinate me because I had heard about them but had never seen them. I was in Yugoslavia, and so I would get information about the pieces long after they took place, so I fantasized about how they looked. These pieces, which I really wanted to re-create, are by artists of my generation. You know, for the past month, I have awakened every morning with this terrible feeling in my stomach—I have such respect for what I'm going to do.

What attracted you to the idea of re-performing them?

I was very disturbed by the fact that a young generation of artists is imitating performances that have already been done. Some are doing so because they know the history and consciously repeat it, others because they just don't know that these kinds of pieces already exist. I was even more annoyed by art critics who prize these as original pieces without reflecting on their history.

If you take a piece of music, you always have to give a reference; when you quote from a book, you have to say who the author is. That kind of respect is not there for performance art. Performance is the most vulnerable art form. Photography was very vulnerable, but is now controlled—everybody knows how many editions there are, what's a print and what's the original. With performance there is absolute chaos, because anyone can take anything and do whatever they want. I propose a certain amount of control, because if an artist has a great idea, it's really a moral issue that this idea should live and the artist—the owner of the idea—should be honored.

As one of the few artists of this generation still performing, I feel it's my duty to educate art critics, art historians and the public as to how performance art should be re-performed. Things like asking the artist for permission, paying the artist for permission, understanding the original material and always referring to the original source.

Has this kind of re-performance been done before?

There were lots of attempts. The first one I can remember is Fresh Acconci by Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley. But those pieces have a slapstick feel. Nobody went into the heavy aspects of the pieces and pushed them even further. You take the original piece but always ask: Can you do more? What part is going to be new or different?

What's new in your version of the Vito Acconci piece Seedbed is that you're a woman…

That's a big difference!

What will you do differently in the other performances?

The difference is time, that's all. For my piece, Thomas Lips, how am I going to cut the star in my stomach for seven hours? What am I going to do? I'm going to repeat the action like a loop and go over into absurdity. I'm thinking of cutting parts of the star so at the end, at midnight, the star is entirely cut. But the other parts—lying on the ice, eating honey—they go on and on.

Why did you want to do the performances in the Guggenheim?

The Guggenheim is a huge institution, and in the 1970s performance happened in alternative spaces—I really think that we're now past this idea of being alternative. I want to have the structure of the museum, where I think performance belongs. Putting on this series has been a long process—at first they didn't have enough money to make the book and the small exhibition and they wanted to postpone it until next year. But I'm running out of time. I'll be 60 next year. It's not that I'm not in good health, but now is the right time.

Do you think performance art can become a performing art? It has been considered a kind of scrappy, ephemeral thing, but now it might have the dignity of an opera …

It's the logical next step. In the time of the Fluxus movement [in the 1960s], performances were called "happenings." What happened—that was the piece, and it was very unpredictable. It was an event. In the beginning, performance artists were against documentation. Then documentation became more and more evident. But then the oldest period of performance art becomes so mystified. For example, there is only one photograph of a Joseph Beuys piece in which he talks to a dead hare about art. That photograph was described by some critics as a new Mona Lisa of the 20th century, and Beuys' wife told me he hated that, because it wasn't true. In that piece he performed a long series of different actions, and the photograph shows only the moment when he sits down with the dead hare. I saw video material of the piece, but that has never been in circulation—the public only knows it from the photograph. So I feel like an archeologist digging through the bones, finding out what actually happened, and trying to reconstruct it.