She stayed quiet for 6 hours and let the public do everything to her with 72 objects. Here’s what happened

“I am the object, I take full responsibility.” In 1974, Serbian artist Marina Abramović exposed the darkest side of human behavior in the face of permissiveness and “was ready to die”. Here’s what he discovered.

How far do we take our actions, if we are authorized to put them into practice? And, faced with a woman who tells us “you can do whatever you want with me for six hours, as if my body were an object”, what will be our response?

In an attempt to reveal the human reaction to permissiveness and answer these questions, Marina Abramović became famous, in 1974, for having starred in one of the most shocking art performances ever.

The Serbian artist was 28 years old when she presented Rhythm 0 (Rhythm 0) at Studio Morra, in Naples. committed to maintaining stop and quiet for six hoursnext to 72 objects of all kinds.

Assuming his body as one of the objects in the room, Abramović left clear instructions to visitors: from eight at night to two in the morning, the public could use the available objects as they saw fit. The same policy applied to his body:

There are 72 objects on the table that can be used on me as they wish.

Performance.

I am the object…

During this period, I take full responsibility.

Duration: 6 hours (8pm – 2am)

At their disposal, the public had objects such as bandages, paper, a quill, ink, a candle, a comb, lipstick, perfume, wine, olive oil, bread, a slice of chocolate cake, grapes. But he also had knives, a saw, a whip, a scalpel, chains, an axe, an iron bar, scissors, razor blades and even a pistol and a bullet.

Abramović relied solely on the trust he had in the public. “I was ready to die”she told , in 2014, when recalling the experience that would traumatize her forever.

What began as cautious public participation evolved, as the hours went by, into an escalation of behavior that involved touching, violence and emotional play that would end up breaking the artist’s psyche.

Undressed, touched, attacked. “Out of control”

“At first, nothing special happened,” Abramović on the Institute’s YouTube channel under his name: “The audience was very kind. They gave me roses, kissed me, looked at me. But then, it became more and more uncontrolled.”

The photographs that immortalized the Serbian’s performance show her with the skin and cut clothingwith a piece of paper stuck to his body with the word “VILE” (“vile”).

He was undressed, touched, assaulted, cut and crowded around the gallery, while few people wiped her tears, trying to correct the evils committed there.

They are mainly men seen in the photographs, handling the objects, touching the artist’s body, laughing and observing in a group. They even went so far as to stick a knife between Marina’s legs and use a blade on her neck. They drank his blood and pointed the loaded gunor art critic Thomas McEvilley.

“It started calmly.” Then “someone turned her back. Someone raised her arms. Someone touched her in a somewhat intimate way”, recalls the critic, quoted by . “At the third hour, all his clothes were cut with razor blades. At the fourth hour, the same blades began to explore his skin. Various minor sexual abuse were committed against his body. She was so dedicated to the work that she would not have resisted rape or murder.”

Alone and completely exposed, Abramović cried, in shock, not only because of the physical suffering or the risk she was taking, but because of the degree of trust she had placed in strangers, who betrayed her without a second thought.

“I’m going to do the play, to see how far the public will go if the artist doesn’t do anything”, recalled the artist. “I took full responsibility (…) if someone wanted to put a bullet in the pistol, they could kill me. I wanted to take that risk, I wanted to know what the public would do in that situation. It was very difficult.”

“When a loaded gun was pointed at Marina’s head and her own finger was being pulled against the trigger, a fight broke out between groups of members of the public,” McEvilley.

“The gallery staff interrupted, completely crazy, saying ‘take the gun out of his hands, throw it out the window’. They cut off my clothes, stuck rose thorns into my body”, says Abramović.

When the experience ended, the artist wanted to face the people who participated in her performance, but, allegedly, no one wanted to confront her or take responsibility.

“After six hours, they said the performance was over. I started moving. I started being myself […] and, at that moment, everyone fled. The people They couldn’t confront me as a person“, Marina said.

“What I learned was that […] If you leave everything in the hands of the public, they could kill you”, said Marina: “I still have the scars from the cuts. After the performance, I had a strand of white hair on my head. I can’t get rid of the feeling of fear for a long time.”

Marina Abramović showed how few artists how permissiveness paves the way for physical and psychological abuse, coming from the same race. The artist even revealed that the work she would do after Rhythm 0 was always a kind of trauma response left after the terrifying experience.

On the part of the artist, works such as:

• in which Abramović carves a star on his naked body, with political/religious symbolism mixed into the resistance performance;
• with his ex-partner Ulay, who, naked, occupy a narrow passage and, to enter, the public must pass between the two bodies, choosing who they look at;
• in which Marina’s body and Ulay’s are seen in unstable balance with a bow and arrow aimed at Abramović’s heart;
• the couple’s (almost) last collaboration, which featured a walk between the two, each at an opposite end of the Great Wall of China to meet in the middle as a monumental gesture of relationship, duration and farewell;
• which featured seven consecutive nights of re-performance (including historical works by other artists) — including a controversial interpretation in which the artist had nine “terrible and tiring” orgasms, inspired by Vito Acconci’s ‘Seedbed’, in which the artist originally masturbated under a ramp while his fantasies sounded through the speakers.