“I was ready to die”: Marina Abramović on ‘Rhythm 0’
How quickly can something change from innocuous to life-threatening? Going solely on Marina Abramović’s 1974 performance art piece, Rhythm 0, the answer is about six hours. The piece was infamous, not because of what it revealed about her as an artist, but what it said about the participating audience. Invited to do whatever they wanted to her, they were coy initially. By the end, her clothes were ripped off her, a loaded gun was pushed against her temple, and she had been sexually assaulted.
Abramović gave them an open instruction: “There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. Performance: I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility.”
Objects ranged from flowers to razor blades. The leap from mundane inclusions like apples and newspapers to dangerous items such as knives and bullets was sudden. The gulf between them was an invite to either harm her or help her; of all the eventualities that could have presented themselves, neutrality was the only one that didn’t.
Even with the express permission of Abramović, the audience were tame at first. Then, someone made the step of lifting her arm in the air. That action emboldened others to try and engage with her more physically, which, by the three-hour mark, devolved horrendously. A knife was stuck between her legs, and her clothes were cut away from her. Male onlookers laughed, and she just stood silently and cried.
The audience members saw what others got away with, and continued to do worse. Someone cut her neck and drank her blood. Others wiped her tears and tried to intervene. A curious third party materialised. As the performance became increasingly bleak, a group who disapproved formed a horrified collective. It wasn’t just Abramović against the audience, but her facing an audience who were pitted against each other.
Accounts of the performance are all varied, but the distinct moment someone pressed the loaded gun to her head and forced her fingers around the trigger remains an undisputed detail. It was also the last straw for the group, who couldn’t stomach the obvious danger she was in, and they tried to intervene. Whether it was that which stopped the performance or the six hours elapsing is still disputed.
The factions that rose up in the audience and the cruelty they were inflicting recalls the Stanford Prison Experiment. Drunk on power, the otherwise nonviolent audience members were capable of extreme actions. It was a play on group dynamics that illustrated, with great impact, how easily groups are led when under the right conditions.
While Rhythm 0 is an incredible artefact of performance art at its most incisive, it was hugely traumatic for Abramović. Processing it all as she silently endured it, she later said: “The experience I drew from this piece was that in your own performances you can go very far, but if you leave decisions to the public, you can be killed.”
Elsewhere, she confessed: “I was ready to die.”
