Artist 'ready to die' after allowing spectators to do anything to her explains why it forced her to implement one rule
World-renowned performance artist Marina Abramović rose to fame for putting her life on the line for the sake of her art, with her shocking performances often forcing viewers to confront something deeper about the human condition.
This is perhaps most evident in her most infamous piece, Rhythm 0, which was performed in 1974 and involved Abramović leaving 72 objects in a performance space and letting the public use them on her however they wished for six hours.
Testing the relationship between the audience and the artist, those attending her exhibition at first timidly interacted with her. But as it became clear that Abramović was not going to respond to their actions, things began to escalate after a whip and rose thorns were used against her, while a gun and a bullet sat nearby.
Speaking to famed documentarian Louis Theroux on his podcast, the 79-year-old artist - who said was 'ready to die' for her work - explained how her experience of letting the public do what they want led to her implementing one important rule.
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"You never know if they're going to kill you or not," the artist said, who had intentionally left objects that could either be pleasurable or painful.
"I was so angry [about] how they treat performance art," Abramović said of people's opinion of her art form at the time.
Aged just 23 at the time, she stood still in the center of the gallery for six hours while people steadily got more aggressive.
"The public went crazy, but this was not me, I did not do anything. This was them to me, and I knew the public can kill you."
By the end of the performance at an Italian gallery, she had been stripped naked and attacked by various people in the crowd, with things escalating to their peak when someone in the audience picked up the gun, loaded it, and aimed it directly at her head.
Speaking previously about the famous performance piece, the artist said: "It was six hours of real horror. They would cut my clothes. They will cut me with a knife, close to my neck, and drink my blood, and then put the plaster over the wound.
"They will carry me around, half-naked, put me on the table, and stuck the knife between my legs into the wood."
"I wanted to show that the public can f***ing kill you," she told Theroux, adding that she 'didn't care' about the other implications of the work and going on to explain that her art explores things that 'disturb' her, or causes other people shame.
This experience of the capacity of strangers to inflict pain and even death on her, without her saying a word or even moving, taught Abramović an important lesson about audience participation that informed her other controversial pieces.
30 years later, this would inform another performance piece that would become famous around the world, this time with no knives, guns, or touching allowed.
Called The Artist is Present, Abramović once again invited the public into her performance, where she just sat almost entirely still for eight hours a day in New York's Museum of Modern Art, with no toilet breaks.
But this time she had a new rule, informed by Rhythm 0.
She said: "I restricted the public to nothing, public can't touch me, can't talk to me, they can't move, they can sit at the table and the chair and are involved in the gaze, I give them the gaze, and that changed everything."
People were allowed to sit down opposite her, but were not able to touch her or talk to her.
Instead of being bored, many people were moved to tears by the silent experience, including the artist herself at one point.
It was attended by celebrities and ordinary New Yorkers, with queues stretching around the block for three months full of people wanting to sit and experience Abramović in person.
Topics: Marina Abramović, Louis Theroux, Art
William Morgan