The artist who willingly let spectators do whatever they wanted to her for six hours has spoken out on the moment everything started to go wrong.
Fifty years ago, Marina Abramović performed one of her most dangerous art exhibitions to date.
The Serbian performance artist - who made a career out of thought-provoking, dangerous, and controversial exhibitions - took to a gallery hall in Naples, Italy, to perform the now-infamous Rhythm 0.
The premise of the piece was simple; Abramović would stand motionless in the center of a gallery and let spectators do whatever they wanted to her for six hours.
"I am an object. You can do whatever you want with me and I will take full responsibility for the 6 hours," she told the audience, per the Marina Abramović Institute.
In the room was a table, with a multitude of random items on top. These 72 objects ranged from harmless items like roses, perfume, and feathers to potentially dangerous ones like scissors, a scalpel, a gun, and a bullet.
"At the beginning, nothing really happened. The public were calm. They would play with me. They would give me [a] rose, they would kiss me, look at me," Abramović recalls.
However, speaking to Far Out Magazine, the artist revealed that, three hours into the performance, it had devolved in a violating and dangerous way.
Members of the audience started to become more and more brazen after one person made the step of lifting her arm in the air.
By the halfway point, Abramović was having her clothes ripped from her body.
In her own words, she remembers: "The public became more and more wild. They cut my neck and drink my blood. They carry me around, put me on the table, open my legs and put a knife between."
She then said that one man put the pistol in her hand and placed it to her head - with her finger resting on the trigger.
At that moment, she says staff at the gallery intervened and took the gun, throwing it out of the window.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2010, she was asked what the worst thing somebody did to her during the performance, to which, she replied: "A man pressed the gun hard against my temple. I could feel his intent. And I heard the women telling the men what to do. The worst was the one man who was there always, just breathing. This, for me, was the most frightening thing."
Nevertheless, despite the danger she was in, Abramović remained true to her word and did not stop the public.
Per Far Out, Abramović confessed: "I was ready to die."
Speaking on the moment the performance came to an end, she said: "I start moving. I start being myself [...] and, at that moment, everybody ran away. People could not actually confront with me as a person."
Opening up about why she went through with the piece in the first place, Abramović revealed that she wanted to respond to the heavy criticism artists were getting at the time.
By the 1970s, artists were continuing to try and push the boundaries and deliver something never-before-seen to the public. The more this continued, the more criticism performance artists like Abramović were facing from the public, with some being slammed for their masochistic and sensationalist visions.
"I was really tired of these type of critics," she said.
As a result, Abramović wanted to conduct a piece where she - the artist - would simply stand in a room and let the public do whatever they wanted. Of course, the crowd could have just let the six hours tick by and not subject her to numerous assaults -- but, as you've just read, they didn't.
