“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.”
That’s how legendary performance artist Marina Abramović now reflects on Rhythm 0, her most infamous and disturbing piece, in which she handed over complete control of her body to the public for six hours. What followed became a chilling exploration of mob mentality, cruelty, and human nature at its darkest.
Originally performed in Naples in 1974, Rhythm 0 asked a deceptively simple question: What happens when an artist becomes completely passive? Abramović laid out 72 objects, including a rose, a feather, scissors, a knife, and even a loaded gun, and invited the audience to use any of them on her however they pleased.
“I am an object,” she declared. “You can do whatever you want with me, and I will take full responsibility for the six hours.”
At first, the crowd was hesitant. But as the hours passed, hesitation gave way to chaos. Someone lifted her arm. Someone else cut her clothes. By hour three, she had been stripped, assaulted, had a knife held between her legs, and even had her neck cut. One man pressed the loaded gun to her temple.
“I could feel his intent,” Abramović later said, via Far Out. “And I heard the women telling the men what to do.”
She described the most disturbing part not as the physical violence, but a man who simply stood by, silently breathing. “This, for me, was the most frightening thing.”
Though some members of the crowd tried to intervene, wiping away her tears or stepping in during the more violent moments, the experience left lasting damage. “After the performance, I had one streak of white hair. I still have scars from the cuts,” she said. “I was ready to die.”
Speaking to The Guardian years later, Abramović revealed that it wasn’t just the violence that haunted her, it was how quickly and completely the public lost their moral compass when given unchecked power. “I realized then that the public can kill you. If you give them total freedom, they will become frenzied enough to kill you.”
When the six hours were up and Abramović finally began to move again, regaining agency over her body, the crowd scattered. “They couldn’t face me as a person,” she recalled. “They ran away.”
Now, decades later, Rhythm 0 is being rediscovered by a new generation on social media, stunned by how quickly things spiraled. Abramović’s work remains a powerful cautionary tale: a radical performance that peeled back the layers of civility to reveal just how fragile they really are.