Fifty years ago, Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović stunned the art world with one of her most daring exhibitions ever.
The now-legendary Rhythm 0 pushed the limits of trust, consent, and audience participation, and Abramović has recently spoken out about the moment things spiraled out of control.
In 1974, Abramović entered a gallery in Naples, Italy, and stood motionless at the center of the room for six hours. Her promise was simple but chilling: spectators could do absolutely anything to her, and she would take full responsibility.
“I am an object. You can do whatever you want with me and I will take full responsibility for the six hours,” Abramović told the audience, according to the Marina Abramović Institute on YouTube.
A table beside her contained 72 items ranging from the benign (roses, perfume, and feathers) to the potentially lethal, including scissors, a scalpel, a pistol, and a bullet.
Credit: Mario Wurzburger / Getty Images.
When the Performance Turned Dangerous
Initially, the audience’s interactions were gentle. “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 recalled.
But three hours in, things took a dark turn. Speaking to Far Out Magazine, she said the crowd began growing brazen, starting with someone lifting her arm in the air. By the halfway mark, audience members had begun ripping at her clothes and escalating to acts of assault.
Abramović remembers vividly: “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.”
The most terrifying moment came when a man placed the pistol in her hand and held it to her head, with her finger resting on the trigger. Staff intervened just in time, throwing the gun out of the window, she said in a 2010 interview with The Guardian.
Even in the face of extreme danger, Abramović didn’t stop the performance. “I was ready to die,” she confessed. She recalls the moment the exhibition ended: “I start moving. I start being myself [...] and, at that moment, everybody ran away. People could not actually confront me as a person.”
Marina Abramović after 6 hours of letting the public do anything they wanted to her. Credit: Marina Abramović Institute / YouTube.
The Motivation Behind the Risk
Abramović revealed that the piece was a reaction to growing criticism of contemporary performance art in the 1970s. Artists who pushed boundaries often faced accusations of sensationalism and masochism.
“I was really tired of these types of critics,” she explained. Her goal was to confront audiences with the raw vulnerability of the artist herself, allowing the public to choose whether to engage with her as a person or merely as an object.
The Legacy of Rhythm 0
Rhythm 0 remains one of the most talked-about and studied performances in modern art history.
While the audience’s actions were shocking, Abramović’s willingness to risk her safety highlighted the extreme trust and tension at the heart of performance art, a testament to her commitment to challenging both herself and the viewers who engage with her work.