Extreme Marina Abramovic
With Rhythm 0, she pushes the limits of performance art
“One of my most extreme pieces,” says Marina Abramović, a 69-year-old, Serbian-born, New York-based, internationally celebrated performance artist, “was when I really pushed my body to the limits.” That piece was Rhythm 0, which she performed over six hours, from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., at Studio Morra in Naples, Italy, in 1974. She discusses her motivation in the video above (courtesy of the Marina Abramović Institute and directed by Milica Zec). “Till that time,” Abramović explains, “performance art was totally ridiculed. They would say it was sick, it was exhibitionistic, it was masochistic, and that the artists just want attention. And I was really tired of this sort of criticism. I said, Okay, I’m going to make a piece to see how far the public will go, even if the artist himself doesn’t do anything.”
Abramović, then in her late 20s and a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad, Serbia, stood in the middle of the Studio Morra, with no stage separating her, and the audience was allowed to mill about freely. On a table next to her read the following instructions: “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.” Among the objects were a rose, a feather, perfume, honey, bread, grapes, wine, a pair of scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, and a gun loaded with one bullet.
The art critic Thomas McEvilley, who was there, described how it went: “It began tamely. Someone turned her around. Someone thrust her arms into the air. Someone touched her somewhat intimately. The Neapolitan night began to heat up. In the third hour all her clothes were cut from her with razor blades. In the fourth hour the same blades began to explore her skin. Her throat was slashed so someone could suck her blood. Various minor sexual assaults were carried out on her body. She was so committed to the piece that she would not have resisted rape or murder. Faced with her abdication of will, with its implied collapse of human psychology, a protective group began to define itself in the audience. When a loaded gun was thrust to Marina’s head and her own finger was being worked around the trigger, a fight broke out between the audience factions.”
“I never want to die,” Abramović says. “I’m not interested in dying. But I am interested in how far you can push the energy of the human body and then see how energy is almost limitless. It’s not about the body, it’s about the mind, pushing to the extremes that you never could imagine.”
Today, Abramović, through her Institute, is trying to renovate an old theater in Hudson, New York, into a permanent performance and exhibition space designed by Rem Koolhaas. She also sponsors and participates in performance art festivals around the world, notably “As One,” which is at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece, through April 24.
