As midnight approached, the atmosphere shifted from experimental to predatory. She was stripped, her clothes cut away. A thorny rose stem was pressed into her abdomen. Someone placed the chainsaw against her throat—then laughed and withdrew it. The loaded pistol was lifted, pressed to her temple. A shouting match erupted: one audience member insisted on firing it; another pushed the gun away, only to later return and draw a bloody star on her forehead with a razor. Abramović later recalled feeling her body no longer belonged to her. “They were cutting me, drinking my blood, licking my wounds.”
The first cut came with the knife, a small scratch on her thigh. A second person painted her lips with lipstick, then drew a line down her neck. The crowd grew. Crucially, the audience now began to compete. One man placed the rose in her hand; another immediately removed it and cut her shirt buttons off. The actions became a public display of fearlessness. The props were no longer tools but trophies. rhythm 0 full performance
[Your Name] Course: Performance Art & The Ethics of Spectatorship Date: [Current Date] Abstract This paper analyzes Marina Abramović’s six-hour performance Rhythm 0 (1974) as a complete, unrepeatable experiment in the distribution of agency between artist and audience. While often cited for its shocking conclusion, the full performance —from the first tentative interactions to the final, violent escalation—reveals a systematic breakdown of social contracts. Using Abramović’s own documentation and contemporary accounts, this paper argues that Rhythm 0 functioned as a sociological Petri dish, demonstrating how absolute audience permissiveness does not lead to creative liberation but to the emergence of authoritarian cruelty. The performance’s enduring power lies not in the artist’s passivity, but in the audience’s active, progressive transformation from participant to perpetrator. 1. Introduction In the evening of 1974, at the Studio Morra in Naples, Marina Abramović placed 72 objects on a white table. They ranged from benign (feather, rose, honey) to pleasurable (perfume, wine) to dangerous (knife, scalpel, chainsaw) to lethal (a loaded pistol with one bullet). Beside the table stood the artist, her body the declared medium. The instruction sheet was brief: “I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility. Duration: 6 hours (8 PM – 2 AM).” Abramović later recalled feeling her body no longer
The Unbearable Permissiveness of Being: A Re-Evaluation of Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974) Beside the table stood the artist