By now, you may be familiar with the controversial 1974 Rhythm 0 art installation by Marina Abramović, where she said she was ‘ready to die’ if that were to happen.
To jog your memory if you can’t quite recall, the artist became the art as she stood still with a series of objects in front of her for six hours, not moving an inch in the process.
Spectators were invited to use the objects arrayed with her in any way they liked, and sadly the artist’s instruction for people to use the objects on her ‘as desired’ almost cost Marina her life.
Speaking to The Guardian decades after Rhythm 0, the artist said she suffered a long-term change brought on by the fear she went through.
“After the performance, I have one streak of white hair on my head,” she said.
“I cannot get rid of the feeling of fear for a long time. Because of this performance, I know where to draw the line so as not to put myself at such risk.”
Rhythm 0 is notorious for Abramović staying still throughout the entire six hours and the audience putting her in increasing levels of danger.
At first people had fun making her hold flowers and feeding her grapes, which were among the objects placed for people to use ‘as desired’, but as the art installation went on things escalated and people used more vicious tools arrayed.
By the end of six hours, Marina had her skin slashed and her clothes cut away from her body, while a fight broke out among audience members after someone put a loaded gun to her head and placed her finger on the trigger.
She said she was ‘ready to die’ and came disturbingly close to that being a reality by the end of Rhythm 0.
“Nobody believed in performance art, and I said, okay, I want to show if I actually do nothing,” she said of her reasons behind taking on the dangerous display.
“The public, if they want to kill me, they can kill me. I was very foolish, I have to tell you, in that time, because I was absolutely going to the end, and I was lucky to survive.”
Among her other art was a three-month long installation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York called The Artist Is Present, where she sat at a table each day with an empty chair across from her.
Anyone visiting the museum could take the empty chair and have a ‘silent conversation’ with her, which resulted in many people breaking down in tears without a word being spoken.
