"Rhythm 0" | Marina Abramovician

This piece of art shows the ugliness of humanity, its brightest exposure and then hiding as soon as an opportunity for accountability is presented. Abramovician became the canvas and the audience, the artists. She was a motionless and nonreactive subject whose humanity was lost to many of the audience’s eyes via 72 objects for six hours.

“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.”

These objects were associated with pleasure and pain, so a rose lay next to a hammer, perfume neighbor to a gun. By the end, Abramovician had been cut, a rose placed in her hand, sexually assaulted, her clothes torn from her body, messages drawn on her forehead, tied up with chains, and more. At the end of the sixth hour, she ended her passive state and walked toward the audience. They all fled.

I wonder how the audience might have approached this if the instructions held a message directed toward their responsibility. If I were in that room, I hope I would be one to interrupt any act of harm upon her because it crosses a moral line but that is not a line all draw for themselves. And if the artist says she “takes full responsibility” then maybe those six hours are the gateway for those people to unleash all of their questionable moral boundaries.

But even then, a human who chose to be a canvas to receive the practice of pleasure or pain, in a dissociative state, feels like the ultimate call to uphold one’s own responsibility. What were those people who used the objects of pain trying to accomplish? Experience? Release?

If nothing else, I don’t know how she did it for six hours. I’d tap out by minute ten.

[Book of Delights pg. 19 | No.6 Remission Still]

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