"Rhythm 0" is the title of a conceptual and performance art piece created by the artist Marina Abramović in 1974 at the Morra Studio in Naples, Italy. The performance nearly cost the artist her life, after she was subjected to hours of torture at the hands of the audience.
Marina Abramović.
Early years.
Born on 30 November 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and described as the most important figure in performance art, Marina Abramović developed an interest in art at an early age, spending her free time painting, despite never having taken any formal art lessons.
The daughter of World War II partisans, Abramović was raised by her grandparents until she was six years old. Her grandmother was deeply religious, and Marina spent her childhood in church following her rituals. At the age of six, after the birth of her brother, she began living with her parents and taking lessons in piano, French, and English.
Between 1965 and 1970, Abramović studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade. She completed her postgraduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1972. Between 1973 and 1975, she taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad, whilst preparing her first solo performance.
Performances.
Throughout her career, Marina has created more than 50 large-scale works, which can be seen as a relentless exploration of human limits, as well as a clinical record of what happens when the body disconnects from the mind and surrenders to pure experience. The most notable ones are:
"Rest Energy" (1980): The pinnacle of relationship art and shared danger. Marina and her former partner, Ulay, held a taut bow with an arrow aimed directly at her heart. Being connected by microphones, the audience could hear their heartbeats accelerating in response to the real fear of death, turning absolute trust into a high-stakes work of art. This performance lasted approximately four minutes
"Balkan Baroque" (1997): One of her rawest and most politically charged pieces. For days, Marina manually washed 1,500 cow bones stained with blood and rotting flesh. The unbearable stench and the repetitive act of cleansing the past became a performative mourning for the Balkan war, assaulting the viewer's senses in a way that no image ever could.
"Lips of Thomas" (1975): A display of religious iconography and extreme physical endurance. Marina carved a five-pointed star into her stomach with a razor blade, whipped herself, and then lay down on a cross made of ice under an electric heater. It was a brutal exercise in the duality between pain, fire, and cold, cementing her status as an artist capable of turning her own body into a sacrificial altar. This performance lasted approximately two hours.
"Rhythm 10" (1973): The birth of her violent language. In this performance, which lasted approximately one hour, Marina laid twenty knives on the floor and, to the rhythm of a recording, stabbed them into the spaces between the fingers of her open hand. Every time she cut herself, she would change knives and record the sound of her skin being pierced, only to repeat the process minutes later, synchronizing her new cuts with the audio of the previous ones. It was a brutal exercise in error and repetition, where physical pain became a tool of technical composition.
"Rhythm 5" (1974): The fight against unconsciousness. For this piece, Marina built a giant five-pointed star, doused it in gasoline, and set it on fire. After walking around the perimeter, she threw herself into the center of the flaming structure. The plan was to remain there in a star position, but the fire consumed the oxygen so rapidly that the extreme heat caused her to lose consciousness while the flames devoured the air around her. It was a spectator who, upon noticing she was not moving, jumped into the fire to drag her out, saving her life. This performance lasted approximately 30 minutes, ending abruptly when attendees had to intervene to prevent a fatal tragedy.
"Rhythm 0".
The premise.
On 2 June 1974, with the aim of testing the limits of the relationship between the artist and the audience, Abramović staged what is still considered the most unsettling performance of her career.
Marina stood motionless in a room at Studio Morra in Naples, facing a table with 72 objects on it. Next to them, she placed some clear instructions:
"There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility. Duration: 6 hours (8 p.m. to 2 a.m.)."
In the performance, Marina took on a passive role, whilst the audience forced her to perform.
The objects.
The objects were divided into two categories that represented the full spectrum of human interaction:
Items of pleasure or harmless objects: a rose, a feather, perfume, honey, grapes, wine, bread, oil, fabrics, etc.
Objects of pain or destruction: Scissors, chains, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, a whip, a hammer, a gun and a single bullet, amongst others.
Escalation of violence.
Over the course of six hours, the performance documented a chilling descent into dehumanisation and sadism.
At first, the crowd was docile and even affectionate. People gently turned her round, fed her grapes, handed her a rose or stroked her with a feather.
As time went on and it became clear that she wasn’t going to react or defend herself, the situation changed dramatically. Someone grabbed a pair of scissors and cut all her clothes off, leaving her naked.
Once she was naked, the physical assault began. They stabbed her stomach with rose thorns. Someone cut her neck and drank her blood. They groped her, painted her and treated her literally like a piece of meat or an inert canvas. They also chained her up, threw cold water over her and forced her into uncomfortable positions.
Among the 72 objects was a Polaroid camera. One of the attendees took the camera, snapped a photo of Abramović, naked and vulnerable, and then placed the photograph in her hand so that she herself could see herself as a documented object.
The most tense moment came when a member of the audience took the gun, loaded it with the single bullet and placed it in Abramović’s hand, with the barrel pointed directly at her own head and her finger on the trigger. This sparked a physical altercation amongst the audience members themselves: one group wanted to see how far the situation would go, whilst another group, terrified by the impending tragedy, intervened to take the gun away from her.
After exactly six hours, the gallery owner announced that the work was finished.
At that moment, Abramović, who had been completely passive and in a trance-like state, began to move of her own accord and walk towards the audience, becoming a person once more and ceasing to be an object.
The reaction was telling: the entire audience fled in terror. They could not bear the visual and psychological confrontation with the human being they had just tortured. Facing her as a person with agency and a will of her own shattered the illusion of impunity.
The conclusions.
The performance resulted in a fascinating case study on human psychology, mass behavior, and how quickly morality crumbles when consequences are removed. The experiment empirically demonstrated that if you give ordinary people total power over another person, without any rules or legal consequences, civility disappears within a matter of hours. Abramović herself later stated that the experience taught her that if you leave your life in the hands of the public, they will kill you.
Abramović later confessed that, despite her serious and motionless demeanour during the performance, she was terrified and prepared to die that night if the audience so chose. The stress was so extreme that, shortly after the performance, she discovered that a strand of her hair had turned completely white.
The morning after the exhibition, Abramović recounted that as she walked through the streets of Naples, people who had visited the gallery would cross the road to avoid her or look away. In the light of day and in their normal state, the aggressors could not look her in the eye. They had reverted to their state as ‘civilised citizens’ and felt ashamed of what their primitive or uninhibited side had done the night before.
.png)