"What I learned was that... if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.” In 1974,
Marina Abramovic would perform her most daring performance piece at Galleria Studio Morra in
Naples, a show that would test her physically and mentally. Marina would become the object and
subject of the performance while exploring her capacity to embody the mental process of conceptual
art.
To understand and observe how far the public would actually go, Marina placed 72 objects on
top of a table with instructions telling the audience that she's an object and they can do as they
please for 6 hours. Among the 72 items was bread, grapes, wine, a rose, metal bar, nails, scissors,
and a pistol with one bullet.
When the performance…show more content… However, as each hour passed the audience started to become more
aggressive. They laid her on a table, placing a knife in-between her legs. They stood her up, and cut
her clothes off with a pair of scissors. Another hour passed, and someone had cut her neck and drank
her blood. Some wrote on her, and as tears were streaming down her face, a man placed the pistol
in Marina's hand and put her own finger on the trigger- aiming the gun at herself. Another audience
member took the gun away and threw the man out of the performance.
As the night progressed, and 2 a.m neared, the gallery owners ended the show. Marina started
moving around and being herself- and at that moment, the audience fled. Nobody could handle
confronting Marina as a person rather than an object. Something Marina learned from that
performance was that she went in wanting to see how far she could push the human body, but soon
learned that your mind is what pushes you.
in 1973, Marina's "Rhythm 10" performance was presented at a festival in Edinburgh. She
placed 20 knives lined up on the floor, with two cassette recorders and microphones next to them.
She turns the recorder on and starts with one knife and quickly stabs each space in-between