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In The Absence of The Sacred
Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0 (1974)
In 1974, Marina Abramovic did a performance where she told visitors that she would not move for six hours, no matter what they did to her. She placed 72 objects on a table at her side that could be used to please or destroy, including flowers, a knife and a loaded gun. She invited visitors to use the objects as they wished.
At first, Abramović said, the visitors were peaceful and shy, but they soon became violent: ′′ The experience I learned was that…if you leave the decision to the public, you can get killed…. I felt very violated. They cut my clothes off, put rose thorns in my stomach, someone put the gun to my temple, and another pulled her gun out close. This created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I got up and started walking towards the audience. Everyone ran away, escaping a real confrontation.” This performance revealed something terrible about humanity, similar to what Stanford’s arrest experiment, Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment also showed about how quickly people attack each other depending on the circumstances.
This performance showed how easy it is to dehumanize someone who cannot defend themselves, and is particularly powerful because it challenges what we think we know about ourselves.
