Rhythm 0: When Live Art Exposed Human Cruelty

When Marina Abramović staged Rhythm 0, the audience became the experiment, exposing how quickly people can turn cruel when given power.

In 1974, Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović staged Rhythm 0, a six-hour endurance art performance, at Studio Morra in Naples, Italy.

Standing impassively by a table of 72 objects, she invited the audience to freely use them on her. The objects ranged from harmless items like flowers, cake, lipstick, cotton, honey, and a feather, to deadly items including a gun, kitchen knife, hammer, and an axe. They were carefully chosen for their ability to bring pleasure, pain or death.

Abramović’s instructions were thus:

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.

By making herself a puppet, and inviting the audience to participate without consequences, Abramović gave them power over her. The question was, what would they do with it?

At the start, the atmosphere was calm. People were curious, playful, and hesitant to use the harmful objects. They offered her water, fed her cake, gave her a rose, kissed her cheek, and moved her around. “In the beginning, the public was really very much playing with me,” Abramović remembers.

But as time passed, the mood shifted. The audience grew braver and more abusive, with a sort of mob mentality taking over. They cut her clothes, stuck rose thorns in her, sliced her skin, and sucked her blood. Others removed her clothes, sexually harassed her, and carried her around half-naked.

Not everyone in the audience engaged in this violent behaviour. Some people came to Abramović’s defence, wiping away her tears and intervening on her behalf. When one person aimed the loaded gun at her head, with her own finger over the trigger, a fight broke out.

She later describes the experience:

“It was six hours of real horror. They would cut my clothes. They will cut me with a knife, close to my neck, and drink my blood, and then put the plaster over the wound. They will carry me around, half-naked, put me on the table, and stuck the knife between my legs into the wood.”

Rhythm 0 was a social experiment that exposed how cruel humans can become, even without provocation, when fear of retaliation, responsibility, or consequence is removed. Without these deterrents, people can unleash a darker side of themselves, dangerously tipping the scales of morality. When Abramović surrendered herself to the audience in this way, they came to see her not as human, but as an object they could do anything to.

“At the end of the performance, I realised that the public can kill you. I was lucky I survived.”

After six hours, Abramović stood and walked to the audience, naked and bleeding, with tears in her eyes. “Everybody run away, literally run out of the door,” she says.

Rhythm 0 was the last of five performance art pieces in Abramović’s Rhythm series (1973–1974).

Rhythm 0 Gallery