Marina Abramović

(Serbia, 30/11/1946 -)

Rhythm 5 (1974)

Born in Belgrade in 1946, Abramović began her formal training in painting and visual arts at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts from 1965 to 1970 but felt that painting left something missing and she was only able involve the audience in her art as it became increasingly abstract. This eventually led her into the still-developing performance and body art. Moving to what was then the constituent republic of Croatia and completing a post-graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1972, she found an artistic environment not subject to Yugoslavia’s censorship and was able to develop her means of expression. The following year, Abramovic would present the first of her Rhythm performance series.

Beginning with Rhythm 10, performed in Edinburgh in 1973, Abramovic’s Rhythm series is her most notorious work which saw her intentionally cutting herself in Rhythm 10, burning the communist pentagram and losing consciousness due to smoke inhalation in Rhythm 5 of 1974. Later that same year, she took medications to induce bodily spasms and then paralytics in her performance of Rhythm 2, and lost consciousness for the second time by breathing air pushed into her lungs by an industrial fan in Rhythm 4.

While these first four performances shocked viewers with how far she was willing to push herself and how much pain she could endure for her art, the final performance in the series, Rhythm 0, is perhaps her most famous and, in my personal opinion, her most unsettling and socially revealing performance.

Staged at Studio Morra in Naples, Abramovic laid 72 objects of pain and pleasure on a table in front of her, including a glass of water, perfume, a rose, a feather, bread and wine, but also scissors, a razor blade, nails, a metal bar, a hammer, and a loaded gun. The audience was provided the following instructions:

‘There are seventy-two objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. Performance. I am the object. During this period, I take full responsibility.   Duration: six hours (8p.m.-2a.m.)’.

Abramovic recalled that, at first, it was “easy”. The audience was behaving with relative passivity – handing her the rose, feeding her the bread and wine – although, as Abramovic continued to stand perfectly still, the audience began to abuse the power they realised they had over her. Her hair was cut, her breasts were groped, the thorns of the rose were stuck into her stomach, within the first three hours all her clothes had been torn off and her neck was cut with the razor blade by a man who then drank her blood as it spilled from the wound. As time went on it became clear that the audience was attempting to break her and test her commitment to taking full responsibility for their actions by using the objects to elicit anxiety and fear in both Abramovic and fellow audience members.

It was only when an audience member put the loaded gun in her hand and pointed it at her head, that gallery staff stepped in, taking the gun and throwing it out the window. But Abramovic never moved from her original position until the 6 hours had passed, at which time she was naked, covered in her own blood and had tears running down her face. The problem, she said, was that they could not, or would not, recognise her as being a human being.

Intended to evoke the power structures of society and the effects of control in authoritarian and misogynistic cultures, the performance inevitably highlighted the dangers of herd mentality and how quickly and easily the audience slipped into it. She later wrote: ‘The experience I drew from this work was that in your own performances you can go very far, but if you leave decisions to the public, you can be killed’.

In 1997, Abramovic was awarded the golden lion at the Venice Biennale for her performance of Balkan Baroque. Created in response to the Bosnian war, through Balkan Baroque Abramovic criticised the senselessness of war in general by undertaking the Sisyphean task of scrubbing blood off two and a half thousand cow bones, six hours a day, six days a week, with the sounds of her family, friends and strangers being interviewed about their experiences during the Bosnian war, highlighting the human cost of violence.

In the late 90s, Abramovic pivoted her performances to explore the notions of presence and nothingness, as is seen in her performances, The Artist Is Present, which was inspired by her experiences with Indigenous Australians. After receiving a grant to travel to Australia in 1980, Abramović and her collaborator Ulay spent several months living with the Pitjantjatjara people in Central Australia. Her comments on how this time influenced her work has led to criticism that she essentialises and fetishises Indigenous cultures that she praises for their “purity”. While she later said that the time spent with Indigenous Australians “was a transformative experience for me, and one that has deeply and indelibly informed my entire life and art”, excerpts from her diary entries, wherein she compared her hosts to dinosaurs and wrote “they look terrible”, has highlighted issues of cherry-picking cultures rather than deep engagement and understanding.

Some of her allocates include the Austrian Commander Cross, awarded in 2008 for her contribution to art history. Serbia’s Golden Medal for Merits and Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award, both awarded in 2021 for her contribution to art, Danmark’s Sonning Prize, awarded in 2023 for her contribution to European culture.

In 2011 she was made an Honorary Royal Academician by London’s Royal Academy and in 2012 she established the Marina Abramovic Institute to provide opportunities for artists from all around the work to present lengthy performance pieces and encourages the collaboration of multi-disciplinary practitioners, including the arts, science, technology, and spirituality fields, in order to create communal participatory projects that critically engage with time, place, and human experiences.

Abramovic has had major exhibitions and retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, and her work has been recreated by galleries around the world, with the physical requirements of her work pushing forward debates surrounding a museums’ duty of care and raising questions about ethical performances.

Image: Marina Abramović, Rhythm 5 (1974). Gelatin silver print and letterpress panel, 57.2 x 81.9 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, U.S.A.