Rhythm 0 (1974)
Rhythm 0 (1974) - Marina Abramovic
Perhaps Marina Abramovic's most famous piece of performance art, Rhythm 0 is a a six-hour long exercise in interacting with the abject, confronting and inciting its presence. In this piece, Abramovic stands, utterly passive, in front of a long table containing 72 objects. The objects ranged from the harmless and pleasurable—sugar, honey, flowers—to the provocative and dangerous, such as knives, scissors, and most notably, a handgun and an individual bullet. All of these items were available for spectators to use on Abramovic's still, silent body. Over those six hours, a range of actions were enacted upon her, as she was drawn on, kissed, scratched, cut, undressed, fed, tortured, and, ultimately, a participant loaded the gun, put it into Abramovic's hand and aimed it at her neck. Even then, Abramovic stood still, till the very end of those six hours. Of the piece, she says, "In the beginning, the public was really very much playing with me. Later on it became more and more aggressive. 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." The viscerality of the body as subject, the body as embodiment of monstrosity, of passive and unspoken femininity, cements this piece into the cultural canon as a most dangerous conversation with the abject. To borrow from Judith Butler's notion of performativity, particularly gender performativity, Abramovic's raw, accessible body so inarguably made an object by its viewers disorients the idea of the monstrous feminine as intrinsic or some divine internal force, in fact challenging femininity as inherent or real at all. In that seminal text, Gender Trouble, Butler says, "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results" (Butler 25). Indeed, if Cohen's "(Seven Theses)" argue that the monster can be constituted as a "harbinger of category crisis," then the dissolution of supposedly essential categories represents a certain modern monstrosity.
In her passivity, Abramovic's body is read as victim, as vulnerable, but also as instigator. Her gender, as she is initially adorned in a silk slip dress, is not quite stable, is in fact no longer engaging in performativity but rather forces the participant performativity, in its highly stylized rituals and habits, upon her. Here the monster is performance, is at once the self-performance of gender and identity but also the thresholds women are forced to occupy, that ensnare their bodies and forces their every experience to be considered not, never, such a serious thing as art but always performative. What constitutes the "Real" is disturbed and collectivized, thus what is considered monstrous is revealed not as a stasis but as an open dialogue amongst people dependent upon the time and space inhabited in the moment. Marina's "performative act," as defined by Butler, desecrates the idea of monstrosity as fixed and sacred. The fragmentation of an imaginary, bordered public space, in its collision with a performatively passive body, appears to be a site of such potential monstrosity that it becomes a mirror for much of our cultural frustration with, and hatred for, the feminized body.
Self-infliction emerges as a site of monstrosity; is she offering herself to be victimized, to be made emblematic of the monstrous, the abject, or is she simply revealing that such monstrosity is indeed not hers at all, not even incited by her but only the participants?