For my artist research, the artist I chose to further research was Marina Abramović. Marina is a Yugoslav artist best known for her performance pieces. When I saw her name come up I did not realize that I had actually been shown one of her works in capstone, her work just caught my eye. However, as I continued to research her, I came across Rhythm 0 which I had heard of before. This was a piece where Marina stood before an audience for six hours and allowed the audience to do whatever they pleased. She had a table full of objects, 72 to be exact, even a loaded gun. The purpose of her work was to see how far people would go with this. Marina found this piece to be much more challenging than she had anticipated and that what the audience did to her was grueling. “What I learned was that … if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you … I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”. She experienced a lot during this piece. I found it very fascinating and impressive that she put so much trust into these people and endured all of this treatment for six full hours. I think it also says a lot about our society that once she started walking away everyone ran in fear of facing her.
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