Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0, 1974
To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging (and best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her.
Abramović had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and actions.
Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as time passed (and the artist remained impassive) people began to act more aggressively. As Abramović described it later:
“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.
I
also, some of them (tracks 1, 2, 3, 5) were purely improvised.
as a result, the sound quality is not the one of a recording studio, but it preserves the freshness and genuineness of those instants in which the music was composed and performed.
credits
music by me and the white lash
composed and recorded between february 2011 and march 2012
thanks to:
marisa bellini, lucio mondini, emanuele crotti and the actors of “i candidi”
Green star Syrius stood over the sea’s rim, the island was a shadow.
from “The man who loved islands”, by D.H. Lawrence
edt:
The primordial darkness of the universe at the moment before creation, as represented in a plate in Robert Fludd’s 1617 Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica, atque Technica Historia (The Metaphysical, Physical, and Technical History of the Two Worlds, Namely the Greater and the Lesser). The words Et sic in infinitum (“and like this to infinity”) are written on all four sides of the square. - Paul La Farge on the color black in Cabinet (via never, palombo, elvira, invisiblestories)
