Ethical Implications in Marina Abramović’s "Rhythm 0"

Penix, Sadie

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Date Uploaded: 04/26/2026
Date Modified: 04/27/2026

“In my opinion, wherever there is a public, there is a sacred place. When there is no public, there is no performance because there is no dialogue,” claimed Marina Abramović (b. 1946) in conversation with Italian art critic and contemporary art historian Achille Bonito Oliva. For Abramović, the presence of an audience is constitutive to performance. Performance art has frequently been defined by its provocative impulse, functioning as a responsive and unstable form that artists have turned to when engaging with political, cultural, or social pressures, and when seeking to unsettle the conventions of more established artistic disciplines. These sentiments are conveyed by her first performance works, The Rhythm Series (1973-1974). Over the course of two years, she completed five separate performances that explored the physical limits of the body and the relationship between performer and audience. Abramović performed Rhythm 0 (1974), the fifth and final work, at the gallery Studio Morra in Naples, Italy, from 8 pm to 2 am. She placed seventy-two objects on a table that could cause the human body extreme pleasure or pain, including but not limited to objects like a comb, lipstick, paint, a feather, a bone of lamb, cake, and a gun. Instructions posted on the wall declared: “I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility.” This experiment used the art space to expose what audiences are capable of when social inhibition is suspended and moral responsibility is left unguided. This paper asks, in her performance Rhythm 0, how does Abramović's deliberate surrender of bodily agency transforms the audience from passive observers into ethically implicated subjects, forcing an intersubjective encounter with the artist that exposes unconventional, if not revolutionary, social conditions governing the art space?

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