Marina Abramović is known to most for being the artist who let people do whatever they wanted to her.
In her ‘Rhythm 0’ piece, the now 78-year-old spent six hours with the audience able to use a huge range of objects as she was ‘ready to die’ if that was the consequence.
And it would seem she wasn’t too far from that, with one person even holding a gun to her head and others leaving her skin slashed open.
But her performance art is not just limited to that one piece in obscurity as she once had nine orgasms during another.
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Abramović shared the ‘complication’ with this piece as she performed ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ in 2005, re-enacting works of art by others and herself in New York.
The Serbian conceptual and performance artist explained that the reason behind this project was because she was ‘so angry’.
“You know in all these years performance was nobody’s territory,” she explained to Art Monthly. “But now everybody - I mean everybody - was taking from performance. Even Lady Gaga - you name it - and without really referring to the original material.”
So, she wanted to ‘teach a lesson’ and asked for permission and paid foundations in order to re-stage performances.
The second one was Vito Acconci’s ‘Seedbed’.
In this, he hid underneath a ramp at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York and masturbated while speakers played out him reciting his fantasies of people walking above him.
But Abramović said there was a slight issue for her with doing this one as she explained: “This one is very complicated because men produce sperm but a woman produces something else.”
The artist told New York Magazine at the time that she had nine orgasms during her performance and had ‘never concentrated so hard’ before in her life.
“Having orgasms publicly, being excited by the visitors steps above me - it’s really not easy, I tell you! I’ve never concentrated so hard in my life,” the self-proclaimed ‘grandmother of performance art’ said.
“The problem for me, with this piece, was the absence of public gaze: only the sound. But I heard that people had a great time; it was like a big party up there! I ended with nine orgasms.
"It was terrible for the next piece - I was so exhausted!”
She later described having an orgasm as ‘such an important moment’ which can make you ‘feel life, connected to nature, birds the rocks, the trees, everything becomes luminous and beautiful’.
Topics: Marina Abramovic, Art
Jess Battison