An artist who once let people do whatever they wanted to her explained why she put on a public performance where she had nine orgasms.
Marina Abramovic is possibly most famous for her 'Rhythm 0' piece, in which she stood still next to 72 objects for hours and the audience was invited to use the objects on her in any way they desired.
She said she was 'ready to die' if that was the consequence of that performance, and it very nearly came to that as by the end she'd been stripped of her clothes and had her skin slashed with blades.
One person even held a loaded gun to her head and put her finger on the trigger, with her dedication to the performance meaning she resisted none of this being done to her.
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Abramovic said she was left with 'one streak of white hair on my head' from the stress of it, and she could not 'get rid of the feeling of fear for a long time'.
In another one of her performances, she sat in a chair in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for two-and-a-half months with an empty chair across from her, and anyone could sit with her and have a 'silent conversation'.
In 2005, she took inspiration from another artist named Vito Acconci, who developed a performance called 'Seedbed' where he hid underneath a ramp at the Sonnabend Gallery in NYC and masturbated while speakers played him talking about his fantasies of people walking above him.
So 20 years ago at the Guggenheim Museum, Abramovic gave a series of performances called 'Seven Easy Pieces' of which 'Seedbed' was one.
At the time, she told New York Art that she had nine orgasms during her recreation of 'Seedbed' and said she'd 'never concentrated so hard in my life'.
She said: “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 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!"
Abramovic later said that having an orgasm is 'such an important moment' as 'you feel life, connected to nature, birds the rocks, the trees, everything becomes luminous and beautiful'.
She admitted that the energy required to masturbate for several hours in one day really took it out of her when she had to do another performance the next day.
Topics: Art, New York, Marina Abramovic
Joe Harker