Rhythm 0 | Hacker News Reader

Rhythm 0

en.wikipedia.org

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I first learned about this piece in a college art class. Reading about it again, I’m intrigued by how much of the surrounding discourse (including the artist’s own comments) talks about “audience” and “public” and “humanity” in the abstract.

It seems to me that the outcome would have been heavily dependent on _who specifically_ was in the room. In that way, the piece speaks more to the psyche of _an_ audience and _a_ public, rather than _the_.

I’m also curious what people think of the name?

I think that's because usually, once people are in a group setting, we all kind of blend in together, acting as a group more than as individuals. Sure, there are always individuals that never conform to any groups, and they'll stick out, but most of the common human will start acting as a "person" rather than "John" when joining a group in a public setting.

It's still valid to argue that this was an audience, rather than something generalizable to humankind. Conformity looks very different depending on context: if this piece were being performed in an Amish community it would look very different than it did, not because of less group conformity (there would likely be stronger conformity) but because of conformity to different norms.

It's a piece though. It hasn't been performed multiple times because of the safety issue, but at its core the idea is that you could repeat it for arbitrary audiences.

Yes, in practice the performance history can only shed a little light on the nature of audience, but the piece is conceptually capable of broader insight.

> but at its core the idea is that you could repeat it for arbitrary audiences.

That's the idea, but I don't see any strong reason to believe it. There are too many unknowns for me right now.

We do not know how the event was marketed. Who was invited? What were they told in advance? Presumably this wasn't a random sample, it was a self-selected group of people, and how the event was presented would determine the type of people who showed up.

Here's what I do know: It was scheduled for 6 hours from 8pm-2am on a Wednesday, and she had previously engaged in some very violent performance art [0][1][2][3]. That suggests that the audience is self-selected away from people who have jobs or families, and that the audience was primed to expect that she wanted a violent performance. Another commenter indicated that the audience egged each other on in the name of the performance.

This does not suggest to me an event that could be recreated with an arbitrary audience by an arbitrary performer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87#Rhythm_1...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87#Rhythm_5...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87#Rhythm_2...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87#Rhythm_4...

> This does not suggest to me an event that could be recreated with an arbitrary audience by an arbitrary performer.

Could you explain why not? What's stopping me from putting on a preformance if this in my project space next week? (other than intellectual property concerns)

Shia Labeouf did something similar called IAMSORRY, although I'm not sure how similar. Suspect there was no loaded gun provided.

Apparently a woman sexually assaulted him and was removed by gallery staff.

That feels somewhat orthogonal to the question asked?

I wonder if it mightn't be tried again at some point using a realistic "artificial human"/android.

Prefacing with that I love this piece and have always found it fascinating.

This has always been my main criticism. As art, it's lovely - horrifying, but fascinating.

As a critique of humanity, it doesn't sit well with me to assert anything in a general way based on the behavior of the audience. I don't see humanity so bleakly as to assume this would happen in every case with any group of people.

At most this shows what "performance art" enthusiasts are like. I wager they're not representative of humanity as a whole.

I was coming to write a similar comment. It's a pity that the article doesn't talk more about the audience.

To answer your question the name is suitably cryptic and can be interpreted as referring to the artist not moving. It kind of pales compared to the my thoughts about the actual 6 hour performance which truthfully leaves me feeling a bit nauseous and disturbed

I lot of society's ills are blamed on the common man. Never the elite.

The elite are just common men with money & power, no?

They are but they don’t think of themselves as common people except for the very aware few.

Studies have demonstrated that money & power (same thing at a certain point really) reduce a person's capabilities for empathy. If you consider "EQ" a thing, you could say power makes people "dumber" in this sense.

So no, common folk with money & power are different from common folk without, especially when confronted with the other.

I feel like this type of language is standard for artists (and startup founders oddly enough). By that I mean they tend to over inflate their scope/impact. This product is going to change the WORLD!! My art is having a huge impact on SOCIETY!!

I think your assessment is correct, but that type of broad/overblown language is not uncommon at all.

Having written some of these statements I want to point out this is done because of the impact requirements of funding programmes.

…and the public has taken the lesson of "the longer the artist statement, the worse the art"

I don't think the public puts a lot of stock into artist statements one way or the other. "Good" art can have eye-rollingly self-important artist statements on the placard just like "bad" art. We all know it's just a part of the game the industry plays.

Given the date, I suspect it was influenced by the Stanford Prison Experiment, which was just three years prior. We now know that Stanford Prison was not an experiment at all [0], but at the time I imagine it was fresh on everyone's minds and believed uncritically.

The proximity to Stanford Prison, coupled with the time (8pm-2am) and her wording ("There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. Performance. I am the object.") go a long way towards explaining what happened here. Not that the behavior is acceptable or justified, but that it certainly should not be used to come to any bleak conclusions about humans in general.

EDIT: Also, it's important to note that she had in the prior year performed four different pieces that left her wounded or unconscious. We don't know what they were told in advance, but the audience was almost certainly aware of her MO when they showed up and expecting something intense. That would both have an impact on the kind of person who chose to be there and on their behavior once present.

[0] https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-exper...

Indeed, for a more optimistic take on humans, see this recent piece by Zeynep Tufekci:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/03/opinion/columnists/burnin...

There was a vogue for stuff about man's innate inhumanity around this time. Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Experiement, Cut Piece, Rhythm 0, Sex Raft Experiment etc.

Don't forget The Third Wave (1967): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(experiment)

Milgram's experiments were ten years prior. And the interpretation of the experiments' results, that Milgram himself favored, was not about man's innate inhumanity, but about man's ability to perform inhumane acts if ordered by an authority. He emphasized that none of the subjects would willingly shock "the learner" unless ordered to.

More importantly, this is echoed in the other works/experiments. Cut Piece explicitly instructs the audience to cut away pieces of her clothing. The "Sex Raft" was intended to initiate conflict in order to find a resolution but ended out just showing that everyone got along until the "experimenter" deliberately intervened. The Stanford experiment, as said before, explicitly set the "wardens" and "prisoners" up as enemies and instructed them to act hostile to each other.

It seems that the only cases of violence in these "experiments" turn out to be violence performed under explicit instruction. Also note that Milgram's experiment not only has the instructor explicitly insist on an order being carried out but it also removes the subject of the harm by only providing a voice channel whereas the instructor is present in the room with the participant. And a number of participants eventually refused to comply nevertheless.

I go into more detail downthread, but my take is just like the Prison experiment, the takeaway isn't "humans are terrible", rather "humans will do what is expected of them".

Even if the audience didn't know about her and her whole schtick being risky performance art, the table, the items, and the directions set up an expectation of "risky shit is gonna go down". The real question is how far the audience is willing to go in terms of inflicting risk.

Given that this performance has taken place in a large, western city with a random audience, what makes anyone think that the outcome would be significantly different if you would perform it multiple times, in similar contexts, assuming the audience has no knowledge of the other instances?

The pattern seems clear to me: you have a situation in which you are "allowed", even encouraged, to do harm to a person. You are "hidden" in a crowd. The crowd starts off with harmless actions but the get more intense over time, the boundary is pushed continuously. As long as you can hide in the crowd, you cheer. But as soon as you have to answer as an individual, you turn into a coward.

Of course you might think of specific contexts, in which the outcome would be different. But in a general setting? Why should this be the case?

The performance took place in 1974, barely 30 years after the fall of the Nazi regime. Under this regime, a whole people was put in a similar situation, where the treatment and dehumanization (i.e. objectification) of specific groups (in particular, Jews) got worse over time, publicly and continuously. I think in this historical context, the performance clearly referred to that time. I don't remember the 1970's, but in the 80's and still in the 90's, WW2 and the Third Reich were very much present in the public mind and often referred to in conversation. One example is Todd Strasser's novel The Wave from 1981, which shows how an "innocent" audience is transformed into an aggressive mob. I remember that this novel, and the movies based upon it, led to discussions where some people claimed "this certainly wouldn't happen here/to us/to me/now".

I think it needs a good explanation why today, or a different crowd, would be any different.

Not a random audience. An audience of the sort of people who go to six hour performance art shows.

describe, with stats, how the sample differs from the mean

I find it interesting as well that many here seem to miss one of the main aspects of the piece: the violence of men against women. It's not just "an audience" but a very divided audience.

When you watch it back it's predominantly men who grope her body, harass her and laugh despite her visible tears.

I've seen this piece discussed in various places. Sometimes the gendered and sexual element of the violence against the artist is the main thing that is touched upon. In other contexts the women of the audience are actually backgrounded so completely that the reaction of the men is spoken about as if it's the entire audience.

The Guardian had an article today which touched on this for the anniversary: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/sep/25/marina-...

> the violence of men against women.

Why bring gender into this? Why assume without any other indication that this would have been different had the artist been a man? Or if the audience would have been only women?

I think you're missing the point of an art, especially art where the audience participates. Art is meant to invoke societal concepts, like gender. It makes sense to bring gender into a context such as an art piece where the audience are active participants.

I'd say there's a few reasons. First: the very visible recorded gender disparity in the audience reaction within the performance itself. Further: the statistical facts of gender based violence. The reaction in the case of this performance mirrors the reality outside the performance hall, where women almost inevitably face various level of gender based violence throughout their lives.

Lastly I'd also say because I believe (although I could be wrong) the gender divide of HN is unbalanced towards men like myself, so it can be helpful to raise these issues at times where our blindspots might lead us to miss interesting or important elements of the stories shared. In cases where that blindness helps real world violence to thrive I feel it's doubly important that we can discuss it without getting defensive.

> Why assume without any other indication that this would have been different had the artist been a man?

Without any other indicator? Like I say, we have huge indicators in the statistical makeup of violence outside of the performance hall. Women are far more likely to experience sexual violence. Indeed, the likelihood of Marina experiencing sexual assault at work would have already been non-negligible even if she wasn't inviting interaction.

> Or if the audience would have been only women?

Please note: the audience in reality wasn't "only men." it was a basically even mix, but the violence of the reactions was far from balanced.

Has anyone attempted to replicate the performance with a man as the target?

Didn't Shia Labeouf do a similar performance art piece and claim to have been raped by a woman during it?

Yes, it was called #IAMSORRY.

I'm afraid this is very much an "a man in a pub told me" anecdote, but a while ago I chatted with somebody who apparently interviewed people who attended the original Rhythm 0. She said that initially people were reluctant to behave in the violent ways expected, and Abromović's assistants were telling people they were spoiling the art by being too timid. None of the online write-ups mention this so idk, but it would make a lot of sense. The piece would've been a damp squib if (a few of) the audience hadn't behaved as they did.

Either way, perhaps it makes sense to think of the audience reaction as artistic collaboration, rather than innate human visciousness.

This is really an important piece of information to understand the original art! The interpretation is vastly different because of this!

It reminds me of a story I heard about John Cage's Music of Changes, which was famously composed randomly. John Cage purportedly threw coins and consulted the I Ching to determine each subsequent note. However, during a memorial at John Cage's death, David Tudor told a story about how he saw John Cage just writing down the notes and not throwing coins. When he asked for an explanation, John Cage said the he did not have to throw coins "because my mind is random."

Yes! If true it reminds me of Hasan Minjaj.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/hasan-minhajs-fab...

Ugh, that's disappointing to read. Certainly, I don't assume the stories told in standup are precisely true. But it's poor form to make up a story about being a victim of bigotry.

I do question if it's unfair that a non-minority comic can make up stories about whatever and I don't necessarily feel that's a problem. But I think it's the fact that people will assume you've been victimized as a thing to know about you outside of your performance that feels wrong.

> When he asked for an explanation, John Cage said the he did not have to throw coins "because my mind is random."

Was Cage claiming some kind of spiritual musical connection from choosing pitches based on the I Ching? If not, then it was just a practical compositional consideration. He didn't need cryptographically secure sequences, and-- at least in terms of music cognition-- at worst he ended up repeating consecutive pitches fewer times than he should have. (And if he started with I Ching-derived patterns he may have noticed the repetitions and successfully emulated them with his mind!)

After all, his general need for random processes was to avoid accidentally falling back into patterns from the common practice period of tonal music (esp. patterns from the Romantic era). In other words, his mind was basically good enough for the avant garde. :)

For me, the interpretation of the art changes significantly. That it was composed randomly was the entire point of the music. If the anecdote was true, that was just normal composing that every composer has done since there was such a profession.

> because my mind is random

I can't find the source, but I think it's Scott Aaronson who told a story of a device with two buttons, which students were invited to press as rendomly as possible, but training a simple Markov model allowed them to predict what button an individual would press next most of the time. Student after student tried to trick the predictor, and failed. Then this one guy comes along and mashes the buttons and the prediction accuracy never goes above 50%. When they asked how he was doing it, he said he "just used my free will".

Similar story, I used to know an artist who knew her casually. He said that she was intensely aware of the commercial aspect of her work and is basically the art equivalent of a shock jock. She gets a lot of attention and makes a lot of money from doing the most outrageous things she can think of.

I wouldn't feel bad about anecdote in this case. All the online descriptions of the performance, including this Wikipedia article, rely solely on the artist's narrative of the events.

Attempting to extract a conclusion about human nature from this event is as ridiculous as trying to determine if hypnosis is real based on the outcomes at a hypnosis performance.

The people were not randomly selected. We are not told what their instructions were. We do not know what their relationships were with the creator/subject of the piece. None of that is a "problem" with the piece, of course, because it doesn't even purport to be science. It's not "performance art" in the sarcastic sense that you might apply to a very poorly designed social science experiment. It's actually performance art. It tells us as much about humanity as an indie film depicting the same occurrences would.

I think art does capture a perspective of humanity in a way that science does not. In a sense, you can argue science is a kind of art, also, with its own perspective of humanity-- notions of conclusions drawn only from observable phenomena isolated from interference/the world can somehow apply to a world full of interference and knock-off unforseen consequences.

I don't know how you can scientifically glean any conclusion that the artist was trying to discover or perspect, here, as effectively as she is trying to do so.

I wasn't trying to say art has no value, just that its value isn't in it being a source of conclusions. Art can raise questions that we wouldn't have had otherwise, and questions are the starting point of science (and that of further art).

> I don't know how you can scientifically glean any conclusion that the artist was trying to discover or perspect, here, as effectively as she is trying to do so.

This is what I disagree with. If there is a conclusion that you think you have drawn from this work, then you should re-frame it as a hypothesis and test it properly. Or just be content with the new questions, perspectives, and the experience of it. Just don't go saying that you learned something reliably predictive about how humans behave.

How do I test it properly in science, except through what she did here? Genuinely asking. Am I paying people 10$ amazon gift cards for the opportunity to sexually assault a woman? VR-cut-and-drink-woman-blood?

Even if you can't ethically test it scientifically, that doesn't mean the alternative is to take conclusions from it instead. You have to recognize it's limitations for what they are.

I’m not sure different people would produce a different outcome. Maybe?

But if you think of it as a statistical mixture problem, there is some sample size where the same aggregate personality emerges in the crowd, much like we expect any given sample of air to have the same characteristics.

So many it’s a question of whether the sample size was large enough to represent the overall population? (“Population” might just be “those who go to this kind of thing” and not all humanity)

> “Population” might just be “those who go to this kind of thing” and not all humanity

Yeah this is the key. The audience is a group of people interested in performance art. They didn't show up for a 6 event where nothing happens.

At any scale, especially at the scale where the aggregate personality is going to become visible, the collective behavior will dominate the individual behavior. You won't be able to separate the two unless you modify the experiment to include another part with meaningfully isolated individuals.

Abromovic's art isn't for everyone, but you can't really deny that this produced some really crazy reactions.

All modern art produces strong opinions in the audience, but performance art trips a lot of peoples BS sensor.

That said, I don't know how you see the results of this and not come away at least thinking about what happened. Which is the point, and that makes it successful as art.

She is also a focal point of paranoid speculation among pizza-gate and Q types. They think that elites use her as some performance art shaman that helps them do something? Not sure what, but its bad.

No type of art is for everyone, and this will have plenty of "it's not art, it's just a performance" detractors.

I'm not qualified to make these judgements nor I car for them.

But I think too, that's extremely hard to ignore her experimental work in studying the relationship between a performance and the audience.

She's been an absolutely terrific pioneer in the field and her work will certainly outlive her.

I don’t see what the difference is between this performance and one of the earlier experiments in social psychology by Milgrom and Zimbardo. There’s no way she didn’t get the idea from them. So, to me, this is neither original nor interesting.

In general, I don’t see the point of conceptual art, as it presupposes that the artist has some privileged perspective on the world that they can enlighten us all with. For me, this is a problem much better suited to the scientific method. And anyway, if the only point of your art is some abstract theory, why not write it out clearly on a single sheet of paper? I know it won’t win you the Turner prize, but it will save us all a lot of time.

"Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted" (attributed to Albert Einstein)

>In general, I don’t see the point of conceptual art, as it presupposes that the artist has some privileged perspective on the world that they can enlighten us all with.

The privilege is simply that they went out and did it, I think. Someone wants to see what happens when you do XYZ, they do XYZ, and that's it. I don't know why this is taken as a sign of extreme arrogance or anything.

For someone who respects the scientific method, you seem awfully dismissive of peer review...

So what if Milgrom and Zimbardo's studies in conformity already happened? We don't run an experiment once and stick with the results forever. That's patently un-scientific.

Regardless, just because you didn't understand the piece, doesn't mean it's not art, and just because you found scientific studies to be more conclusive doesn't mean that this performance failed to further our understanding.

I know this was supposed to be a demonstration of how evil humanity can become. But it failed to show humanity as gravitationally evil. Rather, it was a celebratory joy of how much humanity can be divided, how guilty it can feel, and how courageous or fake are its actions in face of conflict.

This was not art. This was a challenge. And "artist" submitted her life away.

It's an attack on the human spirit in a way. The message is, "look, humanity IS truly awful." People walk away from it thinking, "Maybe everyone is evil." Now, does that serve a good purpose in this world? Seems a little satanic to me.

I had a similar thought. It seems like an attack on morality, implying that there is no true morality or God-given conscience, only fear of consequences.

> After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.

Hard to judge from the wiki page, there are so little details, but this sounds fake and staged. I think there were less stunts back then so people were more trusting. At any rate, I get strong vibes of some kind of agenda here, and you're right that it's probably not a godly one.

The bounds of morality are a social construct. So, if you stage something that is purposefully meant to create an environment that seems to be outside of society, you will get behaviour that is not bound by regular social norms and morality. It is possible that saying this was the artist's goal, but who knows.

But yes, there is no true morality. How can there be? In nature, there is only survival. A lion is happy to find some prey thas has had a stroke of bad luck and gotten stuck or hurt so it can't easily fight back.

And the previous paragraph is not meant to say that the lion is evil. No, the lion simply is.

Nature is not a model of morality though. It's a pretty linear system that offers very few choices that don't lead to death. We constructed a society where there are many more choices other than death, and in doing so defined a moral system.

> We constructed a society

That's just nature. Unless you'd argue that bonobos have "defined a moral system" because they have "constructed a society" that is built on mutual cooperation, all humans have done is find increasingly abstract ways to cause harm to one another in order to work around the natural tendency towards cooperation.

What makes human morality special is not how we support each other but how we hurt each other. And this is a fairly recent achievement even in our own species' historical timescale.

I'm assuming you don't have any free will and it's the combination of your genes and experiences that made you get to this position.

Is there a point to your statement? The existence or non-existence of free will has no discernable effect on reality (see the "philosophical zombies" thought experiment).

Of course it was staged: it was performance art! It's not like she found herself wandering through the gallery and suddenly decided to subject herself to the whim of strangers. The event was planned ahead of time.

Or do you mean the reactions of the audience sound fake/staged? In either case, what gives you that idea?

> It's an attack on the human spirit in a way. The message is, "look, humanity IS truly awful." It didn't have to be an attack on the human spirit. It was open to that, and open to something positive. But people didn't take the positive route.

> People walk away from it thinking, "Maybe everyone is evil." Now, does that serve a good purpose in this world? Seems a little satanic to me.

That's kinda weird, given that the belief that "everyone is evil" is one of the core ideas of Christianity. Well, everyone but one person, I suppose.

> the belief that "everyone is evil" is one of the core ideas of Christianity.

Huh, never heard that before.

Um. What has been your exposure to Christian theology?

Some people would probably formulate the notion of original sin as "everyone is inclined to evil" or "everyone is prone to evil" or "everyone is vulnerable to committing evil" or "everyone is broken" or "everyone needs help against evil" rather than "everyone 'is' evil".

Wouldn't that defeat the need for Jesus, then?

Maybe some of my formulations are too weak. How about "everyone has a nature that will lead him or her to do wrong and incur guilt"?

Traditionally, Christ is the savior (rescuer) from all kinds of life's ills, not only from the much-ballyhooed (in Protestant circles) fate of dying a jackass.

Views on how Atonement works are at the very core of the doctrinal differences between Christian denominations. Painting with very rough strokes, the general agreement is that without Jesus' sacrifice and the Faith, humans would be doomed to stay in sin and never be reconciled with God.

That mirrors my broad understanding as well.

I could ask you the same. Ideas like “love thy neighbour” don’t feel very “everybody is evil” to me.

I recognize that there are Christian doom cults that think everyone is evil but I’m surprised by how plainly you call that a “core belief”. It does not fit in any way the (moderate protestant) way I was raised, and it doesn’t match the beliefs of my catholic friends either. Every devout Christian I know (though I know only a few) is an optimist about humanity.

> I could ask you the same.

Raised Catholic through confirmation. Long time atheist, although I attend my wife's evangelical protestant church. So admittedly an outsider's view on all of this.

> Ideas like “love thy neighbour” don’t feel very “everybody is evil” to me.

I don't know why those would be incompatible. People can be evil, but you can love them all the same.

> I’m surprised by how plainly you call that a “core belief”.

Really? Sin and the need for Jesus's salvation are universal through the branches of Christianity I've experienced. They use different terms for it—Catholicism talks about "original sin", protestants talk about "mankind's sin nature". I know nothing about Orthodox Christianity, but I would expect them to fit in there somewhere. Catholics and Protestants argue about salvation through faith or salvation through works, but they both see it as something desirable.

There are lots of branches of Christianity, and so I don't have a full picture, but I've never heard of one that didn't share this belief, and I'm not sure I'd understand what their faith is all about at that point. But if you've got some info, I'm happy to learn more. I kinda hate to quote Wikipedia here, but it mirrors my understanding:

> The doctrine of sin is central to the Christian faith, since its basic message is about redemption in Christ. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_sin)

Maybe my outsider's take on it is off, but calling these beliefs satanic seems way out there to me.

Thanks for this info. I see what you're saying. To clarify, I meant a _little_ satanic. As in, "giving satan" vibes. Not some truly evil ritual.

> I kinda hate to quote Wikipedia here

I don't mind wikipedia but it has some weird branches. Recommended reading, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_ethics

From the top of that page:

> Christian ethics, also known as moral theology, is a multi-faceted ethical system. It is a virtue ethic, which focuses on building moral character, and a deontological ethic which emphasizes duty. It also incorporates natural law ethics, which is built on the belief that it is the very nature of humans – created in the image of God and capable of morality, cooperation, rationality, discernment and so on – that informs how life should be lived, and that awareness of sin does not require special revelation.

> awareness of sin does not require special revelation.

Then jump into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law

The link you provided highlights the word "Hamartiology" which I just learned is the study of sin. I've never heard of this study before but I have studied some Buddhist teachings. Buddhists teach that when you steady your attention on a mental object, that object grows (for example gratitude). To me, it follows that studying sin leads to increased sin.

I think many modern Christians understand this and, therefore, sin is no longer such a central tenant to the faith.

(Fwiw I didnt call anything satanic)

Thanks for the explanation. I guess our mismatch is that you think sin and evil are the same thing and I think they’re very far apart. To me, stealing a cookie from mom when she’s not watching is sinful but not evil. Murdering people is evil but I don’t think that’s what your average Christian refers to when talking about sin.

> Fwiw I didnt call anything satanic

I know, it was flkenosad who posted the message that I originally responded to.

> you think sin and evil are the same thing and I think they’re very far apart

Well, I am an outsider, so it's not so much what I believe, it's my understanding of what Christian theology teaches. And my understanding might be wrong! Catholics have "mortal sin" vs. "venial sin", for instance, but I'm not sure that's the same distinction.

By no means an expert, but I know lots of Christians. That's not how they talk. But, I mean, every church is different.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin

Different branches of Christianity have their own view on what the Original Sin means. Catholic teaching assumes that humans lost their supernatural attributes during the Fall (most importantly, perfect free will) that should have prevented them from sinning. Humans are still good, but their desires can overcome what's left of their free will. Protestant teaching tends to teach that human nature has been corrupted by the Fall and is mostly evil now.

Perhaps I'm just a cynical person, but the only reaction I had when I read about this for the first time was "look, humanity isn't that awful at all."

Satanic? Where did that come from?

My assumption is that they mean Satanic as in "representative of the worst parts of humanity" and not necessarily as in "of the devil himself"

Huh, I've never once thought of Satanic as representing that.

Being in this world for this long, there’s one thing I know for sure: Evil and apathy are the defaults. True goodness is rare. If you find it, treasure it.

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. - Solzhenitsyn

The sooner people realise this the better, imo.

I like her cannibal art where she has actors play dead bodies on a grazing table as the rich and famous pick food made into simulated body parts off the actors and chow down. The metaphor there is just so on point.

Related: this artist, Marina Abramović, has just become the first woman ever to have a solo exhibition hosted by the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which opened two days ago.

I haven't been, and it's had mixed reviews (well I haven't analysed the average of all reviews or anything, but I have seen one extremely positive one and one fairly negative one), but I thought worth mentioning as anyone interested in this thread/submission might be interested in going to see her more recent work.

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/marina-abramovic

(To enter the exhibition you walk through a fairly narrow doorway squeezing between a naked man and a naked woman who are standing on either side in the doorway, facing each other - or you can opt out and ask to be shown to the entrance that doesn't involve a narrow fit and naked people. NSFW photo of that doorway with two of the models used: https://d1inegp6v2yuxm.cloudfront.net/royal-academy/image/up... )

Thats the good stuff! There's a lot of empowerment in nudity. Rewriting the script, moving away from it being an object of desire / reward.

I'm thinking JLaw on the beach in No Hard Feelings, or any episode of Naked Attraction. Demystifying sex opens up a fuller picture of life.

Imagine how much worse this could have been, if the audience members were somehow completely anonymized

Edit: this is not some hot take on anonymity on the web

Her art sure is provocative. If her performances were just someone staring at a wall for 8 hours there would be no wikipedia page on it. We'd be talking about some other outrageous performance artist instead.

> 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:

Putting a razor blade, a metal bar, a gun, and a bullet on the table and inviting random strangers to do whatever they like, it shouldn't be surprising what happened. One can appreciate that it tells a story about "what people are really like" or a commentary on "conformity" or "morality". But after witnessing all horrors of history, and modern day, did we really need another confirmation? Perhaps she thought the people of Naples in 1974 had reached some enlightenment and wouldn't be like that?

All in all, not trying to criticize her. I appreciate performance art, I even went to see "The Artist Is Present" in NY in 2010, but at least this particular piece seems mostly a provocation for the shock value and to gain attention.

>Putting a razor blade, a metal bar, a gun, and a bullet on the table and inviting random strangers to do whatever they like, it shouldn't be surprising what happened.

Maybe it's not so surprising that it happened in 1974 Naples, but I would be quite surprised indeed if the same level of violence were reached in, say 2023 Tokyo, Oslo or Bern.

I wonder where all the commenters (you're not the only one) saying this is unsurprising or predictable are from.

To me the problem is as an audience member here you know what the artist is expecting of you. She is the one putting the idea of violence into their heads by putting weapons there. This is a piece of art, and a good one, not some sort of psychological experiment.

It may not be a good experiment, but I think there's still learnings to be had.

If you give me a gun and say "you can put this to my head if you like, idk" I'm still not going to. Clearly this isn't true of everyone. That people rose to her bait is not what I would have expected.

If a magician invited you on stage to and gave you a gun and told you to point it at their head you probably would though right? The audience here are part of the show, and their role in it. Did the people who did things like cut her think of themselves more as actors in an extreme form of theater or audience members?

I would shoot a magician without much hesitation, assuming it to be a trick. Something in this performance was different, I don't think it was a trick.

Not a trick, but the artist's previous works in this Rhythm series were all about suffering, for instance Rhythm 10 and 5 she cut her self, and Rhythm 2 she took medication to give herself a seizure. If you are doing a series on suffering where you injure yourself, the audience is going to understand their role in the performance.

Right, and that's different than the magician where harm was never expected.

I would have been uncomfortable drawing blood, even if she wasn't, but I'm not surprised the audience got there.

I am quite surprised they put a gun to her head, and that there was any level of discussion/disagreement about it's use.

I feel a bit skeptical about this whole piece, given how the Stanford Prison experiment and the Milgram experiment were both heavily tampered with in order to get a more bombastic result. [0][1]

[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/beware-the-epiphany-industrial-c... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity

It's essentially an invitation to test the boundaries.

"Here's some razor blades and nails, do what you want, I am an art piece!"

Everyone immediately thinks "well I guess she wants us to test her with this stuff"

It's more of a stunt than anything... and since everything and anything can be art... sure... But I'd rather call it a stunt

The fact that you state that "an invitation to test the boundaries" and focus on the razors and nails says something about you (and probably humanity in general as well).

If you were present then what would you have done?

After all you could have given her a hug. Or used the feather to make her laugh. There were nice things on the table to choose from.

But yeah, I'd probably have done something not so nice as well. But why is that?

I think the point is that the objects provided have a large influence on the actions of the audience. If there were only feathers and face paint I would think the outcome would have been very different. Keeping that in mind might change what conclusions someone takes away from the whole thing.

Apparently, this was the last in a series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87#Career

I'm curious if this was ever repeated but not reported on because the results were much tamer. After all, we wouldn't be discussing this had nothing bad happened, right? If someone tried doing this but the audience was idle the whole time, would we ever know it?

Name another famous work of performance art.

There is your answer.

(Although I'm assuming you didn't study any type of art in college, but I did so I could blather on...)

Legally speaking what would have happened if an audience member had actually shot and killed her? As I understand it you can't actually give someone permission to kill you, at least in the USA.

I think you answered your own question there, they would be arrested and tried for murder.

In this case, you want Italian laws, as it happened in Naples. But I'm not familiar at all with it.

Performance art seems to regularly skirt laws, for better or worse. For example, if you participated in Seedbed by Vito Acconci (when Acconci is crawling around in the roof-space, masturbating while talking to you), could you claim sexual assault?

No idea, but I could probably think of at least 5 performance art cases that are borderline illegal but nothing ever happened as it's part of "art" or whatever.

Being an artist really offers you no immunity from the law (or just cops, who often have little understanding of the law). Music performers have quite often been arrested by local authorities following performances.

Examples:

Jim Morrison (The Doors) - Miami, 1969: Jim Morrison was arrested for indecent exposure and profanity during a chaotic concert, leading to a highly publicized legal battle.

Sid Vicious (Sex Pistols) - Various, Late 1970s: Sid Vicious faced multiple arrests, including for the alleged murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in 1978, though he died before a trial could take place.

Ozzy Osbourne - San Antonio, 1982: Ozzy Osbourne was arrested for public intoxication and urinating on the Alamo Cenotaph, a historic monument.

Marilyn Manson - Michigan, 2001: Marilyn Manson and his bandmates were arrested on charges of criminal sexual conduct involving a security guard during a concert.

N.W.A. - Detroit, 1989: N.W.A. members were arrested for performing their controversial song "F** tha Police" during a concert, leading to a brief detention.

2 Live Crew - Florida, 1990: 2 Live Crew faced obscenity charges over their explicit lyrics in their album "As Nasty As They Wanna Be," resulting in their arrest and a high-profile legal battle.

Pussy Riot - Moscow, 2012: Members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot were arrested for staging a protest performance in a Moscow cathedral against the Russian government.

Axl Rose (Guns N’ Roses) - St. Louis, 1991: Axl Rose was arrested after a riot broke out during a Guns N' Roses concert, with Rose allegedly inciting the crowd to violence.

GG Allin - Various, 1980s-1990s: Known for his extreme and often violent stage antics, GG Allin frequently faced arrests for indecent exposure, assault, and other charges during his performances.

It's so funny how this was almost my same exact (deleted) comment.

There is a certain level of intellectual dishonesty in leaving your comment up, knowing it is mostly not your words. It would be fair to tell your comment was mostly a chatgpt authored one that I chose to delete knowing that same intellectual dishonesty you now know.

(knock it off and don't ever do it again)

Why did you post it in the first place?

Intellectual dishonesty; I already admitted my own mistake.

also I wanted to make a dig against cops

Nowadays they usually have you sign something that says you agree to XYZ.

A sign has no power to override laws.

90 days in jail:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIVZDpT5cQg

That case was different because the "murderer" was explicitly told nothing would happen and was pressured into this by the "victim" against her wishes. The sentencing was mostly for being an idiot.

There's nothing in Rhythm 0 to suggest that the gun or bullet isn't real or that loading the gun and pulling the trigger while aiming at her head won't kill her. So the killing would likely be considered deliberate. At best this could test the boundaries of assisted suicide laws but where present these are usually very narrowly defined and wouldn't apply here even if she said in advance that she'd be okay with dying.

Murder. It's not like an art performance will be given an excemption from italian (or any other) laws.

It resembles the less extreme "Cut Piece" from Yoko Ono (1964)

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/yoko-ono-cut-piece-...

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/sep/25/marina-...

If you prefer watching a video, this is Marina talking about performing Rhythm 0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTBkbseXfOQ

This performance art sure sounds like some sort of kink!

Yeah, never give people you don't trust power over you if you can avoid it. Some of them will be kind to you, but that's not enough.

Her art, whatever you think about it as an art or performance, is about exploring the relationship between the performance and the audience. In her case, it's also body art and endurance performing.

I find that act a terrific example of her work.

I saw it as a commentary on how society treats the weak or less powerful. Some, but importantly not all, of us will exercise our power and will over other people, given the opportunity. The motivations for why some might choose to assert dominance over someone with less power could be interesting territory to explore in this piece, or perhaps a different one.

I was not criticizing her or her art.

At least a couple others have recreated this performance, and most striking to me is the survivorship bias. Guess if the videos where literally nothing interesting happened went viral with commenters praising the artist's safety among the audience.

Reminds me of Steven Millhauser's story _The Knife Thrower_. The titular knife thrower deliberately scars his assistant and audience members before pushing the act to the extreme to satiate the demands of the crowd.

I remember this being "exposed" in the Tate modern in London.

This piece of art is the one that made me acknowledge and appreciate modern art. It really makes you undestand the value of context and performance.

I was born in '72, was a Psych major, and had never heard of this. Wow.

this was depicted in 2011:

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_On_(House)

I don’t understand, nothing I see on Wikipedia mentions anything resembling TFA?

The Wikipedia article doesn't really discuss it, the reference is in the episode's introduction.

The episode in question features not-Marina-Abramović exhibiting not-Rhythm-0. An audience member approaches the table and picks up a weapon. Audience murmurs. Artist stands stoically. Audience member motions like they are going to use the weapon on the artist. Audience gasps. Artist's assistant protests. Artist objects to protests, then promptly collapses with mystery illness (House MD's writers had a thing for misdirecting the audience re: who's sick in the episode intros).

A similar performance is also shown in Sorry To Bother You. I hadn't heard of Rhythm 0 before watching the movie.

Yoko Ono did it in 1964

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/yoko-ono-cut-piece-...

Slightly different though.

"Cut Piece" worst case: she end up nude

"Rhythm 0" worst case: someone ends up shooting/stabbing/killing her, or rape.

Yoko did innovate and this piece might not have existed without her. But that should not take away at all from what Abramovic did. The fact that Beethoven built on the innovations of earlier artists does not diminish Beethoven.

Seems to say more about the artist than the audience.

Note for the next audience members: take the initiative to unload the gun.

No one has a very good reason to oppose you. Not that they could, you have the gun.

I believe the gun wasn't loaded at first, the audience was given a gun and a bullet.

Who is the one that started fighting someone with a loaded gun? Well done I suppose, most people would have just watched her die.

Just feed the bullet to the artist. Then it's art and 'safe'.

Does anyone know if ingesting and excreting a (small) bullet is particularly unhealthy?

Presumably this was a full cartridge (strictly speaking, the bullet is just the projectile; the cartridge includes the case, primer, and propellant).

Bullets are made of primarily lead; military rounds are always covered with another metal; civilian rounds may or may not be. Either way I wouldn't want to swallow the bullet. Then you have the primer and powder, which I also wouldn't want to swallow.

Putting it in your pocket and walking out would be a better idea.

Bullets are typically made of lead, so it's not ideal, but I'd rather swallow a bullet than have strangers wield a loaded gun in my direction.

Ingesting lead isn't healthy. From wikipedia: Lead is a devastating and persistent neurotoxin that accumulates in soft tissues and bones.

Elemental lead is bad but not that bad. It will mostly pass through the digestive system undigested. Especially something with a small surface area like a bullet.

Obviously still not something you want to do. But swallowing a bullet of any kind is probably not something you want to do anyways.

As I understand it, touching lead is actually worse than swallowing it because your skin is better at absorbing it than your digestive tract is. Also the toxicity comes from accumulation over time rather than accute exposure.

It sure ain't Bach. She succeeded against a self imposed constraint of her anxiety and baited needy and damaged people to reveal their own perversions. What a circle jerk. Demonstrations of human capacity for ugliness are a lot easier than revealing something beautiful. I've met a few people over the years who set themselves up to be victimized so that they could feel justified in their own malice toward the world, and it's a banal psychological trope you'd think people wouldn't fall for. A lot of conceptual and performance art to me is just sickness.

The only thing that makes her interesting as a phenomena is how she appears as an enabler and convener in the orbit of some cunning and opportunistic men whose nihilism she would seem to validate for them. When you see our purpose as being to renew life and thrive, to me this kind of worship of consuming material experiences that Abramovic is known for is a spiritual poverty.

I mean, I know nothing more about the piece than what I've just read, but wow, that's a take and a half. I just cannot fathom viewing what she attempted the way you did.

If anything, it offered the opportunity for humanity to reveal something beautiful, but instead, the audience took the opposite opportunity--something I honestly feel you have done here, but in words, which I almost felt as thorns in my bellybutton.

Agreed, that is one of the worst comments I've ever seen on HN. I am usually able to understand and empathize with opinions I disagree with, but that comment is just incomprehensible. I guess that's the point of the piece? I don't know if I would have been exposed to a worldview so opposite to mine if we didn't have this artwork to discuss.

There’s another anecdotal comment where someone heard that the audience was too tame, and some time into the performance they were prompted/goaded into interacting in more controversial ways, otherwise the performance would have been a dud.

If this is true, then it tends to support the GP post’s take: there was an intention to bring out the worst, not a neutral attempt to see what would happen.

Even if we disregard the anecdote, we can at least infer that the intention was to make an original, evocative piece of performance art. How does that implied goal cause people to act? Like a bunch of avant-garde nutjobs, maybe?

Were you able to find anything backing that up? I wasn't, and this is a very famous and thoroughly analyzed piece of art. Given the lack of evidence I'm leaning towards not believing that anonymous third-hand account.

If she wanted to see people acting beautifully, she would have performed it at a soup kitchen, or a temple. Or even just in a little cul-de-sac in an average neighborhood where people know each other and kids are present. Everyday places full of totally average people who aren't used to twisting their minds into scenarios on the ninth meta-level above reality.

All she succeeded in showing is that her audience is full of people obsessed with the ugliness of humanity.

Honestly flabbergasted by your reply. How did she bait anyone? How did she set herself up to be victimized? People could have just… not been violent. That would have been an entirely plausible outcome, yet here we are.

“She shouldn’t have been wearing those kinds of clothes if she didn’t want that to happen.”

Thank you for this comment, I had a hard time pinpointing exactly what made me feel uneasy about all those answers justifying the audience behavior or explaining that they were setup for violence because various harmful objects were present.

It is indeed the same way of thinking.

If you murder someone, I don't see how you could blame them for being too close to a knife or gun. Having the opportunity to do something does not systematically justify doing it.

edit: this logic does not apply even if the person brought the harmful object with them, the decision to do the harm is ultimately not made by the victim.

> People could have just… not been violent

In Naples...?

https://www-ilmattino-it.translate.goog/napoli/cronaca/spara...

https://www-napolivillage-com.translate.goog/cronaca/allaren...

Ah yes, the infamous city of Naples, where people have been intrinsically violent and bad people for decades, because .. Naples.

As Italian, with half of the family from Naples area, yes, that one.

What a take. How is she exactly to blame for the way this turned out? She set the stage for SOMETHING to happen, wether good or bad things happened was completely up to the audience. To see this and say "this is sickness" and "she invited people to harm here" is baffling. You seem extremely judgemental.

She has already performed acts of violence on herself. Acts a good part of her audience most likely has seen and appreciated, why would they go see her otherwise? And among the items were weapons and other instruments of pain. The name "rhythm 0" follows the same pattern as her other performances that involved self-harm.

So yes, I consider it an invitation to harm her.

I don't fully agree with this comment, but some repliers here would benefit from additional context.

Here is the table of materials Marina provided to be used on her: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2022/women-artists/r...

At least two thirds of the table is covered in various instruments of harm. What does that say to the viewer?

I think "baiting needy and damaged people to reveal their own perversions" is a fair characterization, although it may not be a complete one.

Oh well it quite changes my view of events that she herself provided the loaded gun. I did not read the wiki article that way.

> What does that say to the viewer?

I am interested in your answer to this question. My answer would not be "oh she must want us to hurt her with those". When I visit someone's house and they have a decorative hunting rifle hanging on the wall, I don't assume that they want me to shoot them with it.

I'm sure there are a thousand different interpretations of that table, one would be that she's pointing out how everyone is as vulnerable as she is, just less visibly. Everything on that table is an object that anyone can easily acquire and walk around with (and use). I have no idea, but "please attack me" would be my absolute last thought.

I understand there were suggestive instructions, but it's a piece of art produced by a human being. Nirvana has a song called "rape me", what does that say to the listener? Do you think it is meant to say "please rape the members of this band"?

A table with a eg handsaw “that one can use on me as desired” is very different from a hunting rifle on a wall. The sign explicitly encourages people to use the items on the artist. It’s really not far off from literally spelling out “please attack me”.

Of course that doesn't excuse people who do so in any way, they’re still the perpetrator. But I think your hunting rifle comparison isn’t very good.

I would still disagree. Someone apparently drank her blood which is totally out of pocket with seeing a knife on a table, honestly, and is not justified by "well there was a knife there".

I don't know, it seems pretty in pocket with seeing "this is an art exhibit and I want wild shit to happen".

Comparing it to a normal real world interaction where you expect people to just hang out and chat is ridiculous, if people just chatted it would be a totally failed set piece.

I dunno, when I saw this, I wanted to draw flowers on her skin instead, since she provided the rose as reference, and I do a bit of art myself. If people instead painted her, put her in robes, braided her hair or something else nonviolent, wouldn't that also be a spectacle?

It absolutely would not be a spectacle to the degree of being discussed on a technology site 50 years later if people braided her hair.

It's not an accident that she put a number of violent items out and had her assistants riling people up, something like "someone drank her blood" is exactly what it takes to make it into art history.

Ok, what about songs titled "Rape Me" or "Kill Me". When you heard "Try That in a Small Town", did that inspire you to go to a small town and actually try it? Does it confuse you when people attending a live Papa Roach show don't actually try to cut his life into pieces? I mean he literally just told them to, how could it be any more spelled out?

Maybe music doesn't count for some reason. How about something more interactive, like those "living history" reenactment villages (https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/). An actor comes up and challenges you to a duel. Do you accept and actually fight them? Someone on a soapbox in the town square is exhorting listeners to take up arms against the redcoats. As a matter of fact, you just toured an armory, and you see a patrol of British soldiers a few hundred feet away. Do you go arm yourself and attack the soldiers? Can you point to something concrete that differentiates these live interactive performers from Abramovic?

Is there any other piece of art where you'd take the content literally and attack the performer? Actually it's more than that, because if I took these instructions literally I still wouldn't attack her, since I don't desire to. You are making a leap that I still don't understand from "use as desired" to "well obviously anyone would desire to hurt her".

You are either pretending, or refusing, or failing, to understand subtext and intent.

Yes I am failing to understand the subtext other people are reading into this piece, and haven't seen a single comment attempt to explain it. What is the chain of logic that leads from "it says to do whatever I want" to "I will attack"?

I wasn't there and didn't attack anybody, but the chain of logic suggested is that Abramović was known for works involving bodily discomfort, injury and risk, and that it was reasonable to assume she intended this piece to be in a similar vein. In that context, placing dangerous objects on a table and saying "one can use [them] on me as desired" is not just saying the objects exist, in the same way that saying "do you have any ketchup?" is not just asking whether your host possesses ketchup.

I can see why somebody might be uncomfortable with the general shape of argument from a "victim blaming" point of view. If you genuinely don't understand it then again, not trying to be a dick here but perhaps you don't understand subtext and intent in the way most people do.

Thank you, this is a good explanation, but it isn't addressing my core point. I understand that Abramovic intentionally put herself in a vulnerable position, and that the instructions and weapons are intended to say something like "you could hurt me with these". What I am still not understanding is the transition from "could" to "should". The context, that this is an art piece and the artist has performatively hurt herself in the past, to me reinforces the idea that I shouldn't actually hurt her. To me the message is "I could, but we're both human beings so obviously I won't". To me, someone who takes it so literally that they actually attack is missing the subtext and context that this is art, this is a performance, this is a person and not a statue. They are failing to understand the difference between could and should.

The question I responded to is: "At least two thirds of the table is covered in various instruments of harm. What does that say to the viewer?" I maintain that "it says I'm supposed to hurt her" is not a rational answer. With the additional context that she usually hurts herself in these performances, it is understandable to have that thought, but not understandable or rational to act on it. I can think of lots of art that is intended to make you think about your capacity to hurt innocent people, but none that is intended to make you actually act on that.

Let me put it one other way: the commenter I initially replied to said that the presence of weapons on the table is useful context that should explain the actions of the audience members. I disagree, I don't think the presence of weapons is relevant at all or provides any amount of justification. I think the context you provided, that she usually hurts herself, is useful and does change my interpretation of her intent, but it still doesn't justify what anybody did. I still don't understand why somebody would choose to attack her. I also am a little bit skeptical that the audience would have been familiar with her other work. I'm not sure how the audience was chosen, but I don't believe the average person would have any idea who she was.

This is art. Think about writing a book, directing a TV show, or putting on a play. What should happen? There should probably be intrigue, emotion, and excitement. Very likely violence and evil. We should explore a broad spectrum of emotion. It's perfectly likely that most of what we explore is negative emotion, because originality is hard and positive emotion is arguably over-explored if you look at art as a whole through all of human history.

But this isn't just some mass-produced movie or family-friendly Broadway production. This is the cutting edge of art. It's supposed to challenge us. So perhaps we'll go beyond merely pretending at violence and do a tiny bit of actual violence. It's plausible, from a participant's perspective, that the creator of the piece intended that.

That's what I imagine the participants are thinking, anyways. They aren't just average folks of the street, after all, they're attendees at a crazy art exhibit. They've got to compete with people who hang themselves up by hooks driven through their skin, people who bite the heads of bats during rock concerts, and people who whip each other bloody in sadist orgies.

I'm not really clear what "supposed to" or "should" mean here. I'm pretty certain the audience would've understood it was expected that Abramović would sustain some sort of injury or discomfort, in line with her other pieces. I very much doubt anybody would subject themselves to a six hour performance without any idea what to expect. If nobody had obliged, I think it's fair to assume Abramović would've left disappointed, and would probably not be the conceptual art superstar she is today.

There's a whole world of consensual injury that to be honest I'm fairly personally prudish about, but nobody is making either of us participate in it. If people want to do it, if I'm honest I'm slightly judgmental but I feel like I should be less so.

As a performance artist myself, I think there is definitely an aspect of "the audience should hurt me a little bit, or at the very least threaten harm". Why are people fascinated with fire breathers, motorcycle jumpers, escape artists, etc? It's the thrill of risk.

Even without knowledge of her or her works, there's a lot of context that says "the risk is the point".

By putting harmful items out on the table, she made a deliberate choice for risk to be involved. The audience knows this. They know if she wanted a "safe" performance, she would have limited her selection. If the worst items were glue and feathers, the implied worse outcome is making her look like a chicken. Embarrassing, but not a huge harm. She put out a gun and a bullet. That implies (but does not outright verbatim say) that the sky is the limit - shooting me is an acceptable outcome.

That establishes the conceptual limit, but there are still societal shackles on behavior. Which is where "it's all about the risk" comes in. More risk = more sensational news, more notoriety for the artist. Clearly she wants something crazy to happen, else she would not put herself in a crazy position. So the audience starts pushing the limits of what is acceptable. I don't think they are harming her out of a direct desire to cause her harm, per se (might be some sadists in the audience), but there is an expectation that the risk level should ratchet up. But that ratchet doesn't occur without audience participation.

I think this perspective actually tempers the "this piece shows all humans are terrible sadists deep down" interpretation. Just like the Milgram experiments, it boils down to the general principle of humans tending to do the thing they think is expected of them.

> A table with a eg handsaw “that one can use on me as desired”

Does that not reveal the desires of the people who used the implements on her? (such as the one who cut her throat and drank her blood?). People could have chosen to not use the implements on her.

I agree. I think the fact that people had a choice _not to_ use an implement is just as important as the fact that they had a choice _to_ use an implement. Also important: _how_ the implement was used. When I read about this performance, it's pretty immediately evident that the choice was a large part of this performance.

What it says to me is not necessarily "please attack me" but "I want to see what happens if you are offered these temptations, and this is most of what I am interested in during this performance".

It's quite dark. She could have offered many other more benign, creative, playful options.

She did, there's a full list here: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/abramovic-rhythm-0-t148...

Only ~6 of them are things that I would classify as "weapons", and maybe ~10 others are not weapons but things that you could obviously use to hurt her (scissors, needle, etc.) There was food, paint, clothes, makeup for anyone that wanted to do something benign and creative.

I disagree that the weapons were "temptations". It is not normal to be tempted to hurt someone merely because you have a weapon and opportunity.

You're quite sure you don't see the difference between (1) a decorative hunting rifle and (2) laying out a large array of weapons and other dangerous objects for an audience and saying the following to that audience?

> Instructions:

> There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.

> Performance.

> I am the object.

> During this period I take full responsibility.

I agree it's not normal to want to hurt someone just because you have an opportunity, but you really don't see the artist doing anything to shift the possibilities of "normal", by phrasing the instructions in this way?

I do see a difference, I just don't agree that the intended message is "please literally hurt me". Even if you believe that is the intended message, it still isn't rational or acceptable to act on it.

We agreed on that two posts ago, so maybe there's nothing further to discuss.

I'm not saying I'd go bad either but when I go to my friend's house and they've got decorative hunting rifles they usually lack a sign instructing to "Use this on me however you wish"

But if there were such a sign, you still wouldn't shoot them. So in what context would you actually shoot? Maybe if it was a stranger instead of your friend? Maybe if they said "don't worry, it's art, it's ok"? I'm trying to understand what about the context here is making the audience members' actions seem normal and expected to some commenters here.

That's fair. Honestly I think the difference I'm thinking about is deindividuation stemming from being in a crowd that is in this situation. I'm still pretty sure I wouldn't shoot but if everyone else was poking with a pen I might also.

I guess my point is that there are a lot of factors in this situation that aren't just individuals making decisions.

Even thinking about the Milgram experiment, though of course that was authority figures telling them what to do, in a crowd I feel like the people who take charge and start some action typically end up being a defacto authority figure.

I don't think you're wrong though that there are DEFINITELY some outliers in this. The blood drinking is weird. The person holding the gun to her head is probably cause for a mental evaluation.

But, overall, I feel like I can't blame some of the more mild cases presented here for their actions.

Other important context is her past performances [0]. Rhythm 0 is the last of five performances in which she injured herself, intentionally lost consciousness, and took medications that gave her seizures. In one of the performances a sympathetic audience came to her rescue when she fell unconscious, so she performed the next one alone with a cameraman who was instructed not to intervene. Once again, in contrast to the picture of humanity she seemed determined to paint, he intervened anyway.

Given that history, I sure wouldn't have shown up for Rhythm 0, and I don't know many decent people who would have either.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87#Rhythm_1...

> Demonstrations of human capacity for ugliness are a lot easier than revealing something beautiful.

Not always. See that Acali experiement ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acali ).

To make it short: An experimenter took a bunch of people, put them a raft expecting sex and violence, instead, they became best friends.

"..scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, a gun, and a bullet"

The naivety in some of the responses to your take surprise me. If you walked into the centre of London, Sydney or NYC, setup a table which included these objects and invited the public to do whatever they wanted to you, the general outcome is fairly predictable. And the protagonists can present the profundity of their scene as insight and call it art. So, bravo them.

I agree. And something overlooked is that Rythym 0 isn't an incitement for good people to do something bad; it's inciting good people to leave.

If good people pick up the roses and bad people pick up the guns, why would the good people want to stay in that environment?

Maybe it was about more than just her?

> Demonstrations of human capacity for ugliness are a lot easier than revealing something beautiful.

This almost seems like an obvious truth but most people seem oblivious to it.

In the general case, I like to say that "destroying is much easier than creating". Sadly, for decades now, most of art (and society) has been more about the former than the latter.

If anyone reading this has sources, essays, articles, books to suggest to me that touch on this issue, I am all ears

Ok, but please don't fulminate or post in the flamewar style. We're trying for the opposite here, and you can make your substantive points without any of that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't agree with the commentator, but I think with extreme pieces like this any and all interpretations are on the table. Challenging and disruptive things aren't always handled eloquently or reasonably, otherwise they wouldn't be challenging and disruptive.

Consider reactions you'd rather not see here as extensions of regrettable behaviors in the performance of the piece. In other words, did 'Rhythm 0' ever really end, or are we all in it?

This is a terrible place to talk about art. We probably should avoid it entirely because the flamewars are inevitable.

The idea is to discuss provocative things without getting provoked to sputtering grumpitude and if you can't help getting provoked to sputtering grumpitude, don't write it on HN. It's imperfect and limiting in a number of ways but it's not a particularly onerous or unreasonable constraint.

Exactly. To which I'd add, this is a topic that inevitably brings out sputtering grumpitude.

I don't think it is, nor do I think it makes any sense to deny forum users either agency or responsibility - you can choose not to sputter and if you do choose to sputter, it's not the fault of a wikipedia article.

Though I disagree with every line* of it, I submit that the comment was written in the art critique style. Which, I'll grant, is a very fine line.

* except the one; this sure enough ain't Bach

a circle jerk.

justified in their own malice toward the world

a banal psychological trope

conceptual and performance art to me is just sickness

our purpose as being to renew life

I'm sure this is just angry venting but if you somehow elevated it to art critique, it's this art critique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art

Fair call and I apologize. The artist is provocative and politically connected, but my level of challenge wasn't consistent with tone.

I would love to see a video of this and know what kind of people there were in the audience. I do not thing this would turn out like this at all in any western country.

I haven't seen a full video but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMWiFKl8K2o talking about it has quite a few pictures / snippets. This was done in Italy.

This happened in a western country.

I forgot to add TODAY to the end of my sentence. I am really suspicions of what kind of people this were.

The narrator of the video claim that some men wanted to go further in s3xually assaulting her but THEIR WIVES would not let them. Exuse me WTF. What kind of men go there with their wives and do this in front of them. This seems to be a very weird crowd. Maybe a planted audience or just different times.

Again I do think think it would happen today like this, especially not if it was videoed.

That seems like horrible "art" and the it only has shock value.

>When the gallery announced the work was over, and Abramović began to move again, she said the audience left, unable to face her as a person.[9]

More like the audience left because they had other things to do and she was more interesting as an object than as a person.

Either interpretation, it’s a profound statement about our (lack of?) shared humanity.

> she was more interesting as an object than as a person

This as an excuse would describe the audience even more horribly.

"Art is anything you can get away with" – Marshall McLuhan

Many people take the saying as negative, but McLuhan said it from deep respect for art. Art is cultural product and 'getting away with' is cultural process related to the audience.

Horror in this case is how art presents realities of humanity.

ps. Andy Warhol quoted McLuhan and made the saying famous, but did not originate the quote.

Source?

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) Marshall McLuhan, Lewis H. Lapham

> That seems like horrible "art" and the it only has shock value.

It could have been nothing, if none of the audience would have dared to touch her. But then the audience did make it into "shock value" by treating her the way they treated her.

They didn't have to, but seems people naturally gravitated that way.

Right, are you sure it was unscripted?

I'm just saying I'd be totally aware it's an art exhibit and not do anything stupid because of potential hidden cameras.

Seems the "result" of the experiment is conveniently implying that humans by nature are evil which is just not true.

Unless there is some proof otherwise, I'm gonna assume it was genuine performance art.

Taking what the author says at face value, the goal was "See what the public would do to a human if given tools and unrestricted access/allowance for 6 hours", and the conclusion is up to the audience and future viewers/readers, rather than the author trying to steer people into some predefined conclusion.

One way you could see it is "all humans are inherently evil" but that's not the way I see it, as the audience seems to eventually be split up in one "nice" group trying to stop the "not nice" group from acting out.

How would you convince someone that they had unrestricted access to a human being to do whatever they pleased with though?

Seems almost impossible.

Read the linked article and maybe watch https://vimeo.com/71952791 so you know what actually happened in the event.

In this case, you write a note and let people do whatever. Once you see someone that cutting their skin is OK, I'm pretty sure you'd feel OK with whatever you had in mind.

Unless there's proof otherwise I'm going to assume there were plants in the audience, because that's where the interests of the organizer is.

You wouldn’t do anything stupid (evil) because of potential hidden cameras (albeit, this was 1974), but also you reject that humans by nature are evil.

I’m not sure how you’ve arrived at your conclusion, irregardless of my feelings about the innate evilness of humanity.

>I’m not sure how you’ve arrived at your conclusion, irregardless of my feelings about the innate evilness of humanity.

You go to bed in safety wake up in safety you are highly unlikely to be randomly harmed.

What's more likely that humans aren't innately evil or that they are acting nice because of laws and repercussions?

But you just said that the reason you were acting nice is because of the potential cameras.

By stupid I obviously meant something embarassing like touching her in inappropriate places.

You’re not helping yourself (or your argument) here.

Literally no one cares what you think

How are you so sure humans aren't evil by nature?

Because children are pure. It's not until the environment damages them, that people become evil.

This does not explain the existence of evil.

Evil doesn't exist. It's a value judgement. We have an understanding of certain specific instances of certain specific acts being "evil" (which ones and to what degree depending on various sensibilities but for acts involving physical harm at least most humans share a common ground). We also have culturally variable codes of law (religious or secular) which likewise define categories of acts as "evil" or illegal and often defer to scholars (judges and priests) for edge cases.

But unless you literally believe in evil spirits, demons or devils, "evil" is not a thing that exists, it's an emergent property of human behavior and as such can be explained by pyschology and sociology (e.g. as in the Milgram experiment where "evil" is the product of the participant's desire to comply with the experimenter's instructions to the detriment of a fake subject separated from both by a wall with an intercom).

Studies of human behaviors in crisis situations such as after natural disasters causing a collapse of infrastructure and social hierarchies likewise demonstrate a tendency towards mutual support and solidarity, quite to the contrary of what popular media would have you believe as the norm in the "post-apocalypse".

It seems that human nature (because humans are a social species, i.e. we rely on each other as a group rather than natural defenses of our own bodies) is cooperative and it takes social hierarchies and complex systems in order for us to do "evil". Heck, a huge part of military training ever since the modern age consists of dehumanizing the enemy to overcome our natural hesistation against causing harm to other humans. Even the nazi police officers who volunteered to participate in the mass killings of Jews in Poland mostly came up with narratives for themselves to justify their actions as humanitarian (e.g. we know of one such officer who insisted on only shooting children and waiting until their mothers were killed by his comrades so killing the child was an act of "mercy" - turning what was clearly an "evil" act by anyone's standards into something he could justify to himself).

Even if it isn't 'scripted', there's an implied script in the objects laid on the table and the general presentation as a piece of interactive art where the audience is requested to participate by doing 'anything' to her and she won't react. They were being asked, implicitly, to break norms, to treat her as non-human, to get all weird in the name of Art.

The idea that this says something profound about how people will 'naturally gravitate' towards violent or dehumanising behaviour is ridiculous.

> where the audience is requested to participate by doing 'anything' to her and she won't react

Just to be 100% clear, she never asked people to "do anything" nor "I won't react", this is what was said to the audience/participants:

    Instructions:
    There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
    Performance.
    I am the object.
    During this period I take full responsibility.

    Duration: 6 hours (8 pm – 2 am).[6]

Those instructions strongly imply "do anything". As for "I won't react", that's obvious from the first moment someone does something to her (like moving her arms) and she just goes along with it. From then on, it becomes obbvious that it's a game, a kind of endurance test for the artist, with the audience trying increasingly extreme things to see if she really will keep going along with it.

(And of course, at any moment she could just say "OK that's enough, I'm stopping this early, please stop" and it would be over - it's not like everyone would say "Nah, we are going to keep abusing you until 2am as originally agreed".)

Do you not think it's interesting that there was "shock" at all?

There is more than shock value though. Note that the artist herself did not do anything shocking. Without the public she'd just sit there for 6 hours and probably get bored.

Isn't that the description of that the world did to Yugoslavia since the last decade of the last century? It is purely tragic, I've been to Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia to confirm.

Life imitates art.

What the world did to Yugoslavia? Do you mean what Serbia did to Yugoslavia? Take over the army and invade bósnia. No wonder they love Russia over there.

It's way more complicated than that and also not the only event which happened there.

I can see that the West have no reservations about them participating in trashing the country, though.

EDIT 2: Our overlord /u/dang has blocked my account again, which he likes to do from time to time when I start writing comments that he disagrees with, so I can no longer answer any more of your questions. Good chat.

What hints? There were 72 different objects, and a person who allowed spectators to become active participants, how is that instigating any particular situation? People could have just idly stand by, if that's what they wanted to.

If you put 72 things on the table, and some of them are weapons, and you are telling a bunch of audience members that they can do whatever they want and you will take full responsibility for it, you are quite blatantly implying violence and rape as possibilities.

The choice to hold the piece through the night for such a long time further goads the audience.

Basically, she was blatantly setting up the audience for this reaction. Repeat the same experiment in the middle of the day for an hour without putting a gun and knife on the table and you'll see a very different result.

EDIT: really, it's a piece of art about how it's very easy to manipulate an audience

EDIT 2: another downvote for not liking the same piece of art as you. Please grow a pair of balls.

> Repeat the same experiment in the middle of the day for an hour without putting a gun and knife on the table and you'll see a very different result.

Yeah, if you change the conditions you get different results.

> she was blatantly setting up the audience for this reaction

I agree that the reaction was predictable. I disagree that it detracts from the experiment/performance. In fact it's the opposite - if the reaction is random then the experiment is pointless - if the reaction is predictable - the experiment tells you something about human nature.

I just don't find it that interesting that if you put people into a situation that provokes people to commit violence then they will do it. What does that say about human nature? It's not something we are afraid of admitting nor something unearthed.

I thought her real test would be that even if she put any sort of weapons on the table, no one would use it/them on her. That’s what made the experiment/art interesting.

> That’s what made the experiment/art interesting.

Why? Anyone seriously harming her would have committed a crime and get jailed.

Even if it was done via remotely operated robots via some privacy-proof Tor network, so the participants could be absolutely sure not to be punished for their crime, and someone did seriously harm her, what did it accomplish?

Not much, I'd say. Some people acting cruel when they can get away with it is expected behavior, just look at any kindergarten, not to mention the history books.

So then what’s the point of conducting this experiment when we already know the expected behaviour?

My point is, most folks think the expected behaviour was the unexpected behaviour. I think it’s the other way around.

> the experiment tells you something about human nature

Hardly told us anything new tho, so trivial result as such. Water is still wet.

Quite gutsy of her tho, I'll give her that.

And yet, each generation and group needs to discover the wetness of water.

>another downvote for not liking the same piece of art as you. Please grow a pair of balls.

Please grow some balls yourself and accept that not everyone has to have the same opinion and use of the downvote as you.

Agree. People use upvote to like or agree a comment. A down vote inversely function the same way. He thinks he is view so special and deserves no downvotes at all. What a character.

> If you put 72 things on the table, and some of them are weapons, and you are telling a bunch of audience members that they can do whatever they want and you will take full responsibility for it, you are quite blatantly implying violence and rape as possibilities.

That sure is one interesting way of seeing it. Another way of seeing it is "Just because something is available, doesn't mean you have to exploit/use it".

If you could, with 100% security, steal without getting caught, would you?

> The choice to hold the piece through the night for such a long time further goads the audience.

People have the option to say "Nah, I'm tired, lets go home" instead of staying there if they're tired. But I'm guessing they wanted to see how it ended, so they stuck around.

In the end, people had options, and some people chose options many would consider "less good".

This is what happens in any group of people when there's impunity. Things escalate till somebody stops it.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina . This happened in many other countries too.

Or just look at bullying in schools.

This is how groups of people behave.

I don't think so. Bullies don't have impunity, but they carry on anyway. I think it's much more to do with the suggestion of violence. Leaving the blank space for violence makes it huge in people's mind. They act it out against their best interests, because it's so tempting. If you remove the suggestion towards it at all or suggest to it and then fill the urge another way, the problem disappears.

If she didn't say she takes responsibility - nothing would have happened.

After you punish the bully the first time - usually he leaves you alone.

Impunity is the important factor, not "suggestion of violence".

If we are alone in a room for 6 hours with a loaded gun, are you going to point it at me? Pull the trigger?

The fact of the performance is that Marina Abramović presented herself and 72 objects to an audience, and did nothing more. It is insanity to imply that somehow the presence of a weapon alone compels someone to use the weapon, in fact that only reflects one's own insanity... IMO.

I downvoted because I disagree. Simple as that, and a totally just reason to downvote. From pg himself:

> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

Your account is rate limited because you've been regularly breaking the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37532272. This has nothing to do with disagreeing. I neither agree nor disagree; I haven't the slightest idea what your opinion is about anything.

Please don't delete-edit your comments in way that deprives existing replies of their context. It's unfair to your fellow users to pull the rug out from under them. You can always append whatever information you want, beginning with "Edit:" or something similar.

You took my rate limit off and then added it back on. The person in question did need mental health support. I delete edited in protest of you and your war against me

Well yes, we take rate limits off (when there's reason to believe an account will stick to the site guidelines in the future) and we also put them back on (when there's reason to believe they won't). It's not a war against you. It's just standard moderation practice. People sometimes take it personally, but that's a mistake.

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