The extraordinary story of how Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic ‘turned the audience into the performers, instead of the artist’ is explored in this month’s 1843 magazine. The six-hour work in Naples involved Abramovic standing still while the audience was invited to do whatever they wanted to her, using one of objects she had placed on a nearby table:
‘a comb, a lipstick, a rose, a feather…chains, nails, a safety pin, a kitchen knife, a box of razor blades, a whip and a gun’
The evening began gently. Someone stroked her. Another offered her a rose, one a kiss. But as the Neapolitan night began to heat up, things got very dark. Marina said:
‘What I learned was that … if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you … I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation’
Broken Columns 