CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/21/2024

A comprehensive new survey on Marina Abramović

Featured photograph, of Marina Abramović performing Rhythm 0 in 1974, is reproduced from the Royal Academy’s eponymous new exhibition catalog—complete with image recognition app linking to historic video content. Documenting the entirety of the groundbreaking artist’s long and remarkable career, this 264-page hardcover was created in close collaboration with Abramović. For Rhythm 0, Abramović stood stock still for an entire day at the radical Studio Morra exhibition space in Naples, Italy. “Before her stood a table on which she had placed objects that referenced pain and pleasure—from a feather to a gun and a single bullet—and which members of the audience were invited to use on her as they wished,” Andrea Tarsia writes. “‘I am the object,’ the artist stated. ‘During this period I take full responsibility.’ As the day progressed, silence and incredulity gave way to increasingly violent interactions. Abramović was stripped to the waist, her skin cut with the thorn of a rose, her hands tied and the gun, loaded, eventually held to her neck.” As in The Artist Is Present (2010), the iconic endurance work that made her virtually a household name, Abramović “used her body as a cipher, a reflective mirror for the audience’s own feelings and behaviors.”