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Marina Abramović is a Serbian performance artist known for her work exploring endurance, vulnerability, and the relationship between artist and audience. Rhythm 0, created in 1974, is one of her most famous pieces, in which she stood passively for six hours while allowing the audience to use a selection of 72 objects on her, ranging from a feather to a loaded gun. This piece examines human behavior and the impulses that can arise in situations of unrestrained power. Rhythm 0 is currently held in various forms of documentation, such as photographs and video recordings, and is represented in several collections, including at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where I was able to see it last fall.

Abramović’s piece can place viewers in a passive yet morally implicated role, which can be compared to viewers’ experiences in Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence. In Real Violence, viewers wear VR headsets and are forced to witness a disturbing scenario of a brutal assault, watching without any ability to intervene (Alexandra Schwartz). While Real Violence restricts the audience’s role to onlookers, Rhythm 0 positions each person as an accountable bystander, as they watch other participants act on Abramović’s vulnerable form. This difference highlights how Rhythm 0 compels viewers to confront the ethical weight of inaction, the discomfort of passivity, and their potential complicity in allowing harm to occur when they have the power to influence others.

Created in 1974 in Naples, Italy, Rhythm 0 emerged at a time when performance art was pushing boundaries, inviting audiences to engage with themes of vulnerability, autonomy, and power. Marina Abramović, an important figure in this movement, designed the piece as an experiment in surrendering her bodily autonomy, compelling the audience to face their moral responses to a passive, vulnerable body. This context resonates with Smee’s analysis of Goya’s “tortured prisoner,” whose suffering confronts viewers with the unsettling familiarity of human cruelty (Smee). Like Goya’s work, Rhythm 0 reveals the discomforting accessibility of violence, emphasizing society’s complex relationship with power and suffering.

Abramović’s Rhythm 0 invites the audience to confront their own boundaries, revealing their capacity for empathy or aggression as they interact with her passive form. This dynamic mirrors the unsettling effect that Smee describes in Goya’s work, where he captures humanity’s capacity for cruelty in ways that feel intimate and accessible (Smee). In a similar manner, Abramović’s silence and complete passivity turn her into a vessel, onto which audience members project their instincts and desires. This setup exposes how easily individuals may act upon a vulnerable figure without constraint, reflecting the dark potential for cruelty in ordinary people. By highlighting this, Abramović’s piece critiques society’s desensitization to the suffering of others, revealing the concerning ease with which power can be exerted over those who are defenseless, much like Goya’s work does by depicting his subjects’ suffering as uncomfortably relatable.

Abramović’s silence and stillness remove any distractions, compelling viewers to confront her vulnerability through a direct and unmediated sensory experience. This absence of dialogue or movement forces the audience to rely on their physical presence and emotional intuition to interpret her suffering, often leading to discomfort that can evoke empathy. This sensory response parallels Barbosa's description of Galindo’s work, where sensory discomfort immerses the viewer in an intense, visceral experience of suffering (Barbosa, p. 65).

Abramović’s minimalistic setup, a table of objects and her passive stance, creates psychological intensity for each member of the audience during their choice. This can be seen as similar to the effect Smee notes in Goya’s restrained compositions, where minimal distractions force the viewer’s attention on the suffering depicted (Smee). The simplicity of Rhythm 0 intensifies the moral weight of each interaction, making sure that nothing will dilute the direct impact of each decision.

Abramović’s performance space becomes a medium for societal violence, where each viewer’s action reflects the dynamics of control, harm, and empathy in broader society. Like Goya’s representations of suffering, which Smee describes as too familiar in its immediacy, Rhythm 0 places viewers in direct confrontation with their impulses toward violence or care (Smee). Abramović’s setup transforms the audience from observers to participants, implicating them in a shared moral and social responsibility for their actions

Abramović’s silent, motionless body becomes an object for the audience to explore, leaving it up to viewers to act with care or cruelty. This approach aligns with Barbosa’s concept of the “implicit body,” where the artist’s passivity forces the viewer into a direct engagement with her suffering (Barbosa, p. 64). The absence of resistance transforms her into a mirror, compelling the audience to recognize their own tendencies within a space that lacks any moral guidance or repercussions.

The intimate physical proximity in Rhythm 0 invites the audience into a space where they might begin to feel Abramović’s vulnerability and suffering on an empathetic level. Abramović’s silence and stillness mirror the “sensory discomfort” that Barbosa describes in Regina José Galindo’s work, where the artist’s pain forces viewers into a visceral experience of suffering, rather than a detached observation (Barbosa, p. 65). In Rhythm 0, this proximity creates an “implicit body,” drawing viewers closer to Abramović’s experience and making it difficult for them to ignore their role in her suffering. This confrontation with a vulnerable figure in a shared space challenges viewers to engage empathetically, testing whether they will respond with aggression or care, and ultimately confronting them with their own emotional boundaries.

Abramović’s six-hour endurance performance invited the audience to witness the cumulative impact of each act inflicted upon her, allowing them to observe how visible pain and vulnerability deepened over time. This prolonged exposure created a disturbing cycle in which viewers could choose to engage, escalate, or abstain from her suffering. Over time, Abramović’s body began to bear the effects of each interaction, forcing the audience to confront the consequences of their choices and the unsettling ease with which cruelty could become normalized. This setup parallels Barbosa’s analysis of Galindo’s work, where prolonged sensory engagement with suffering forces viewers to confront their own desensitization and moral boundaries (Barbosa, p. 65). By standing silently and absorbing the audience’s actions, Abramović highlighted the concept of “empathetic suffering,” inviting viewers to experience discomfort and to question how extended exposure to vulnerability impacts empathy. Through her endurance, each participant is forced to confront the troubling potential of cruelty shifting into normalized behavior in the absence of authority or social cues to intervene.