Lillian Crawford/ BBC:

At Studio Morra, Naples in 1974, for six hours, it was possible to be in the same room as Marina Abramović. Of course, the performance artist has occupied many rooms since, but this was the room – the most notorious one, the site of her work Rhythm 0, in which she stood completely still and invited the audience to do what they wanted to her using any of 72 items laid out for them.
“I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility,” was the instruction. All her clothes were removed from her with razor blades, and a man forced her to press a loaded gun to her neck. The next morning a clump of the artist’s hair had turned grey.
This might be Abramović’s best-known work, but an infinitesimal number of people familiar with her today experienced it. It has been described over and over again, including by Abramović herself in her 2016 memoir Walk Through Walls and her new Visual Biography co-written with Katya Tylevich. There are photographs of the piece, showing Abramović transitioning from clean, clothed statue to vandalised, dirtied nude.
These images are projected in a gallery room at the current Marina Abramović retrospective at London’s Royal Academy. The question of how to display Rhythm 0 was first resolved, at least to an extent, in 2010 for a similar exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York – to show these photographs around a long table, altar-like at the head of the room, with the 72 objects offered to those original viewers in 1974 to use on the artist’s body. Lipstick, feather, cotton, flowers, chains, nails, honey, saw, gun, bullet… To see those objects, laid out in tangible space, is to accept a challenge – what would you do?
These implements are once again laid out at the Royal Academy. But the photographs of Abramović being played with, doll-like, by her audience lack impact. Be it via Yoko Ono, who invited people to cut off her clothing ten years earlier, the works of her contemporary pioneers Carolee Schneemann and Ana Mendieta, or Abramović’s own 50-plus-year career, there is an extent to which audiences have been desensitised to the impact of such work – we have become accustomed in our culture to displays of violence and cruelty. Or rather, the distance created by photographic documentation has made it easier to consume such works, because no gallery would allow Rhythm 0 to be performed within its walls today. The artist might claim to take responsibility in the piece, but that can never be true.
While one can watch films of many of Abramović’s 1970s performances, to engage with her retrospective is to accept the ephemerality of her art. Abramović writes in her memoir that she loved a quote from fellow performance art pioneer Yves Klein: “My paintings are but ashes of my art.” But there is still a need for legacy, longevity, and perhaps even notoriety for the artist. Sitting in a Claridge’s suite, Abramović tells BBC Culture, “It’s really difficult to make the work presentable in a way that isn’t dated. Some of the works have this energy that has survived time. I was always interested in documentation and how to present the work for a future when I’m not there or nothing is left.”
Part of that energy exists within Abramović herself. From 14 March until 31 May 2010, for 736 hours and 30 minutes, Abramović sat at a table in the middle of the MoMA retrospective of her work with visitors invited to sit opposite her, in silence. She carries her work within herself – The Artist is Present, as that piece was called, but so is the art. But she won’t be appearing in the Royal Academy retrospective. “I’m not going there because people will want to take a selfie with me. They are there to see the work, not me.” There is a distinction then between being with Abramović when she is performing and when she is not. At least, in her own self-perception. Unlike the MoMa exhibition, by removing herself entirely from the Royal Academy retrospective, Abramović is wondering whether the works survive on their own without her physical presence.
How she’s sealing her legacy
An interesting dichotomy is being created across cultural spaces while Abramović is in London. While her own works are shown at the Royal Academy, the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), which she created in 2007 to aid the development of performance art, is this week staging a “takeover” across the Thames at the Southbank Centre. “The problem that we always face is how to present new work without attaching my name to it,” she says. “I hope that this is only temporary because once these people prove themselves, then I don’t need to be there. I need to remove myself. I become an obstacle to my own work.” That new work is to raise a generation of performance artists capable of performing long durational pieces which speak to their personal motivations. Her aims are global, staging collective performances all over the world, and for this show she has selected 11 artists from South America, Europe, America, and Asia. While Abramović will be on hand at the start and end of the takeover to introduce the audience to the work, in between she will leave her artists to speak for themselves.
In 1973, Abramović performed Rhythm 10 at the Edinburgh Festival. Adapting a Slavic game in which the player stabs a knife between their fingers, taking a drink each time they cut themselves, Abramović used ten knives and two tape machines to perform and record the dangerous feat until she had wounded herself ten times.