Body, Feminism, and Postmodern Art

Performance art treats the artist's own body, present and often at risk, as the medium of the work itself, existing only in the moment of its live enactment rather than as a durable object. Marina Abramović, a Yugoslav-born artist who has worked in the medium since the early 1970s, became its most widely recognized practitioner through works that tested physical endurance and the boundary between artist and audience, most notoriously Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she stood passively for six hours in a gallery in Naples while inviting visitors to use any of seventy-two objects, including a rose, a feather, scissors, and a loaded pistol, on her body however they wished, an experiment that grew steadily more disturbing as the evening progressed. Decades later, her retrospective performance The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010, in which she sat silently across a table from museum visitors for over seven hundred hours, drew enormous public attention and introduced performance art to a mass audience.