Safety in Objects: Discourses of Violence and Value—The

Rokeby Venus and Rhythm 0

Kristen Renzi

SubStance, Volume 42, Number 1, 2013 (Issue 130), pp. 120-145 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2013.0007

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/505956

Access provided by Iowa State University (23 Jan 2019 11:45 GMT)
Safety in Objects:
Discourses of Violence and Value—
The Rokeby Venus and Rhythm 0
Kristen Renzi

Is it better for women to be valued as subjects or as objects in the

eyes of society? Most feminist critics would answer almost automatically
with the former, as much feminist philosophy and criticism has worked
to free women from a condemnation to “object” status and win for them
a “subject” status equal to that of men. In light of historical, oppressive,
gender-biased treatment of both women and representations of women
in art and literature, feminist theorists and critics have used the term
“subject” to designate an agent or self who is licensed to full participation
and rights within society, including the right to observe and use “objects”;
in doing so, they have pointed out the means by which legal, social, and
linguistic systems have constructed this “subject” as male.1 In contrast,
the term “object” within feminist criticism often signifies an individual
whose agency, social participation and rights, and even “selfhood” is not
licensed or guaranteed; this “object,” which society recognizes as “female,”
is, moreover, seen not as a full self with both mind and body but rather
as reducible to her body alone. Even as modernist criticism has given
way to postmodern considerations of multiple, fractured, and unstable
subjects and selves, feminist theorists have continued to draw attention
to the systematic inequalities between men and women that still make
distinctions between subjects and objects useful when speaking about
the material, social, and physical discrimination women face.2 Thus, by
posing its opening question, this piece may at first seem to query one of
the key assumptions that has governed feminist theory in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. I hope, however, to show how such a ques-
tion—and giving the latter, “object,” as its answer—does not contradict
feminist aims but rather highlights the ways in which these aims have
not yet been reached.
To do so, I will show how one particular tradition of feminist criti-
cism, feminist art criticism, has distinguished between subjects and objects
along gendered lines, and I will investigate and trouble the faith that this
tradition has placed in performance art to rectify subject/object inequali-

© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2013

120 SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013
Safety in Objects 121

ties for female subjects. I will then turn to two feminist “performances”—
Mary Richardson’s 1914 protest slashing of the Rokeby Venus and Marina
Abramović’s 1974 performance piece Rhythm 0—which I argue do not
rectify women’s relegation to objecthood but rather emphasize the pre-
carious power of women’s objecthood. My argument largely counters the
critical treatment of these pieces, treatments that have tended to obscure
this negative power of objectification in favor of more romantic accounts
of not only women’s ability to be seen as subjects but also the positive
impact their subject status has had on female safety in the face of violence.
The temporal diversity of these performances is not incidental, but
instead is crucial to my argument that this negative counter to a feminist
theoretic, which urges us to see women as subjects for their increased
safety, continues to haunt feminist texts throughout the twentieth century
in ways that feminist politics and critics have often ignored.3 The treatment
of such diverse sources alongside one another may initially jar the reader;
however, treating the two together seems especially pertinent given that,
despite a gap of over half a century (particularly a century in which women
have made large strides in terms of securing political and social rights),
we have not yet managed to fully exorcize the “object” from the woman.
As feminist politics have attempted to create better and better
realities for individuals and citizens of all genders, Richardson’s and
Abramović’s texts seem audaciously, even blasphemously, to reject these
attempts. This essay’s re-reading of Richardson’s and Abramović’s per-
formances meditates on these texts’ significant rejections of the notion
that women’s tenuous “subjecthood” is what women need more of, and it
does so not to question these texts’ feminism but instead to reincorporate
their excluded position into feminist notions of the subject and self. By
gaining access to these performances through visual and textual traces
of the performances, each artist’s statements about their “work,” and
public and critical responses and reactions to the performance events,
this essay investigates the way in which Richardson’s and Abramović’s
texts, though explicitly and personally embodied, nonetheless grapple
with the difficulties of visibly (not just visually) depicting women’s lack
of subjecthood—a struggle that is perhaps exacerbated rather than eased
by using the body of the woman/artist as the textual vehicle.4

I. Is it Intersubjective? The Challenge and Limits of Performance Art

As we begin to consider the radical way in which Richardson and
Abramović’s performative texts have considered and critiqued the dis-
course of female subjects and objects in feminist art criticism, we should
first acknowledge the way in which artistic performance, by virtue of its
performative use of the body, critiques a traditional aesthetic treatment

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

122 Kristen Renzi

of the female body that emphasizes her lack of subject status. For many
artists and critics, the advent of performance art that centered on the
explicit and personalized body of the artist intervened in art history’s
key metonymic conflation—a history of art that has allowed “the framed
image of the female body, hung on the wall of an art gallery” to stand as
“shorthand for art more generally” (Nead 1992, 1). This metonym performs
an inherent split of mind and body in which the mindful subject/viewer
experiences bodiless superiority while viewing the mindless body of the
object of art, aligning the “subject” with an implicitly masculine observer
and the viewed, aestheticized “object” with the feminine. In light of this
conflation, Amelia Jones argues in her book Body Art: Performing the Subject
that body art—a type of performance art in which the artist uses his or
her own body as the material from which the artwork is produced—has
a “particular potential…to destabilize the structures of conventional art
history and criticism” (1998, 5). She positions body art against a history of
“disinterested” viewing, in which a subject is invited to leisurely observe
an art object, without any challenge from the artwork (or absent artist) to
interrupt the subject’s view (1998, 5).
Body art destabilizes the discursive norms attending the female
aestheticized body in two crucial ways. First, Tracy Warr writes that “in
the late 1950s and early 1960s,…body art [was] largely aimed towards
an exhibition of the self in its full embodiment as a way of laying claim
to ‘being’ itself” and in which female artists in particular created works
that “propos[ed] fully embedded and social relevant feminist bodies
that [were] also specific ‘selves,’” (2000, 21). Thus, from Warr’s point of
view, one of body art’s important contributions to discourses of art and
aesthetics is that it insists that the female body be read as a unique self
or subject, not just as an object. Further, Jones reads body art as a type of
performance which, through its merging of artist/artwork (or the subject/
object), has the potential to explore a modern mode of subjectivity that
emphasizes not only the embodied, or phenomenological, state of subject-
hood (the state of being a subject) but also the constructed one. Through
a discourse of aesthetic embodiment, in which an art object is always also
a subject, Jones contends that body art “insistently pose[s] the [human,
art-observing] subject as intersubjective (contingent on the other) rather
than complete within itself” (1998, 10). Here, Jones reads body art as a
mode that insists on interplay and exchange, rather than on an interaction
entered into by two discrete, unchanging subjects.
This merge of post-structuralist and phenomenological notions of
the subject informs other critics’ understandings of body art’s personal
imbrications, which—through liveness, motion, interchange, and unstable
identities or categorizations—can lock the viewer and viewed, artist and

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

Safety in Objects 123

interpreter, into relation. For example, Rebecca Schneider sees perfor-

mance art as “integral to a cultural critical perspective which wants to
explore the dynamic two-way street, the ‘space between’ self and others,
subjects and objects” (1996, 156–157). Peggy Phelan claims performance
art is “compelling” because of its live, singular aspect which “contains
the possibility of both the actor and the spectator becoming transformed
during the event’s unfolding” (2004, 575). And Lynda Nead emphasizes
the power inherent within performance art to “reveal” particularly the
“woman’s body as matter and process, as opposed to form and stasis”
(1992, 63). In all of these interpretations, both the “artist” and the “inter-
preter” are “marked as contingent,” while the latter can no longer “claim
disinterestedness in relation to [a particular] work of art”—in which
such “artwork” is always coexistent with the artist’s body and his or her
(relationally-formed) subjecthood (Jones 1998, 9).
Jones’s investment in an art theory that sees “interpretation-as-
exchange” is useful in reanimating a frequently unarticulated relationship
between viewer and viewed (1998, 9). Her dynamic conception of body
art enables us to see this relationship between audience and art as one
of mutual constitution—the viewer creates, interacts with, and changes
the art/artist just as the art/artist creates, interacts with, and changes the
viewer. That the exchange prompted by body art between the subject/
viewer and the art/artist is both necessitated and complex seems undeni-
able; what I would wish to question, then, is not the exchange itself but
rather the necessary (and recognizable) subject status of those who partake
in the exchange. For it does not seem to be at all given that the conflation of
artist and artwork would necessitate a viewer’s recognition of this artist/
artwork as a subject. It seems that even if we comprehend “the art ‘object’
[in body art] as a site where reception and production come together,” an
object that could be recognizable as unique “in all of its sexual, racial, and
other particularities,” this object would still not necessarily be recogniz-
able to the viewing subject as a simultaneous subject (Jones 1998, 14, 5).
Furthermore, it seems that such an inability, within the body art exchange,
might not, in fact, be negative.
Though the question of the art/artist’s subjecthood is pertinent to
all performance body art, this issue is particularly relevant to the early
Rhythm performance pieces of Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramović, in
which she experimented with relinquishing consciousness by “assuming
a stance of complete passivity” in her artwork (McEvilley 1995, 46).5 Each
performance developed a new means by which Abramović could rid her
body of its consciousness; this relinquishing reached its peak and became
most radically fraught in Abramović’s 1974 piece Rhythm 0, which was
performed at the Studio Morra Gallery in Naples, Italy. In this piece, the

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

124 Kristen Renzi

artist had set up seventy-two objects on a table for the audience to use;
then, she surrendered her body to the audience as the “object” on which
they might use these objects for the duration of the performance. Here, the
unscripted nature of her performance turned mortally hazardous when
her explicit staging of the body not as a passive self but rather an object
of artwork threatened her body as a lived subject.6
Indeed, the complete surrender of Abramović to the object state
and to her audience nearly ended in disaster. One narrative describes the
performance’s set-up as follows: “the gallery director announced that the
artist would remain completely passive for six hours (8pm to 2am), during
which time the visitors could do what they wanted with or to her” (McEvil-
ley 1995, 46). During the six hour performance that followed, Abramović
was undressed, re-clothed, drawn on, photographed, cut, posed, and
otherwise marked by viewers. Eventually, a loaded gun was held to her
head, and the performance was halted. Narration varies as to whether
or not this act of holding a gun to her head ended the performance, and
there is disagreement as to who was responsible for the performance’s
end—some reports say spectators,7 another pinpoints art enthusiasts,8
and, in some versions, Abramović herself claims the responsibility.9 In
any case, most reports agree that the violence escalated throughout the
performance until Abramović’s life was threatened by a loaded gun, at
which point the performance artwork ceased. Logic demands (and these
stories suggest) that we consider this moment of breach as one in which
intersubjective exchange led to genuine concern through which the view-
ers were able to recognize a person in the body, a live subject in the object
of art; thus, the humanizing interjection of performance art reverberated
within the cold, impersonal space of the art museum.
But what if this logic is misleading? What if this performance was
not unscripted but instead predictable within discourses of subjects
responding to art objects and subjects responding to other, explicitly
female-gendered subjects? What if there wasn’t really a moment of breach?
I would like to pose another possibility for Abramović’s performance,
not in order to replace the above reading but rather to reinvigorate our
understanding of what this piece might tell us about how the female body
is perceived and valued. The performance took place, a gun was held to
Abramović’s head, violence was stalled, and death was avoided. This
much is certain. But I want to consider what it would mean to claim that
any interjections heard in Studio Morra Gallery were not humanizing
but ones that, at root, objectified. Put another way, I want to pose the
possibility that the performance was halted, not because Abramović was
seen as a life, but because she was viewed, and valued enough to save
from destruction, as art.

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

Safety in Objects 125

To do so, I will mobilize the notion of value as it adheres within

feminist critiques of aesthetics, a gendered nexus that joins sociologi-
cal theories of value (what is popularly considered important) with
economic ones (what is popularly a desired commodity).10 For if we are
to investigate how the metonymic collapse of the female nude into the
general category of high art is or is not challenged by body art, we must
also confront a popular-cultural system in which women are frequently
idealized and commodified via their relationship to aesthetics. I seek to
uncover such investments that attend female bodies, both within the art
world and as more general social “subjects,” by contemplating the ques-
tions that this reading of Abramović’s performance insists we ask: what
if being an object is what saves you? what if it is within subjecthood that
you have no value? But first, in order to understand how such a reading
of Abramović’s work could be made sense of, I will turn to another violent
encounter in another museum that prefigures Rhythm 0 both temporally
and conceptually: the mid-morning in March 1914 when Mary Richardson,
a “well-known and highly active militant suffragette,” entered London’s
National Gallery and attacked the body of another woman—this one the
nude, painted form of the Rokeby Venus (Nead 1992, 34).

II. Troublesome Bodies: The Value of “Subjects” and “Objects” in

Richardson’s Protest
Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1649–1651) was characterized as “‘per-
haps the finest painting of the nude in the world’” by an article in the
London Times, just before its acquisition by the National Art Gallery and
nine years before its vandalism by Women’s Social and Political Union
(WSPU) militant suffragette Mary Richardson (qtd. in Nead 1992, 36);11
Richardson’s vandalism of the painting, according to Lynda Nead, “has
become one of the most notorious acts of iconoclasm in recent history”
(1992, 35). Nead’s analysis of the significance of the act relies largely on
Richardson’s suffragette status and the legibility of feminist protest in
her actions, a protest which Nead understands as intervening in “the
dissemination of the patriarchal ideal of the female nude through the
institutions of art education and art criticism” (1992, 43); however, her
discussion of the public outcry also pinpoints a fascinating, if disturbing,
trend that molds aesthetic immortality out of seemingly “human” flesh.
An extensive article from The Times, entitled “National Gallery
Outrage” and issued the day after the painting’s vandalism, describes
the details of Richardson’s act of iconoclasm. The action is narrated as
follows, under a section entitled “The Attack on the Picture”:

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

126 Kristen Renzi

[Richardson] stood in front of the Rokeby Venus for some moments,

apparently in contemplation of it. There was nothing in her demeanour
to arouse the suspicions of the uniformed attendant and a police con-
stable who were on duty in the room and were standing within seven
or eight yards of her. The first thought of the attendant, when he heard
the smashing of glass, was that the skylight had been broken; but a
moment later he saw the woman hacking furiously at the picture with
a chopper which, it is assumed, she had concealed under her jacket.
He ran towards her, but he was retarded somewhat by the polished
and slippery floor. The constable reached the woman first and seizing
her by the right arm prevented her from doing further mischief. She
allowed herself to be lead quietly away to the inspector’s office. Ad-
dressing a few visitors to the Gallery who had meanwhile collected,
she said, “Yes, I am a suffragette. You can get another picture, but you
cannot get a life, as they are killing Mrs. Pankhurst.” (1914)
It would at first seem that Mary Richardson had committed a clear-
cut crime of vandalism against a lifeless painting; fascinatingly, however,
the question of what, or whom, Richardson’s crime was committed
against remained, in public discourse, ambiguously unresolved. (Nead
1992, 35).12 Even preceding the description, we are led by the section
title to read this incident as an “attack,” connoting the personal nature
of the violence committed against the painting. And indeed, Richardson
sought, in her outburst, to draw a clear distinction between a replaceable
“picture” and a precious “life,” but primary reports and critical readings
of the incident did not tend to make such a distinction. The report above
indicates the involvement of three female bodies in the National Gallery
incident and also specifies their roles in the crime narrative—Richardson,
criminal; Venus, victim; and Mrs. Pankhurst (the jailed suffragette to
whom Richardson explicitly links her actions), motive.13 That one of these
bodies was painted does not discount the Venus from her status of female
victim; rather, albeit counter-intuitively, paint solidifies it. Indeed, Thomas
J. Otten claims in his comments on “the slashing of the Velázquez” that
“this practice of categorizing experience and artifacts into ‘life’ and ‘art’
only so that those categories may swap attributes are what aestheticism
depends on” (2000, 298). Thus, to take up Otten’s position, it is not despite
the Venus’s position as art, but because of it, that she is able to be seen by
her observers as a victimized life.
Richardson explicitly categorizes the Rokeby Venus as a picture; public
discourse, however, quickly transforms the painted Venus into a sort of
tenuous subject. To pursue this odd animation further, I turn to Nead, who
argues that the Venus is treated not as a work of art but as a live victim,
using as her evidence the newspapers that “represented the attack on ‘The
Rokeby Venus’ in the visual and written language usually reserved for the
sensation murder” (Nead 1992, 38). So, from The Times, we hear of a paint-
ing that was “attacked” and “mutilated” (1914). The “cuts” are described

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

Safety in Objects 127

meticulously, as in an autopsy, in which Richardson’s actions are “blows”

from a “weapon” that “caused a cruel wound in the neck,” a “severe cut,”
a “gash,” and “a broad laceration starting near the left shoulder” (1914).
More ambiguous words like cut are infused with fleshy significance by
terms normally associated with criminal acts against the human body,
such as mutilation and wound. These specific kinds of criminality associ-
ated with Richardson’s act are reflected in the nicknames she was given:
Nead notes that she was called “the ‘Ripper’” and “the ‘Slasher’” (1992,
38), and these links persist even to Richardson’s obituary in The Times,
where we are reminded that she has “[won] for herself,” through her
actions, “the sobriquet ‘Slasher Mary’” (1961). These descriptive names,
though literally reminiscent of the “ripping” and “slashing” damage her
weapon did to the Rokeby Venus, also connect to cultural memories and
depictions of serial killers such as Jack the Ripper, further solidifying the
discourse surrounding the incident by linguistically modulating a crime
of vandalism into a crime of murder.
The conflict that arises as the aesthetic object is attacked, infringed
upon, and even “re-author[ed]” through the act of vandalism into a mur-
dered being has been read by Nead as a “breakdown of the genre of the
female nude” (1992, 41–42). Rather than view the “fleshy” descriptions
of the Venus as an indication of genre breakdown, however, I suggest we
can view this link of flesh and art as the ultimate indicator of the genre’s
coherence and success: as the logical, if extreme, extension of a genre that
sees beautiful women as ideal art, ideal art as beautiful women. Perhaps
the most blatant linguistic fusion of flesh and art adheres in the description
of “the seventh and most important injury,” described by The Times as “a
ragged bruise” (1914). A canvas may be cut, but certainly the word choice
of bruise is out of place in a two-dimensional aesthetic vocabulary. Nead’s
thorough reading of this particular description capitalizes on these spatial
discrepancies. She writes that “to refer to the damage on ‘The Rokeby
Venus’ as a bruise is instantly to confuse the distinctions between hard-
ness (the canvas) and softness (the signified female body),” and, further,
that such an account describes “damage to a woman’s body rather than
to a picture” (1992, 39). On one hand, Nead seems undeniably correct—a
canvas cannot bruise while a body can, and so what is being depicted in
The Times is not an object of art but a human subject: thus, a transmuta-
tion has occurred. But, looked at literally, in context, the account doesn’t
describe a woman’s body at all—it is explicitly a description of the dam-
age to a picture. The tension between these two seeming incompatibles
defines the Venus’s tenuous subjecthood, in which the beautiful flesh of
the human body becomes simultaneously the aesthetically beautiful im-
mortal substance of art.

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

128 Kristen Renzi

What can it mean to view a picture as a subject, and what kind of

subject would this be? An emphasis on the real possibilities of the Venus’s
“subjecthood,” as opposed to the representational manifestations such a
merge implies, requires a substantial refiguring of much of art discourse.
Indeed, this mode in which both paint and cells form a kind of female flesh
calls up a third question: how different, if at all, is the body of the Venus
from that of a body art artist’s? Such a question forces us to consider a
possibility in which the Venus, in some sense, might be murder-able: not
to consider that the public believed the Venus was made of flesh, but that
the value they placed on the Venus was akin to the value—in discourse—
of human life, a discursive slippage made possible by the way in which
(gendered) art historical discourses of aesthetic valuation have helped
to shape the discursive valuation of female humans. Correspondingly,
then, we must also query the terms and ways that human life itself was
valued. For the fact that a distinction between the two versions of the
Venus—fleshy subject, painted art—is clearly not being defined seems
essential to our understanding, not only of the positioning of the Rokeby
Venus but also of the way that the live female bodies—Richardson and
Pankhurst—are discussed
The spectre of Emmeline Pankhurst, invoked by Richardson upon
her arrest, cannot be divorced from the scene of vandalism/murder, since
Richardson’s actions and words work to realign a sense of value that she
maintains has gone awry in society. According to Richardson, paintings
and lives are not of equal value; paintings are replaceable, but “another
life” to replace Pankhurst cannot be attained (The Times 1914). A statement
that Richardson sent to the WSPU makes more explicit her pronounce-
ment of Pankhurst’s comparative rarity; however, despite her attention to
essence, she is speaking in terms of aesthetics. Richardson joins the two
bodies with the term beauty in her rationale: “I have tried to destroy the
picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest
against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most
beautiful character in modern history” (1914). Richardson links ideal, two-
dimensional physicality and unique, human personhood under the term
“beauty,” which moves the subjecthood of Mrs. Pankhurst, the means by
which Richardson evaluates her fitness as a human being, into the realm of
the aesthetic. Just as the Venus is praised for the rarity of her “flesh” that
can bruise, so Mrs. Pankhurst is valued for the rarity of her soul, which
is beautiful. Aesthetics here becomes a bridge between the two women,
but its invocation levels rather than denotes privilege.
Value as leveling device becomes key, then, not only in terms of the
artwork’s cultural estimation, but also in terms of its economic worth.
For far from being opposites, we find that the humanizing terms applied

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

Safety in Objects 129

to the Venus go hand-in-hand with her object value, since cultural and
economic worth are conflated within the field of aesthetics. Despite all the
violent language of attack and murder that seems to privilege the Venus’s
subjecthood, the “outrage” of the vandalism is linked inextricably with
the depreciation, once damaged, in the painting’s monetary value “by as
much as $50,000 to $75,000”—a language of economics most often associ-
ated with the objectified (The New York Times 1914a). Indeed, the painting
had been bought and paid for by the British nation; because the paint-
ing was not simply a piece of art but instead an artwork with an owner,
the assertion that, post-vandalism, “it has become a broken thing” was
perhaps a loss more keenly or personally felt as a loss of individual pos-
session—and thus control—over items owned (The New York Times 1914a).
Interestingly, this same sense of personal loss is evident in Rich-
ardson’s rationale for both her act of vandalism and her invocation of
Pankhurst. At the time of the vandalism, Pankhurst was “on a hunger
and thirst strike in Holloway Prison” (Gamboni 1997, 94). Richardson
implied that her own actions were designed to highlight the plight of
Pankhurst’s body as a call to “the public” to “cease to countenance hu-
man destruction” (The Times 1914). However, the destruction Richardson
points to is not explicitly bodily destruction. The “Cat and Mouse Act,”
by which self-starving suffragette prisoners were released before their
health deteriorated to the point of putting their lives at risk, was in place
specifically to preclude physical, self-imposed destruction of the body,
while also to avoid governmental responsibility for such destruction
(Nead 1992, 35). Richardson, too, was subject to these laws; following her
arrest and her subsequent hunger strike, the New York Times reported that
she was “being forcibly fed” (1914c.). The article goes on to quote Home
Secretary McKenna, who claimed that “every care [was] being taken by
the medical officers in Holloway Prison to prevent the prisoner from injur-
ing herself, but it is their plain duty to feed her even at some risk rather
than permit her to commit suicide by starvation” (1914c). Though critics
have commented on the dangerous, even at times lethal, consequences
of forcible feeding, McKenna’s statement make clear the steps of feeding,
or ultimately release, were taken by the government in order to prevent
her sure death from self-starvation.14 Thus, we might suggest that it is
not only nor primarily the suffragette woman’s life that is at risk of what
Richardson terms destruction; rather, what Richardson might be protest-
ing is the state of Pankhurst’s female subjecthood.
As subjects of the state of England in the early twentieth century,
Richardson and Pankhurst were subjugated by laws and subjected to a
loss of control over their bodies, even their lives. Here, human and body
are not separable constructs; for Richardson’s body to be saved even as her

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

130 Kristen Renzi

will—to not eat, to kill herself—is revoked seems the stricture under which
this particular, female, human subject must live. She, as live body, was
saved, not due to any aesthetic valuation or devaluation, but because the
state had a selfish interest in not being responsible for her death. As such,
her body was valuable to the state; as such, her individual, unchecked
will was a threat. Instead of presuming the protest behind the Rokeby
Venus’s vandalism to concern the objectification of women (or a fall from
full subjecthood) under the patriarchic hegemony of early 20th-century
England, it seems that Richardson’s protest more accurately concerns
women’s subjectification—the way in which the structures surrounding
her construct and help determine her embodied experience.
In Richardson’s explanation of her actions, she anticipates the
public’s vehement response to her act of vandalism with the following
statement: “If there is an outcry against my deed, let everyone remember
that such an outcry is a hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of
Mrs. Pankhurst and other beautiful living women” (The Times 1914). Rich-
ardson here seems fully aware that her act will induce others to respond,
and her charge of hypocrisy—by way of comparing the public’s response
to the Venus’s destruction with their response to Pankhurst—highlights
the ironies within both the public discourse and her own intervention.
For while Richardson’s words clearly mark the discrepancy between the
treatment of the art object and the human subject, as well as the linguistic
irony of attributing more “humanity” to the wounds of a canvas woman
than to those of the suffragette wasting in jail, this statement connects
such discrepancies to issues of control over the female body. Inflecting
humanity on the Venus in order to express its value proved beneficial to
the government, while attributing humanity to Richardson or Pankhurst,
though beneficial to the government who would not be responsible for
the deaths of its subjects, could only limit the women regarding their
political aims.
Therefore, it is crucial for us to note that the hypocrisy that Rich-
ardson references might not refer to the public’s supposed concern for
human lives and subjects—a concern that, in the end, was proved false
by the attention they paid to the Venus’s body at the expense of Mrs.
Pankhurst’s. Though such logic is compelling, I want to suggest that,
alternatively, Richardson could be critiquing what she views as the pub-
lic’s assumed attribution of inherently positive value to subjecthood in
general. Put more simply, the deep irony of Richardson’s statement is not
that her comparison of painting and flesh begs the question of why Mrs.
Pankhurst, as a subject, is not treated better. It is that essentially, it forces
us to ask why Mrs. Pankhurst, human subject, is not treated like a paint-
ing: at root, why she isn’t treated—and valued—as an object.

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

Safety in Objects 131

III. Who—or What—Was Actually Saved? Marina Abramović’s

Objectification
Sixty years after Richardson’s vandalism of the Rokeby Venus,
Marina Abramović’s evening performance of Rhythm 0 in Naples, Italy
at the Studio Morra Gallery resonated with this question about Mrs.
Pankhurst’s non-advantageous subjecthood by positing its own central
question: what happens when a subject allows herself to be treated as
an object? Abramović’s 1974 performance piece went about investigat-
ing this by engaging in a strange experiment of consciousness, absence,
and passivity that marked an extremity in her artwork, albeit one still
related to her work’s central themes. One such central theme, according
to performance theorist Peggy Phelan, is Abramović’s “conviction that the
artist’s consciousness is not necessary for art” (2004, 572). This particular
investment in the limits of control and consciousness were foregrounded
in the artist’s Rhythm pieces of the early 1970s. Phelan goes on to observe
about Abramović’s Rhythms: “deciding that her art was quite literally
more important than her mind, she created performances in which her
conscious presence was both a provocative anchoring point and strangely
irrelevant, if not completely expendable” (2004, 572). This willingness to
risk the self for art also, however, created an irreconcilable tension, since
the material of Abramović’s art was, in fact, her self—her body.
For example, when Abramović’s life was threatened during her
performance of Rhythm 5 (1974)—in which she began to suffocate while
lying down in the center of a fire, lost consciousness, and had to be
rescued by audience members—she, in her own words, became “very
angry” (Abramović 2002, 29). Interestingly, Abramović’s anger stemmed
not from her closeness to death but from her realization that “there is a
physical limit: when you lose consciousness you can’t be present, you can’t
perform” (2002, 29). That her ability to make or to be art was dependent
on her life angered Abramović, as she realized that to perform body art
in the way she had then been doing required an acting mind to direct
artwork that was, constitutively, mortal. Thus, Abramović indicates that
she sought out a method of performing “in which [she] could use the body
with and without consciousness, without stopping the performance”—a
way in which she, as a living being, could manifest herself as a literal
embodiment of the immortal flesh (2002, 29).
Her answer to her anger as well as to the method she sought was
the performance piece Rhythm 0. In addition to the gallery director’s
instructions that were given to the spectators of Abramović’s Rhythm 0
performance, Abramović had also posted instructions for her audience
on the gallery wall. In the space that would typically be occupied by a
description of the materials and history behind a specific work of art,

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

132 Kristen Renzi

Abramović’s text announced that “there are seventy-two objects on the

table that can be used on me as desired. I am the object” (Warr 125).15
By removing herself as a subject or self (in particular, a thinking self),
Abramović provides a space to her audience in which it can “[take] all
the responsibility” and onto which it can “[be] free to project its desires”
(Balfour and Sudbanthad 2006, 2; Elliott 1995, 64).16 At the same time,
Abramović challenges the intersubjective premise of body art by employ-
ing an approach that can, as Maureen Turim notes, “beg the question of
what the body represents” (2003, 104); Abramović radically suggests a
mode in which the body, evacuated of consciousness and subjecthood,
at once can only represent (because it is the substance from which art is
made) and can, literally, represent nothing (because it can no longer be
read as a conduit through which the self or person is known).
Though Abramović herself was perhaps the most notable “object”
in the gallery that day, the other seventy-two objects also deserve con-
sideration. These objects or props, offered to the gallery audience, were
described as both “dangerous and pleasant” and were the means by which
“the parameters [of the piece] were supposedly defin[ed],” (Elliot 1995, 64;
McEvilley 1995, 46); they spanned from the seemingly innocuous (book,
hat, cotton) to the provocative (whip, lipstick, rose), from the artistic
(red paint, Polaroid camera) to the dangerous (saw, scalpel, gun, bullet)
(Abramović 2001, 53).17 Of course, these categorizations are provisional
at best; many of the objects on the table had the potential to be used for
either danger or pleasure. The rose, for instance, could be a thing of beauty
kindly given, or, if pressed along the stem with force into the flesh, an
insidious weapon. As the inclusion of a bullet separated from the gun most
poignantly points out, the props themselves signify ambivalently, and it
is only through the intervention of a human subject—and this subject’s
will—that these props could, and indeed did, become a potential threat
to Abramović’s object body.
As I’ve indicated in the first section of this essay, accounts of the
performance vary in terms of their specifics; however, they all chart an
escalation in force within the audience’s response to Abramović the object
as the six-hour performance progressed. Art critic David Elliott recounts
that “at the beginning, the atmosphere was friendly, but by the end of six
hours, the artist had been stripped, ridiculed, cut and nearly killed” (1995,
64). Thomas McEvilley similarly notes that “Abramović was stripped,
painted, cut, crowned with thorns, and had the muzzle of a loaded gun
thrust against her head” (1995, 46). And RoseLee Goldberg gives a still
more detailed account of the increasing violence:
As she stood passively alongside the table, viewers turned her around,
moved her limbs, stuck a thorny rose-stem in her hand. By the third

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

Safety in Objects 133

hour they had cut all her clothes from her body with razor blades and
nicked bits of flesh from her neck. Later, someone put a loaded gun in
her hand, and pushed its nozzle against her head. (1995, 11)

The emphasis in all three accounts, but particularly in Goldberg’s, is on

the physical puncturing and manipulation of Abramović’s helpless body
as the viewers animate, examine, and cut her open. Any specifics about
the audience members are erased completely in Elliott’s and McEvilley’s
passively-voiced stories, while Goldberg subsumes identity (and respon-
sibility) into a collective “they” and a nameless “someone” who places
an already “loaded gun” to Abramović’s head. Importantly, just as the
transformation of the Rokeby Venus into a victim necessitated appeal to the
fragile, fleshy, murder-able body, these discussions of Abramović focus
on a similar fragility and ominous mortality. Indeed, Abramović’s own
recounting of the event places a like focus on the fact that she “was really
violated;” she recounts: “they cut my clothes, they put the thorns of the
roses in my stomach, they cut my throat, they drank my blood, one person
put the gun in my head and then another took it away” (Abramović 2002,
30). Abramović’s own statement about the damage done to her, which
privileges the first person “my” in relation to the “violat[ion],” seems to
highlight the crux of the performance’s impossibility: that of being both
an object without subjecthood and a subject who experiences, even owns,
pain and bodily harm.
Read one way, it would seem that these four stories of the damage
done to Abramović during Rhythm 0 articulate readings of the perfor-
mance in which, despite the artist’s avowed “transformation into a living
object,” the human subject still dominates its meaning (Abramović 2001,
17). In this view, though the artist, as Goldberg asserts, may “ha[ve] been
inviting trouble” with her piece, she was still a human being who went
through a “pretty frightening” experience that she, thankfully, came out
of with her life intact (1995, 11; Abramović 2002, 30). The performance
thus becomes one that speaks to the “indulg[ence] […] in excessive ges-
tures” of which a group of human subjects are capable, while ultimately
emphasizing their avoidance, albeit narrowly, of doing lasting harm and
damage (Abramović 2001, 15). Thus, a striking lesson is taught, but real
damage is also precluded.
I do not disagree that there is potential insight or wisdom about
human interrelations to be gained from Abramović’s Rhythm 0, but I do
think the above reading pushes aside a potentially fruitful investigation
of the flesh-art merge in favor of a temporal double-transmutation—
Abramović’s subject-body turned to object of artwork, and then back
(at the threat of death) to the most valuable subject-body again. Just as it
seems necessary to acknowledge the public’s response to and recognition

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

134 Kristen Renzi

of the Rokeby Venus as both a human, fleshy subject and an object of art,
it seems important to look at Abramović’s body, especially as it is being
vandalized, as both flesh and aesthetic object. And if, ultimately, it can be
claimed that the outcry against the destruction of the Venus is an outcry
about a humanized yet ultimately aesthetic object whose status as such
is tied to its public value, it is essential to question whether, during the
performance of Rhythm 0, the second transmutation of object back into
subject actually took place. We must consider the possibility that the gun
was taken away by the audience and Abramović’s death was prohibited
because Abramović, who acknowledged herself as the object of her art,
was taken seriously in regard to this assertion and valued as such.
With this possibility in mind, let us turn to the narratives of the end of
Rhythm 0. For just as the stories about the events of the performance vary
in different accounts, the narratives about the performance’s end also vary.
Some sources explicitly link the escalating violence to the stopping of the
performance and attribute the steps taken to end the piece to the threat
of death. For example, Tracy Warr’s account simply asserts that “after six
hours the performance was halted by concerned spectators” (2000, 125).
Further expanding on this general theme, while also differentiating the
mass of spectators via their competing moral attitudes toward the perfor-
mance, Goldberg notes that though “the audience’s responses developed
into an ugly surge of cruelty […] a small group banded around the artist
to protect her from the impending violence, and finally put a stop to the
event” (1995, 11). Note that Abramović is here signaled as the artist rather
than the object of art she explicitly claimed herself to be, an act of naming
that emphasizes her subjecthood at the time of her “rescue.” McEvilley,
however, suggests the alternative rescue scenario that most intrigues me.
Whereas Warr’s spectators are concerned and Goldberg’s division
of the audience between the cruel aggressors and the moral protectors is
created through the performance, McEvilley notes a division present from
the performance’s beginning, stating that the audience was made up of
“a random crowd brought in off the street, with some art world aficiona-
dos” (1995, 46). McEvilley continues to narrate the violence that played
out, eventually claiming that “when the art world constituency rebelled
against the aggressive outsiders, the event was declared over” (1995, 46).
Far from undermining an argument that Abramović was saved due to
her objecthood by invoking the greater humanity of the more cultured,
knowledgeable constituency, McEvilley’s claim perhaps unwittingly
complements an insistence on the value of the aesthetic over the living.
We might assume, given McEvilley’s language, that these “aficionados”
valued and loved art; thus, it was precisely their culture and knowledge
that allowed them to intervene in the performance, not for humanitar-

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

Safety in Objects 135

ian but for aesthetic reasons. Interestingly, some accounts claim that the
performance continued for its complete, designed duration; its run of six
hours, which in some accounts is due to its being halted, is, in others, the
original plan set out by Abramović.18 But even an assertion of this pre-
planned ending shies away from claiming humanitarian intervention; if
Abramović planned to and did carry out a six-hour performance despite
threats to her life, it is her will as artist (who insists on being read as only
object), rather than her assessment of risk as a subject, that she emphasizes.
In this view, Abramović’s explicit assertion that she set out, after
Rhythm 5, to create art that was not dependent on her will reached fruition
in Rhythm 0, in which art continued for as long as it was given to exist,
alongside what did or did not, might or might not have happened to her
body or her subjecthood. If we acknowledge that Abramović’s artwork
was successful in its transmutation of subject into object, then we must in-
vestigate the end result of Rhythm 0—Abramović’s continued life—under
these terms. And in all these narratives, the motif of violence ends with the
same moral foreclosure: the object was damaged, not destroyed; violence,
once asserted, was internally contained.19 To understand this containment,
we must turn again to the notion of the culturally-determined value of
the female body, and if we set aside the possibility that Abramović was
valued as subject in favor of the view that she was recognized and valued
as an object, we must now investigate the set of discursive circumstances
under which Abramović could accrue such value.
Exposing discursive habits requires an understanding not only of
what actually is being seen, but also of the ability to differentiate this from
what is talked about as being seen. In a 2004 article, Peggy Phelan suggests
that in our modern culture, “the often arbitrary line between art/life has
turned into an erasure of that line entirely,” and she warns that “without
a robust sense of ‘life’ as something other than art, the terms collapse into
one another” (2004, 571). To a certain extent, viewing life as the robust
“other,” in which life can be compared to art but is always ultimately not
only separable from art but able to trump it, is what Mary Richardson’s
statements to the WSPU suggests should be true, and what narrative
retellings of Rhythm 0 suggest is the case. If one hesitates, however, to
buy into the linguistic reduction of art to life’s inferior mirror, then our
investigation of the discourse produced in response to Rhythm 0 can il-
luminate an opposing attitude toward art or objectification. For while
Phelan sees the potential for performance art to challenge the collapse
of art and life, in the case of Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, it appears
that narratives of the performance—which are invested in translating
this performance into a demonstration of the way in which life, and the
recognition of life in danger, triumphs over art—succeed only in speaking

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

136 Kristen Renzi

of life’s robust otherness, not in actually ensuring it. When they do ensure
female life’s otherness, moreover, they make life not a robust other but
rather the shadow to the female art object.
Maureen Turim comments on the rules inherent in Abramović’s
and other performance artist’s body art in her assertion that “we have an
uncertain contract with these works, to observe these limit experiences
under the assurance that one real limit will not be surpassed, in that the
artist may bleed, but she will not die” (2003, 107). She goes on to note that
“no gallery will risk the infection of deep wounds left to putrefy,” and
that this contract holds, despite the fact that “some performance artists
have broken an unspoken contract and done lasting harm to their bod-
ies” and that such a threat “haunt[s] all performance art” (2003, 107). To
destroy or kill the body, especially in performance art, would be to stop
the performance permanently and to completely destroy the work of art.
Art, then, not only rhetorically but also in a real way moves the human
body into the realm of the immortal, even if it does so by removing the
“humanness”—or any sense of the subject—from this body.20 If spectators
watching art are predisposed to assume that artwork, even artwork of
the body, is not at risk of death, then why would they fend off violence
to Abramović? I believe their actions suggest that artwork, even perfor-
mance artwork, is at risk of damage, not death. Valuable as a controllable
aesthetic commodity, even if, as Phelan notes, this artwork is necessar-
ily transitory, the public discursive similarities surrounding the Rokeby
Venus slashing and the performance of Rhythm 0 suggest that body art is
still, at least in a conceptual sense, commodifiable. Indeed, it is perhaps
performance art’s transitory nature that makes that audience so resistant
to exposing the body’s mortality. Through sustaining Abramović’s life,
her audience sought to sustain the duration of the performance (as art
voyeurs), the possibility of preserving future performances and art (as art
patrons), and the material from which it creates this art (as the designated
“artist”). For by relinquishing control of her body through objectification,
Abramović allowed the audience also to take on her role as artist and to
become sculptors or painters who used her flesh as their clay or canvas.
In the context of the Rokeby Venus vandalism, it seems that Abramović’s
death had the potential to enact the ultimate “vandalism” of Rhythm 0,
from which she could never be restored and through which she would
depreciate in value.
The audience’s tripartite investment serves to preserve an object,
not a performer; thus, it has little to do with any interest in Abramović
as human being. Instead, the audience’s response is deeply enmeshed in
discourses of gendered aesthetic value, gender oppression, and female
commodification. As these “artists” authored Abramović’s female body

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

Safety in Objects 137

as their own, they became attached to its preservation. Their tentative

ownership of the piece, like the British nation’s ownership of the Rokeby
Venus, inflects their responses and enables their outcry against its viola-
tion. That only some, perhaps the artists and art lovers, were the ones
to privilege Abramović-as-art and insist on the immortality of the piece
speaks chiefly to their familiarity with the institutions and economies
of art. Abramović once stated in an interview that she “do[esn’t] expect
anything from the public” during her art pieces, and Phelan remarks on
and is excited by “the potential for the event [in live performance] to be
transformed in unscripted ways by those participating (both the artists and
the viewers)”; however, it seems that the outcome of Rhythm 0 suggests
that these relationships between audience and artwork are still scripted
by discourses of aesthetic value in the art world and bounded in their
possibilities (Kaplan 1999, 11; 2004, 575).
Continuing to read Rhythm 0 in light of the Rokeby Venus vandalism,
the recounting of the damage inflicted to Abramović’s body in this perfor-
mance serves as a description of both the artistic strokes that render the
artwork valuable (with the Venus, its “noble black” background and “the
brilliancy of the flesh tints”, with Rhythm 0, the nicks and cuts, exposures
and embellishments) and the excesses that threaten its worth (with the
Venus, the gashes and the bruise, with Abramović, the bullet-loaded gun
to the head) (The New York Times 1914b). Humanization and discussion
of flesh in regard to Abramović’s body in Rhythm 0 might thus, as with
the Rokeby Venus, be seen not as recognition of the artist’s humanity but
rather as mere vocabulary, by which we, as subjects, express our valuation
of aesthetic objects that depict the female form. To admire and want to
protect a woman’s flesh is not necessarily to see this woman as a subject;
these performances instead suggest that in the eyes of society, female flesh
is just one more material out of which art is made. Likewise, Abramović’s
attempt to re-perform Rhythm 0 at the Guggenheim as a part of her 2005
Seven Easy Pieces, and the museum’s refusal to grant her the right to do
so, suggests that this proscription was enforced not because the museum
sought to protect Abramović, but rather, like the government that released
Pankhurst and Richardson upon threat of their deaths, because of the
institution’s self-interest in what it “owns” (Abramović 2006, 47).21 In
fact, we might even push so far as to suggest that discourse emphasizing
Abramović’s salvation by humanitarian means, instead of ensuring that
the female subject is recognized in the dehumanizing space of the mu-
seum, actually threatens such protection from occurring again. In short,
I posit that the discourse that obscures Abramović’s transformation into
an object in favor of her recognizable subjecthood effectively obscures the
very positioning that enabled her survival in the first place.

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

138 Kristen Renzi

IV. The Specter of the Female Object

That both of these performances occurred in a museum space is
hardly arbitrary; it is their very position within the museum that allows
for the narratives surrounding Richardson’s vandalism of the Rokeby Ve-
nus and Abramović’s performance of Rhythm 0 to betray the privilege of
aesthetic objecthood within cultural valuations of women, even as such
narratives explicitly discussed challenges enacted by and on subjects. As
such, this analysis is not meant to suggest that Mary Richardson’s and
Marina Abramović’s actions were ill-deployed or normative in their failure
to demand the type of intersubjective exchange that Amelia Jones sees as
one of performance art’s radical promises. Rather, my readings seek to
investigate the normative force of aesthetic discourse itself and to increase
the urgency and seriousness with which we consider the implications
these stories have for the way in which we conceive of objectification
and the status of the female subject in the modern era. The incidences’
many similarities, despite both their temporal divide and recent history’s
increased focus on identity politics, equality, and civil rights, suggest that
institutions (museums, governments, interpersonal relations) are evolving
slowly, if at all, in regard to feminist demands for equality for female social
subjects, which only increases the seriousness attending this discussion.
Critics have asserted that Abramović’s artwork “jangles the tether
that lashes viewers to the belief systems of Western culture,” and certainly
her work in Rhythm 0 should do so, if viewed complexly (Weintraub,
Danto, and McEvilley 1996, 64). Performance art does posit the possibility
of intersubjective exchange, as Jones suggests; however, in order for this
exchange to construct meaning positively, in order for Phelan’s claim that
“the face-to-face encounter is the most crucial arena in which the ethical
bond we share becomes manifest” to truly adhere in both life and art, it
is essential for Jones’s intersubjectivity to become a realm in which to be
a subject encountering another subject is not only a possibility but also a
positive and enabling position for both subjects, despite their gender, to
inhabit (2004, 577). We see in Richardson’s and Abramović’s performances
the same striking irony: not only are women, in very important ways, not
considered to be full subjects, but the ways in which they are considered
to be subjects serve not to empower but rather, to hamper and restrict
them. In order for this tendency—which has long outlasted the political
protests of Richardson and theoretical challenges of early feminism—to
truly change, not only would a subject need to be visible to body art’s
audience from within the form of an aesthetic object, but also a recognized
status of subjecthood must become a safe position to occupy for any, but
especially the female, body.
Richardson and Abramović’s performances—through both their
thematic connections and temporal gap—stand as evidence of a kind

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

Safety in Objects 139

of modern “haunting.” Here, feminist engagement with the power of

“objecthood” is the ghost that runs counter to the more traditional, full-
bodied feminist engagement with female subjecthood. For a woman to
seek recognition as a subject, the spirit of these performances suggests,
has been and is still a dangerous attempt, one that doesn’t carry with it
any innate assurance that to be seen as a subject will protect her from
harm. Rather, by comparing the discursive treatment of the Rokeby Venus
with that of the suffragettes like Mrs. Pankhurst who were fighting to be
seen as subjects equal to men, one is confronted with the chilling evidence
that the aesthetic female body receives better treatment—and more public
demand for protection—than the live one.22 This ghost, we must realize, is
not a benign spirit we can effectively ignore; rather, what I hope in these
final paragraphs to show is the importance of acknowledging this ghost’s
presence in our modern discourse in order for the feminist political goals
with which this essay started to be realized—or, even, realizable.
It seems especially fitting for us to now resurrect the feminist
implications of the stories surrounding Abramović’s Rhythm 0, since en-
counters with her past work have become a recent focus of the art world,
particularly due to the MoMA’s retrospective of her work that was on
display in 2010.23 Composed of both documentation of her early pieces, re-
performances of her work by other artists, and a new piece by Abramović
herself, the MoMA exhibit aroused not glowing reviews of the present but
rather critical nostalgia for the so-called “intensity” of her earlier works
(Cotter 2010). In contrast to what critics saw as the “light, even farcical”
effects of the re-performances of her work, they praised Abramović’s
youthful performances in which her “harsh little fragments of reality, eager
to invade an art world that preferred appealing commodities” presented
a significant challenge to the status quo (Cotter 2010, Gopnik 2010). Such
critics often refer back to Rhythm 0 and retell the story of its particular risk
and power; the now-infamous story of the gun’s threat and resolution is
cast, for instance, by The New York Times’ Holland Cotter as a performance
in which “most of the [audience] responses were benign, but some were
not” and in which “fights broke out between people who wanted either
to assault or to protect her” (2010). And Blake Gopnik, for the Washington
Post, uses this performance as an example of the artist’s “radical” and
“powerful” “wild years,” a performance he juxtaposes starkly with the
MoMA’s current exhibit that signals, for him, the way in which Abramović
“has let herself become a work of art like any other” (2010).
What troubles me here is not only the oversimplified binary between
Abramović’s radical past and her conventional, even commercialized,
present; more crucially, what such critiques miss (and what ignoring the
“ghost” has allowed them to suggest) is that the “power and poignancy,
and a true sense of danger” that they find missing in Abramović’s cur-

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

140 Kristen Renzi

rent work has not only not gone missing but was never there, in the art
museum, in the first place (Gopnik 2010). Gopnik complains that in her
outsourced re-performances, “no one can be truly at risk, given today’s
liability issues and rules on workplace safety,” yet what I hope this essay
has shown is that the discourses of value and aesthetics in place during
the original performance also disallowed the kind of “risk” Gopnik would
want (2010). In contrast, her current reviews show that the true “risk”
for the female body when viewed as a subject that Abramović’s original
performance highlighted remains troublingly intact. Indeed, Abramović
has not complacently allowed herself to become “a work of art like any
other”; I’ve shown here how the success of her early work, just like her
later work, depended on her ability to embody the norms of art. Thus,
in response to Gopnik’s argument that “the museum has tamed her,” I
would posit that we, the audience, are simply now more aware of this
taming effect, the same one that saved Abramović’s life in 1974 (2010).
It is therefore with great wariness that I read Jerry Saltz’s comment that
the current MoMA exhibition demonstrates that the art “audience is more
open and more mature than ever” (2010). For if this mainstream audience
is the one that too easily understands the female body—even when live
in front of us—as an object, if the brouhaha over groping the performers
occurs and the “look but don’t touch” rule applies to performance artists
only because they are artworks and not people, if the performers can too
easily be termed not artists but “models,” then it seems that such matu-
rity does not aid but in fact hinders feminist attempts to shore up a safe
subjecthood for modern women.24
It is my hope that the acknowledgement to which Richardson
and Abramović lead us via their performances—that “subject” is not a
universal term with universal meaning, that we do not inherently value
“subjects” over “objects”—can usher in an understanding of intersub-
jectivity (in both performance art and in broader public response) that
is not reducible to the monolithic sense of a “mutual transformation” of
mutual subjects (Phelan 2004, 575). When we find that the female human
subject is, on her own and via her humanity, not “valuable” enough to
save, we can then confront the circumstances that make such positive
intersubjective exchange both circumstantial and hesitant. It is a fallacy,
these performances ultimately suggest, to think that our subjecthood is
inherently regarded as valuable, or as “full,” to others. Thus, insisting on
a recognition of full and equal subjecthood in all human beings, regard-
less of difference, frequently does not ward off violence as we think it
will; rather, we must also consider the ways in which such a recognition
of subjecthood can be deployed to acknowledge a value that ensures its
subject’s safety, even when in exchange with another subject.

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

Safety in Objects 141

We must learn, it seems, how to both counter and work within a

discourse of aesthetic value and commodity in order to make our subject
selves indispensable to those other subjects we encounter. We must find
a means to articulate a subject’s value not as essence nor as aesthetic
commodity but as a contribution, a being with an ability to further the
social collective if her potential is given the opportunity to be reached.
What this new ethics of the subject might look like, this reading can only
point toward, while offering the warning that in our rush to get there, we
should not forget nor dismiss the lesson that still haunts us regarding the
relative safety “objecthood” for those who are not yet fully recognized
as subjects. But there is, of course, the romance of hope: instead of clos-
ing down possibilities, by placing the Rokeby Venus beside Rhythm 0, and
subjecthood beside objecthood, I hope we can take the first steps toward
making possible a discourse in which Marina Abramović would not have
had to “conclude [her] research on the body with and without conscious-
ness” with her 1974 performance in a Naples gallery (Abramović 1993, 68).
It seems possible, with such openings, that we might someday be able to
do without evacuating our subject-full selves, for safety, at all.
Michigan State University

Notes
1. An incredibly large history of feminist theoretical work exists on the gendered distinc-
tion of subject/object and feminist considerations of the self. For early discussions of
women’s object or “other” position in relation to male subjects, see Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex. For a linguistic discussion, see Luce Irigaray’s “Any Theory of ‘Subject’
Has Always Been Appropriated by the ‘Masculine’” from Speculum of the Other Woman.
For more recent, postmodern considerations of gendered distinctions that see “female”
as a fluid but still definable social category via women’s unequal relationship with men,
see the work of Sally Haslanger, as well as Iris Marion Young’s “Gender as Seriality.”
2. See, for instance, the work of Sally Haslanger, who takes up issues of male domination
and female oppression despite postmodern discourse. She writes in “Gender and Race:
(What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?” that in light of these theories, one
can “treat the category of gender as a genus that is realized in different ways in differ-
ent contexts” that allows for flexibility while also still letting us “recognize significant
patterns in the ways that gender is instituted and embodied” (38).
3. This is not to say that such political activists and critics have not had good reason for
ignoring this “negative strain.”
4. One of the strange ironies of “subjecthood” debates in general Western philosophy/
criticism and in art history discourse in particular is that embodiment and the human
body are frequently used to accentuate not personhood but nonpersonhood, not subject
status but objectification. See, for instance, Caroline J. Howlett, who argues that “the
female body is a prime ground for signification; if as a woman you want to be read you
must write what you have to say there. To show that women are violated and held in
contempt in a male-dominated culture it is necessary to show that women’s bodies are
violated and held in contempt by men” (34). This, of course, comes with risks, as Mayhall

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

142 Kristen Renzi

makes very explicit in “Creating the ‘Suffragette Spirit’”: “unintended consequences

follow women’s production of themselves as spectacular; only a very limited reading of
those practices would have it that women always control the reception of images they
produce about themselves” (333).
5. Each of her Rhythm projects focused on moving the body beyond the conscious will
of the mind by various means. For instance, Rhythm 10 used ritual and repetition to
guide the artist’s body as she spread her hand on the ground in front of twenty knives,
stabbed a knife between each finger of her hands while taping the sounds, and each time
she cut herself, picked up another knife. After 20 cuts and 20 knives, she then attempted
to re-perform the stabbing to the sounds of the previous run-through, replicating both
successes and mistakes. For more on Abramović’s early work, see Marina Abramović:
Artist Body: Performances 1969–1998.
6. Indeed, I do not wish to suggest that passivity itself is de-subjectifying, only that the
artist’s experimentation with surrendering her consciousness to the other, of taking
on a state of passivity, eventually led her to explicitly claim a de-subjectifying state of
objecthood. Thus, I am charting Abramović’s path, not delineating what I take to be an
inevitable trajectory.
7. See Goldberg (1995, 11) and Warr (2000, 125).
8. See McEvilley (1995, 46).
9. See Abramović (2002, 30).
10. For such feminist critiques of aesthetics, see the special issue of differences, Trouble in the
Archives, edited by Griselda Pollock. For more on the gendered link between popular
culture and aesthetics, see John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. For a more general discussion
of feminist philosophy’s interventions in aesthetics, see Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective,
edited by Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer.
11. This quote comes from The Times, 14 December 1905, page 9.
12. As Lynda Nead makes clear, the legal reasons for Richardson’s return to jail were not
clear; prior to Richardson’s vandalism of the painting, she had been released from
Holloway Prison (where she had been held for suffragist activities) because her “li[fe]
was threatened by prolonged hunger-strikes” (1992, 35). Thus, it is not clear if she was
finishing out her prior sentence or serving time for a new one upon her return.
13. Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) was one of the leaders of the suffrage movement in
England and one of the heads of the militant suffrage organization, the WSPU.
14. Indeed, that the purported reason to force-feed the suffragettes was to prevent death
did not mean that the practice was safe; in fact, forcibly feeding the suffragette prisoners
was often injurious to these women’s health and was viewed by many as excessive and
cruel. See, for more information, J. F. Geddes’s article “Culpable Complicity” (2000) and
June Purvis’s article “The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain”
(1995)
15. This written text is also mentioned in Marina Abramović (1993), but this source only notes
the use of the phrase “I am the object” (29).
16. Of note, according to some accounts, Abramović pre-emptively absolves the audience
by including in her instructions the statement that “during this period I take the full
responsibility” (Abramović 2001, 68) or “I take all the responsibility upon myself”
(Abramović 1974). Abramović articulates as part of her role as a facilitator who provides
the audience with “an opportunity to select an object to be used on [her] body and the
time to release a conscious feeling and suppress their shyness in order to act a certain
way” (Abramović 2001, 17). But, in a more Marxist consideration of this linguistic act
of permitting, Abramović ensures that while her body may be truly commodified or
objectified during her performance of Rhythm 0, she has expressly permitted such
objectification, which implicitly reserves for her the right to take this permission back.
Thus, in this figuring, Abramović as artist still retains control over the situation, even
as Abramović, as human subject, ceases to exist.

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

Safety in Objects 143

17. The full list of objects on the table during the performance is as follows: gun, bullet,
blue paint, comb, bell, whip, lipstick, pocket knife, fork, perfume, spoon, cotton, flow-
ers, matches, rose, candle, water, scarf, mirror, drinking glass, Polaroid camera, feather,
chains, nails, needle, safety pin, hair pin, brush, bandage, red paint, white paint, scissors,
pen, book, hat, handkerchief, sheet of white paper, kitchen knife, hammer, saw, piece
of wood, ax, stick, bone of lamb, newspaper, bread, wine, honey, salt, sugar, soap, cake,
metal pipe, scalpel, metal spear, bell, dish, flute, Band-Aid, alcohol, medal, coat, shoes,
chair, leather strings, yarn, wire, sulphur, grapes, olive oil, rosemary branch, apple.
(Abramović 2001, 53).
18. David Elliott (1995, 64) and Marina Abramović (1993, 68) both suggest this planned
sense of the duration of the performance.
19. One might consider the following questions here: Is halting the performance in order
to protect the object Abramović also, in some sense, a destruction of the artwork? What
destruction is allowable and what is prohibited in order to preserve the art object?
20. I contend, as I will make more explicit later, that this is true even of performance art in
spite of the prevailing art critical emphasis on performance art’s ephemerality and the
issues performers and art critics have had in terms of documenting performance art.
Rather than making a claim about performance art’s actual immortality or ephemeral-
ity, I talk about performance art’s move into the realm of the immortal to talk about the
ways by which performance art’s audience attempts to create and sustain an object out
of the performance that can withstand temporality or even the mortal physicality of the
performer herself. Thus, I am talking about a mode of thinking about art, even perfor-
mance art, as capable of being objectified or immortalized; I am not trying to suggest
that this does definitively happen, but rather that we have evidence to suggest that the
audience desires it to happen.
21. Another place of inquiry might concern what the actual legal ramifications of
Abramović’s death might be—if she were to die in the Rhythm 0 performance, would
the crime be classified as vandalism or murder? Or, in light of Abramović’s assertion of
responsibility, would it be suicide, even if death were dealt by another subject?
22. Of course, this is not to say that subjecthood in its ideal, utopian formation would be a
dangerous position to occupy. Rather, it is to argue that until such utopia is reached, the
different meanings “subject” takes along the lines of gender (and race, class, sexuality,
etc.) determine the danger or safety attending such a position.
23. This exhibition, The Artist is Present, ran from March 14th to May 31st 2010 at the MoMA
(Museum of Modern Art) in New York City.
24. See Barbara Hoffman and Richard Johnson’s “Grope dopes inside MoMA” and Claudia
La Rocco’s “Some at MoMA Show Forget ‘Look but Don’t Touch’”.

Works Cited
Abramović, Marina. 1974. Marina Abramović. Zagreb: Galerija Suvremene Umjetnosti,
14.10–22.10.
---. 1993. Marina Abramović. Stuttgard: Edition Cantz.
---. 1998. Marina Abramović: Artist Body: Performances 1969–1998. Milan: Charta.
---. 2001. Marina Abramović: Public Body: Installations and Objects, 1965–2001. Interview by
Germano Celant. Milan: Charta.
---. 2002. Marina Abramović. Milan: Edizioni Charta
---. 2006. “Pure Raw: Performance, Pedagogy, and (Re)presentation.” Interview by Chris
Thompson and Katarina Weslien. PAJ 82: 29–50.
Balfour, Alexandra and Pitchaya Sudbantha. “Marina Abramović.” Museo. 26 (1999). <http://
www.columbia. edu/cu/museo/2/marina.html> (26 February 2006).

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

144 Kristen Renzi

de Beauvoir, Simone. 1989. The Second Sex. Trans. by H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage.
Berger, John. 1977. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin Books.
Cotter, Holland. 2010. “Performance Art Preserved, in the Flesh.” New York Times. March 11.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/arts/design/12abromovic.html> (9 August
2010).
Elliott, David. 1995. “Balkan Baroque.” Marina Abramović: Objects Performance Video Sound.
Ed. Chrissie Iles. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford.
Gamboni, Dario. 1997. The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolu-
tion. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Geddes, J. F. 2000. “Culpable Complicity: The Medical Profession and the Forcible Feeding
of Suffragettes, 1909-1914.” Women’s History Review. 17, no.1: 79–94.
Goldberg, RoseLee. 1995. “Here and now.” Marina Abramović: Objects Performance Video
Sound. Ed. Chrissie Iles. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford.
Gopnik, Blake. 2010. “Blake Gopnik on ‘Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present,’ Museum
of Modern Art.” Washington Post. April 18. <http:///www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/ 2010/04/15/AR2010041506294.html> (9 August 2010).
Haslanger, Sally. 2000. “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to
Be?” Noûs. 34, no 1 (March): 31–55.
Hein, Hilde and Carolyn Korsmeyer, eds. 1993. Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press.
Hoffman, Barbara and Richard Johnson. 2010. “Grope dopes inside MoMA: Naked-art
exhibit draws ‘touchy’ crowd.” New York Post. April 16. < http://www.nypost.com/p/
news/local/manhattan/naked_art_exhibit_draws_touchy_crowd oTa7FFOXUoznDX-
cA0JcpaJ> (9 August 2010).
Howlett, Caroline J. 1996. “Writing on the Body? Representation and Resistance in British
Suffragette Accounts of Forcible Feeding.” Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance. Ed.
Thomas
Foster, Carol Siegel, and Ellen E. Berry. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
3–41.
Irigaray, Luce. 1985. “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the
‘Masculine.’” Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. by Gillian C. Gill. Cornell: Cornell
University Press. 133–146.
Jones, Amelia. 1998. Body art/ Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Kaplan, Janet A. 1999. “Deeper and Deeper: Interview with Marina Abramović.” Art Journal.
58, no. 2: 6–21.
Mayhall, Laura E. Nym. 1995. “Creating the ‘Suffragette Spirit’; British Feminism and the
Historical Imagination.” Women’s History Review. 4, no. 3: 319–344.
McEvilley, Thomas. 1995. “The Serpent in the Stone.” Marina Abramović: Objects Performance
Video Sound. Ed. Chrissie Iles. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford.
Nead, Lynda. 1992. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality. New York: Routledge.
New York Times. 1914a. “Militant Hacks Rokeby Venus.” March 11. 4. ProQuest Historical
Newspapers The New York Times (1851–2003). Indiana University Libraries. Bloomington,
Indiana <http://proquest.umi.com> (13 February 2006).
---. 1914b. “Mrs. Pankhurst in Jail.” March 11. 4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New
York Times (1851–2003). Indiana University Libraries. Bloomington, Indiana. <http://
proquest. umi.com> (13 February 2006).
---. 1914c. “Forcibly Feeding Mary Richardson. April 3. 4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers
The New York Times (1851–2003). Indiana University Libraries. Bloomington, Indiana.
<http://proquest.umi.com> (13 February 2006).
Otten, Thomas J. 2000. “Slashing Henry James (On Painting and Political Economy, circa
1900).” The Yale Journal of Criticism. 13, no. 2: 293–320.
Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge.

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013

Safety in Objects 145

---. 2004. “Marina Abramović: Witnessing Shadows.” Theatre Journal. 56: 569–577.
Pollock, Griselda, ed. 1992. Trouble in the Archives. Special Issue differences. 4, no 3.
Purvis, June. 1995. “The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain.”
Women’s History Review. 4, no. 1: 103–133.
la Rocco, Claudia. 2010. “Some at MoMA Show Forget ‘Look but Don’t Touch’” New York
Times. April 15. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/arts/design/16public.html> (9
August 2010).
Saltz, Jerry. 2010 “In the End, It Was All About You: How ‘Marina Abramović: The Artist is
Present’ turned the viewer into the viewed.” New York Art, May 23. <http://nymag.
com/arts/art/reviews/66161/> (9 August 2010).
Schneider, Rebecca. 1996. “After Us the Savage Goddess: Feminist Performance Art of the
Explicit Body Staged, Uneasily, Across Modernist Dreamscapes.” Performance and Cultural
Politics. Ed. Elin Diamond. New York: Routledge.
Times. 1914. “National Gallery Outrage.” March 11. 9G. The Times Digital Archive 1785–1985.
Indiana University Libraries. Bloomington, Indiana. <http://web6.infotrac.galegroup.
com> (9 February 2006).
---. 1961. “Miss Mary Richardson.” November 8. 15D. The Times Digital Archive 1785–1985
Indiana University Libraries. Bloomington, Indiana. <http://web6.infotrac.galegroup.
com> (9 February 2006).
Turim, Maureen. 2003. “Marina Abramović’s Performance: Stresses on the Body and Psyche
in Installation Art.” Camera Obscura. 54 (Vol 18 No3): 98–117.
Warr, Tracey, ed. 2000. The Artist’s Body. London, Phaidon Press Limited.
Weintraub, Linda, Arthur Danto, and Thomas McEvilley. 1996. Art on the Edge and Over:
Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society 1970s–1990’s. Litchfield, CT: Art
Insights, Inc.
Young, Iris Marion. 1994. “Gender as Seriality: Thinking About Women as a Social Collective.”
Signs. 19, no 3 (Spring): 713–738.

SubStance #130, Vol. 42, no. 1, 2013