00:00In 1974, a 27 year old woman stood motionless in the middle of a gallery.
00:04On a table beside her lay 72 objects, a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, but also scissors,
00:10razor blades, a knife, and a loaded pistol. To every person who walked in, she said one sentence,
00:16you can do anything you want to me. At first, people were gentle. Someone gave her the rose.
00:22Someone touched her lightly. But within hours, these ordinary people began to change.
00:27They cut her skin with razor blades. They tore off her clothes. And in the end, someone picked up the
00:33gun, loaded it, and pressed it against her neck. So what else happened during those 6 hours?
00:38By around the 3rd hour, every stitch of clothing on her body had been cut away.
00:42Even the rose was used against her, someone drove its thorns into her stomach.
00:46Someone took a knife and opened a cut on her neck, then leaned in to drink her blood.
00:50Later, a few of them lifted her up, laid her on a table, spread her legs,
00:54and drove a knife into the wood between them. You can imagine what that meant.
00:58For an ordinary person, that alone would be enough to break them.
01:02But even as tears ran down her face, she did not move.
01:05Slowly, some people could no longer stand it. Someone stepped forward to wipe her tears.
01:10A few others gathered around her and tried to shield her.
01:13The room split into 2 camps, one side wanted to see exactly where her limit was,
01:18the other wanted to stop it at any cost. And then came the loaded gun.
01:22One bullet was all it would take. And the gun was placed in her own hand,
01:26someone moved her fingers onto the trigger, again and again, testing whether she would finally resist.
01:30It was as if they were asking, for the sake of your art, do you truly not want to live?
01:35At that moment, the people protecting her were enraged, and the two sides broke into an open fight.
01:40By her own account, the staff finally rushed in, grabbed the gun, and threw it out the window.
01:45The performance ran from 8 in the evening until 2 in the morning.
01:48That is, from the moment you finished dinner until the middle of your sleep,
01:51she stood there letting people handle her.
01:53At 2 o'clock, the gallery owner stepped out and announced the piece was over.
01:57Only then did she begin to move. Her clothes were long gone.
02:01She was covered in blood, her eyes full of tears, and step by step, she walked toward the crowd.
02:07And what happened? Everyone turned and ran.
02:10When they were cutting her, each one was crueler than the last.
02:13When they fled, each one was faster than the last.
02:16That night, she went back to her hotel, stood in front of the mirror,
02:19and saw that a great streak of her hair had turned white.
02:22In old stories, we hear of a person's hair going white overnight from terror.
02:26She always took that as legend.
02:28But hers happened in 6 hours, a woman in her twenties,
02:31who in a single night of being handled by strangers, had a patch of her hair turned white.
02:35She later summed it up, if you leave every decision to the public,
02:38they really can kill you. At this point you might think, is this woman out of her mind?
02:43Her name is Marina Abramovic, from what was then Yugoslavia, today, Serbia.
02:48Today, many call her the mother of performance art.
02:51But back in the 1970s, performance art was not respected at all.
02:55People who did it were called insane, masochistic, exhibitionist, people said it wasn't art at all.
03:00And she was indeed extreme.
03:02She had once lain down in the middle of a burning star shape, and passed out from the fumes.
03:06But here's the thing, this sane woman was terrified of flying, panicking at the slightest turbulence.
03:12So this time she wanted to reverse it.
03:14Before, she had tormented herself.
03:16This time, she would do nothing at all, and hand everything over to the audience.
03:21Look at the title, Rhythm Zero.
03:23To me, it means she is the zero, no motion, no resistance.
03:27She wanted to see how far an audience would go if a person refused to resist.
03:31But the problem is, these people were ordinary people in their daily lives.
03:35Why did they become like this the moment they walked into that room?
03:37I think the answer was written in black and white from the very beginning.
03:41Her sentence, you can do anything you want to me, was followed by another half,
03:45written on the instructions at the scene, I am an object.
03:48During this time, I take full responsibility.
03:50In plain words, that is a disclaimer.
03:53Translated, do whatever you want, if something happens, it's on me.
03:57Why don't people normally act out?
03:59Very often it isn't that they lack the evil in their hearts, it's that they fear the consequences.
04:04Now the consequences have been claimed by someone else.
04:07That barrier was instantly wiped away.
04:09Then there's this, she didn't move, didn't speak, didn't cry out in pain.
04:13You touched her, no reaction.
04:16You cut her clothes off, still no reaction.
04:19Over time, in many people's eyes, she was no longer a person, she was a prop.
04:23No different from the knife on the table or the honey.
04:26People are gentle with people.
04:28But with an object, who would be gentle?
04:30And there's the crowd.
04:32The first person only dared to touch her once.
04:34The next saw that it was fine, so they tried a little more.
04:37And after that, someone brought out the scissors.
04:40Each person took just one small step beyond the last.
04:43And with so many people, the blame couldn't land on any single person.
04:47In other words, no one turns into a monster all at once.
04:51It took a whole room of people, one inch at a time, walking there together.
04:55So why, when she finally moved, did they all run?
04:58Because for six hours, they had been handling a thing.
05:01But now what walked toward them was a person, a person who could look into your eyes,
05:05recognize your face, remember what you did.
05:07They dared to do anything to an object, but they didn't dare to face up to a human being.
05:12That night, in that gallery in Naples, there were no murderers, no perverts,
05:16just a crowd of ordinary people who had come to see an exhibition.
05:19When it was over, most went back to work, went to pick up their kids.
05:22And that is the most chilling part of all.
05:25The civilization and upbringing we talk about are often just like a layer of cling film,
05:29transparent.
05:30In daily life you never even feel it's there.
05:32But the moment someone says, do whatever you want, it's on me,
05:36this film can be pierced in an instant.
05:38And now, more than 50 years later, two generations have come and gone,
05:41yet that table has never been cleared.
05:43Open your phone, tap into any comment section.
05:46The person on the other side of the screen doesn't feel pain,
05:49doesn't look at you, doesn't know you.
05:51In many people's eyes, they're just a username.
05:54Nobody ever said to them, you can do anything you want to me.
05:57And yet, many people have taken it for granted.
05:59But don't forget, that same night, in that same room,
06:02someone pressed a knife to her neck, and someone wiped her tears.
06:06Someone aimed a gun at her, and someone rushed forward and knocked it away.
06:09So the 72 objects on the table, some comforting, some painful,
06:13some deadly, sat there from beginning to end, not one more, not one less.
06:17The only thing that changed was the hand that reached for them.
06:20And that hand, every one of us has.
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