In November 1974, at the Studio Morra gallery in Naples, Marina Abramović performed *Rhythm 0*. She set up a table in the gallery with 72 different objects: a rose, perfume, bread, grapes; and also scissors, a butcher's knife, a whip, an iron bar, a loaded pistol with a single bullet. She placed a sign: 'There are 72 objects on the table. You can use them on me as you wish. The responsibility is mine. Duration: 6 hours. 1974.'

In the first hours the audience was tentative. A few people kissed her, one placed a flower in her hair, another changed her clothes. As the hours went on the atmosphere changed: her clothes were cut with razors, paint and wine were poured on her, the rose's thorns were pressed into her bare chest. At one point someone placed the loaded pistol in her hand and held the barrel against her throat; another audience member took the gun back. When the six hours were up, Abramović later recounted, 'I was alive. When I stood up from the table and walked toward the audience, most of them ran away. They could not look at me directly.'

Abramović's thesis is this: the limit of human behaviour is not individual morality but social control. The individual in a group — where they feel responsibility is shared — in an anonymous crowd, will do unusual things. *Rhythm 0* brought that hypothesis into the laboratory, with the artist's own body as the subject. In the tradition of performance art's 'self-risk', it is studied in the same category as Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments.

Abramović became famous with this performance; she spent the next forty years on *The Artist Is Present* (2010), *Balkan Baroque* (1997, Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale), founding the Performance Art Institute (2007), and on the archiving of performance art. *Rhythm 0* is still read in performance-art teaching as a foundational reference.