“What I learned was that … if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you,” she said.
“I felt truly violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed a gun at my head, and another took it away.”
Abramović also noted that several spectators fled after the performance ended, unable to face the woman they had treated so horribly.
“Everybody ran away. People couldn’t actually confront me as a person.”
The performance not only solidified Abramović’s status as one of the most important conceptual artists of the time but also highlighted the cruel tendencies of the human mind.