> That seems like horrible "art" and the it only has shock value.
It could have been nothing, if none of the audience would have dared to touch her. But then the audience did make it into "shock value" by treating her the way they treated her.
They didn't have to, but seems people naturally gravitated that way.
You wouldn’t do anything stupid (evil) because of potential hidden cameras (albeit, this was 1974), but also you reject that humans by nature are evil.
I’m not sure how you’ve arrived at your conclusion, irregardless of my feelings about the innate evilness of humanity.
Unless there is some proof otherwise, I'm gonna assume it was genuine performance art.
Taking what the author says at face value, the goal was "See what the public would do to a human if given tools and unrestricted access/allowance for 6 hours", and the conclusion is up to the audience and future viewers/readers, rather than the author trying to steer people into some predefined conclusion.
One way you could see it is "all humans are inherently evil" but that's not the way I see it, as the audience seems to eventually be split up in one "nice" group trying to stop the "not nice" group from acting out.
Read the linked article and maybe watch https://vimeo.com/71952791 so you know what actually happened in the event.
In this case, you write a note and let people do whatever. Once you see someone that cutting their skin is OK, I'm pretty sure you'd feel OK with whatever you had in mind.
Even if it isn't 'scripted', there's an implied script in the objects laid on the table and the general presentation as a piece of interactive art where the audience is requested to participate by doing 'anything' to her and she won't react. They were being asked, implicitly, to break norms, to treat her as non-human, to get all weird in the name of Art.
The idea that this says something profound about how people will 'naturally gravitate' towards violent or dehumanising behaviour is ridiculous.
> where the audience is requested to participate by doing 'anything' to her and she won't react
Just to be 100% clear, she never asked people to "do anything" nor "I won't react", this is what was said to the audience/participants:
Instructions:
There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
Performance.
I am the object.
During this period I take full responsibility.
Duration: 6 hours (8 pm – 2 am).[6]
Those instructions strongly imply "do anything". As for "I won't react", that's obvious from the first moment someone does something to her (like moving her arms) and she just goes along with it. From then on, it becomes obbvious that it's a game, a kind of endurance test for the artist, with the audience trying increasingly extreme things to see if she really will keep going along with it.
(And of course, at any moment she could just say "OK that's enough, I'm stopping this early, please stop" and it would be over - it's not like everyone would say "Nah, we are going to keep abusing you until 2am as originally agreed".)
Evil doesn't exist. It's a value judgement. We have an understanding of certain specific instances of certain specific acts being "evil" (which ones and to what degree depending on various sensibilities but for acts involving physical harm at least most humans share a common ground). We also have culturally variable codes of law (religious or secular) which likewise define categories of acts as "evil" or illegal and often defer to scholars (judges and priests) for edge cases.
But unless you literally believe in evil spirits, demons or devils, "evil" is not a thing that exists, it's an emergent property of human behavior and as such can be explained by pyschology and sociology (e.g. as in the Milgram experiment where "evil" is the product of the participant's desire to comply with the experimenter's instructions to the detriment of a fake subject separated from both by a wall with an intercom).
Studies of human behaviors in crisis situations such as after natural disasters causing a collapse of infrastructure and social hierarchies likewise demonstrate a tendency towards mutual support and solidarity, quite to the contrary of what popular media would have you believe as the norm in the "post-apocalypse".
It seems that human nature (because humans are a social species, i.e. we rely on each other as a group rather than natural defenses of our own bodies) is cooperative and it takes social hierarchies and complex systems in order for us to do "evil". Heck, a huge part of military training ever since the modern age consists of dehumanizing the enemy to overcome our natural hesistation against causing harm to other humans. Even the nazi police officers who volunteered to participate in the mass killings of Jews in Poland mostly came up with narratives for themselves to justify their actions as humanitarian (e.g. we know of one such officer who insisted on only shooting children and waiting until their mothers were killed by his comrades so killing the child was an act of "mercy" - turning what was clearly an "evil" act by anyone's standards into something he could justify to himself).
There is more than shock value though. Note that the artist herself did not do anything shocking. Without the public she'd just sit there for 6 hours and probably get bored.
"Art is anything you can get away with" – Marshall McLuhan
Many people take the saying as negative, but McLuhan said it from deep respect for art. Art is cultural product and 'getting away with' is cultural process related to the audience.
Horror in this case is how art presents realities of humanity.
ps. Andy Warhol quoted McLuhan and made the saying famous, but did not originate the quote.
>When the gallery announced the work was over, and Abramović began to move again, she said the audience left, unable to face her as a person.[9]
More like the audience left because they had other things to do and she was more interesting as an object than as a person.