[writing]

[Written January 2024]

In his 1957 lecture The Creative Act, Marcel Duchamp identified the "art coefficient" as the gap between an artist’s intention for a work and that work’s ultimate reception by the viewer. Duchamp described this discrepancy as "representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and what he did realize." By identifying this gap, Duchamp calls into question the limitations of the artist’s intentionality as it relates to how their work is interpreted by the general public, scrutinizing the extent to which the artist is socially permitted to intervene in the audience’s interpretation. Delivered in 1957 amongst uncertainty regarding the future of modern art, Duchamp conceptualized this future as one negotiating this line between intention and reception. Despite not being labeled as "modern art" at the time, articulations of Duchamp’s provocation were already in progress through the incorporation of chance into event frameworks within the work of John Cage and George Brecht. Responding to the ideas raised in The Creative Act years before its delivery, these artists adapted Duchamp’s concept of the readymade to their individual ends and collapsed intention and reception into two facets of the same artistic experience in the process. I argue that both Cage and Brecht employ and expand upon Duchamp’s concept of the readymade to incorporate chance operations and the randomness of everyday life into their respective event frameworks. In Cage’s 4’33” (1952) and Brecht’s Three Chair Events (1961), both artists suspend authorial control to allow the randomness of the viewer’s immediate response to the work to engender the work itself. In 4’33”, Cage utilizes silence to frame the myriad of random, supposedly "non-musical" sounds made within the auditorium as a kind of found, readymade soundscape. In Three Chair Event, Brecht employs the readymade event score as a constant variable that incites the randomness of audience response as the score is read and considered intellectually by the viewer. While Cage’s incorporation of chance into his work expanded the readymade to a durational event, Brecht’s event scores expanded this notion even further by making the durational readymade event repeatable and indeterminately specific to each viewer’s idiosyncratic artistic experience.

In 1914, Duchamp conceptualized the readymade as the transformation of everyday, ‘readymade’ objects into art through their selection and presentation within a gallery setting. Employing such items as a bottlerack, bicycle wheel, or most famously in 1917, a urinal, Duchamp critiqued the notion of artistic taste and valuation by reducing the artist’s act to an object’s mere selection and contextualization. In this way, the true workmanship of the artist is centered not upon the form or content of the object being presented, but rather the gesture that dictates its presentation whatsoever. By removing an object from its utilitarian, quotidian context, the object "suddenly loses all significance and is converted into an object existing within a vacuum, into a thing without any embellishment." (Paz, 24) In this way, Duchamp’s gesture critiques the uneven relationship between value and labor present within art criticism. Through the reduction of labor to the selection of an object or a group of objects, the readymade gesture was instantaneous and consists of the moment of the object’s selection. However, nearly four decades later, through the translation of the readymade gesture into the realm of music and performance, Cage first expanded upon the Duchampian gesture by making it durational, while embracing chance operations in the process.

Cage’s 4’33” (1952) translates Duchamp’s readymade gesture by expanding beyond the elevation of an everyday object into a piece of art, instead recognizing "random" sounds made within a certain duration as music, or more generally: as art. First performed in Woodstock, New York in 1952, Cage conceptualized 4’33” as a silent music piece in which any sound made by the audience within that four minute and 33 second time frame constitutes the work itself. Having considered a silent work since 1947, Cage finally created the work after being inspired by the first presentation of Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings in 1951. (Harren, 49) Whereas Rauschenberg’s white canvases drew focus to the effects of light, shadow, and dust rendered on the painting’s surface by whichever room in which they were presented, Cage’s silent piece aimed to apply that reconfiguration of viewer attention to an aural register in the context of a traditionally musical setting, like a concert hall. By embracing the indeterminacy of sound produced by the audience, Cage’s intended outcome for the work and its reception by the audience unfold simultaneously within the work’s duration. In this way, Cage’s authorship of 4’33” is limited to the definition of the work’s temporal boundaries. As follows, the audience’s active experience of the work simultaneously constitutes its authorship as well. Cage’s auditory inactivity activates the audience’s participation in the work while simultaneously legitimizing the randomness of that auditory participation through the work’s contextualization. Just like a urinal in Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) can be interpreted as a work of art due to its placement within a gallery, all sound, no matter how unplanned, made within Cage’s "silent" symphony can be read as music due to the contextualization of its presentation within a concert hall before an audience.

While the limited durational quality of the work prohibits a direct experience by contemporary audiences, 4’33” predominantly exists today through reenactment recordings and three forms of graphic notion: traditional staff notation, proportional notation, and text. (Harren, 48) In one regard, Cage’s silent symphony acts as a rejection of the traditional Western forms of musical graphic notation by dignifying sounds as music that could not be written down on the traditional 5-line staff. Instead, Cage argued that sound should be measured in five acoustic qualities: frequency (pitch), duration, amplitude (volume), timbre, and morphology, with 4’33” amplifying the foundational nature of duration. (Harren, 33) What’s more, Cage’s embrace of the indeterminacy of sound made by the audience not traditionally defined as music rejects a systemization of graphic notation that works to limit risk and differentiation across the translation of the musical composition from author to interpreter. (Harren, 41) Barring the work’s temporal boundaries, each performance of the work is different because each audience’s experience, and thus the authorship of the work itself, is idiosyncratic to the performance in which it occurs. Despite predating the term’s coinage, 4’33” can be understood as bridging the gap of Duchamp’s art coefficient due to the work’s position as "the very marker of the gap between intention and realization." (Robinson, 82) What’s more, due to the work’s enduring material existence in the form of graphic notation, the (albeit blank) score acts as a kind of readymade experience perpetually awaiting an audience to activate it with their indeterminate response, intimating the event scores of Cage’s student George Brecht.

Years after the first performance of 4’33”, Cage’s interactions with Brecht, through experimental music compositions and event scores conceived in Cage’s course at the New School, would return translations of Duchamp’s readymade gesture from the context of musical performance back to the realm of avant garde visual art where the gesture first originated. Before joining Cage’s course, the first five years of Brecht’s artistic production included Chance Paintings made through indeterminate processes, as inspired by the incorporation of chance in the work of the late Jackson Pollock. In 1957, Brecht compiled his research into chance operations in Chance-Imagery, an essay tracking the history of the incorporation of chance in art from Dada and the Surrealists to Pollock, who died the year of its writing. (Robinson, 16) Chance-Imagery demonstrates the extent to which Brecht studied Duchamp’s readymade gesture as a model for applying chance operations in visual art before any close interaction with Cage. However, Brecht later resonated with the Duchampian influence on Cage’s work, noting Cage’s appropriation of the Duchampian gesture: "Cage uses ambient sounds like readymades." (Brecht, 129-131) Having only recently met, Brecht sent Cage Chance-Imagery in 1957, later being invited to join Cage’s Experimental Composition class at the New School, attending in 1958 and 1959. (Robinson, 84-85) Beginning with experimental musical compositions contextualized by Cage’s musical background, Brecht’s work in the class would eventually become legible within an avant garde visual art and performance context. Drip Music (Drip Event) (1959-1962) constituted Brecht's first major event score in this transition. Similar to a musical score’s allowance for repeated performances of the same composition, Brecht’s event scores ensured a reproducible readymade experience while maintaining indeterminacy through the response of the viewer.

Presented as a part of Environments, Situations, Spaces, a group show at Martha Jackson Gallery in April 1961, Three Chair Events (1961) realized the full potential of Brecht’s event scores as an extrapolation of Duchamp’s readymade into a repeatable experience ultimately realized by the randomness of its audience’s reaction. (Robinson, 93) In the work, Brecht provided visitors an event score with the title of the work followed by three bullet points stating: "Sitting on a black chair. Occurrence. Yellow Chair. (Occurrence.) On (or near) a white chair. Occurrence." In the gallery, Brecht lit a white chair under a spotlight. In spite of what the event score might suggest, Brecht positioned the black chair in the bathroom and the yellow chair on the sidewalk outside the gallery’s front entrance. Whereas the white chair received "art-like attention," visitors threw their coats and handbags on the black chair, and the yellow chair served as a sitting place for Claes Oldenburg’s mother. (Robinson, 56) Three Chair Events demonstrated Brecht’s first experience placing everyday objects within the vicinity of one of his event scores. In the process, this relationship between score and object reveals how the event framework activates viewer’s expectations to be presumably confirmed by objects within the gallery context. Echoing the Duchampian gesture, the true contextualizing power of the gallery setting is revealed when these viewer expectations are disappointed, dignifying the objects within it as art and reducing all those outside as quotidian junk.

The event score in Three Chair Events acts as a readymade experience in its establishment of inflated expectations for the viewer that are detached from the material objects presented in the gallery before them. By titling the work Three Chair Event and listing three different chairs on the event score, but only providing one white chair spotlit in the gallery, the graphic notation of those two omitted objects are defined by Rosalind Krauss as "shifters," in that they are linguistic signs only deemed significant by their emptiness, or lack of a referent. (Krauss, 197) By recognizing the chairs’ material absence, the viewer assigns the event score meaning that it would not otherwise contain without their readership and contemplation. As stated by Julia Robinson, "The score’s material object (or referent) is never completed, or depicted, by the artist; it is supplied by the reader, each time it is read." (96) While the score is a consistent variable authored by Brecht, Three Chair Event is incomplete without a viewer to read it, thus providing an intellectual referent to the two chairs omitted from the gallery. As follows, Brecht incorporates chance into both the authorship and reception of the work by authorizing the viewer’s response that is as random and unpredictable as the viewer themselves. In this way, the black and yellow chair visualized in the viewer’s head is just as much a part of the work as the white chair lit before them. Whereas Cage’s readymade soundscape could only be experienced communally among an audience, Brecht’s reproducible readymade experience takes the Duchampian gesture even further by making it specific to each individual viewer responding to it. What’s more, akin to Cage’s own response to the Duchampian "art coefficient," Brecht’s framework of the "event" "gave a name to the incalculable space between the maker and the receiver of a work of art, designating it as an open field of experience." (Robinson, 18)

In 4’33” and Three Chair Events, Cage and Brecht extrapolate on Duchamp’s readymade gesture by sacrificing their own authorship in favor of the randomness of the outside world, most clearly formulated through the audience’s experience. In both works, Cage and Brecht’s subjective authorship are limited to their scores which incite indeterminate responses from the audience in the form of their experience. In 4’33”, Cage incorporated chance operations into his experimental compositions by suspending all authorship beyond the duration of the piece itself, allowing the viewer to identify meaning (or meaninglessness) in the randomness of sounds made inadvertently by their fellow audience members. As Cage’s Student, Brecht’s Three Chair Events expanded upon this Duchampian adaptation using event scores to highlight the contextualizing power of the gallery setting and the interpretive possibilities of an audience’s expectations when betrayed by the art objects before them. By incorporating chance within the authorship of their work, Cage and Brecht conceptualized a future of modern art following Pollock’s death and its ensuing uncertainty. Instead of avoiding the gap of Duchamp’s "art coefficient," Cage and Brecht responded to the provocation by making that gap between artist’s intention and viewer reception nonexistent.

Works Cited

Brecht, George, Notebook IV: September 1959 to March 1969, vol. IV of Notebooks I-VII, ed. Dieter Daniels and Hermann Braun, (Cologne: Walther König, 1991-2005), 129-131

Duchamp, Marcel, ‘The Creative Act’, lecture transcript in Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 77-78

Harren, Natilee, ‘Diagramming Form, from Graphic Notation to the Fluxus Event Score’, in Fluxus forms: scores, multiples, and the eternal network, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), 27-70

Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Notes on the Index: Part I’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993)

Paz, Octavio, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, (New York: The Viking Press, 1978)

Robinson, Julia, ‘From Abstraction to Model: George Brecht's Events and the Conceptual Turn in Art of the 1960s’, October, 127 (Winter 2009), 77-103

––––, ‘In the Event of George Brecht’, in George Brecht : events : eine Heterospektive = a heterospective, ed. Alfred M. Fischer, (Cologne: Walther König, 2005), 16-21

––––, ‘The Mandate of Readymade and Score’, in George Brecht : events : eine Heterospektive = a heterospective, ed. Alfred M. Fischer, (Cologne: Walther König, 2005), 52-57

[written October 2023]

Marina Abramović performed Rhythm 0 in the Studio Morra gallery in Naples in 1974. In the performance, Abramović provided strict instructions to the audience, stating: 

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)

The breadth of objects and their potential uses upon Abramović ranged from the sensual to the deadly: a feather boa, grapes, wine, razor blades, knives, a loaded pistol. The audience consisting of art world insiders and ‘random outsiders’ brought in from the Neapolitan street fulfilled Abramović’s wishes to push her personal limits. However, this audience ultimately factionalized among themselves due to contention about what those exact limits should be, and what right they, as an audience, have to push them. In analyzing Rhythm 0, I will demonstrate the participatory extent of performance by negotiating how Abramovic scrutinizes and inverts the traditional social contract of passive audience and active performer. By performing extreme passivity, Abramovic allows the parameters of the social contract to be determined solely by the participation and self-regulation of the audience. What’s more, by removing any traces of personal subjectivity and extending her bodily agency to include any potential audience interaction, I argue that the only identity Abramović performs in Rhythm 0 is that which is assigned to her through audience participation. In reaction to Abramović distancing herself from the audience in terms of identity and bodily agency, the participatory actions of Rhythm 0’s audience reveal how community is constituted through the enforcement of conformity, and thus the elimination of the other.

Despite much of the piece existing today in anecdotes, props utilized, and archival photography, surviving photographs of the performance convey much of Abramović’s original intention. One way archival photography captures Rhythm 0’s key aspects is by picturing how the audience configured Abramović’s identity through her appearance: writing on her body in lipstick or cutting off her clothes. What’s more, these photographs capture several of the more ephemeral interactions: Abramović being physically moved around the room or kissed. Abramović’s objectification is perhaps even enhanced when perceived through photography due to the performance’s mitigation through an additional layer of representation. Building upon these existing resources, the present day viewer can extrapolate on the extent to which Rhythm 0’s audience participation constituted the performance itself.

By inviting audience interaction, Abramović’s Rhythm 0 drew attention to the traditional demarcations of the social transaction between audience and performer, and more broadly between viewer and art object. Abramović first scrutinized the social contract by upending it altogether: inverting the traditional passive audience/active performer dynamic, as explored by Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, through designating her body as the object itself in the work’s instructions. In doing so, Abramović adopted an extreme passivity as performer to force the boundaries of the social contract to be completely set, pushed, and restricted by the actions of the self-regulating audience. According to anecdotes of individuals present, the event ended once disagreements within the audience determined the threshold of the transaction to have been pushed to its absolute ethical limit. After hours of Abramović enduring razor cuts and sexual assault, the performance was declared over once the ‘outsiders’ pressed the loaded gun into Abramović’s hand and positioned her finger around the trigger, only for Abramović’s gallerist to wrench the gun away from her. In this way, the participation of the audience determines that the social contract between performer and audience stops just short of death. 

This conclusion aligns itself with similar practices by other masochistic performance artists of the 1970s. As described by Kathy O’Dell, artists like Abramović tested the limits of their own endurance to ‘dramatize the importance of a transaction that is often overlooked or taken for granted.’ What’s more, these artists positioned themselves in a representative art historical tradition by utilizing the body as a metaphor to speak more broadly through performance. The exploration of the contract present in Rhythm 0 holds much wider cultural significance. Beyond simply scrutinizing informal performative or interpersonal contracts held between individuals, Rhythm 0’s presentation in a gallery suggests a questioning of more literal art world contracts and how they treat the artist or the art work. In this way, Abramović aligns herself metaphorically with the art object on top of embodying its objectification.

In addition to this passivity speaking to an inversion of traditional audience/performer relations, Abramović identified herself as an object, extending agency over her body to encompass responsibility for all audience interactions, in the interest of removing all potential identification with the audience as a group. As opposed to being performed on a stage, Rhythm 0’s presentation in a gallery allowed Abramović to perform on the same level as her audience, creating a communal space of shared identification. However, by identifying herself as the object and ‘taking all responsibility’ for whatever might be done to her body, Abramović’s extension of bodily agency instills ownership of her body onto the audience, effectively removing herself from their social order. Abramović's positioning aligns closely with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, which describes a ‘sacred man’ who can be killed by anyone without it being designated as murder. Understood through this framework, Abramović’s only inclusion in the social order of the performance is through her exclusion or potential elimination from that order. Through this transference of bodily ownership, Abramović evacuates all notions of subjectivity or identity that might allow her to identify with the audience as a community. 

Within the context of Abramović’s self-removal, the increasing violence of the audience's interactions suggest truths about how community is constituted through the elimination of the other, whether that be through conformity or death. By situating herself as the other through objectification, Abramović placed her audience in a position of power by supplying them with group identification, designating them as a community in relation to her objecthood. What’s more, she further empowered them by supplying that community with agency over her body. This gesture recalls Jean-Luc Nancy’s construction of community as being revealed through the death of others, designating community as that which ‘takes place through others and for others.’ As follows, in Rhythm 0, the audience’s interactions can be read as increasingly motivated by attempts to make Abramović ‘break’, or end her performance. By making Abramovic ‘break’ through their participation, the audience would thus eliminate all the qualities of her performance that disqualified her from identification with them. As it happened, the placement of a gun in Abramović’s hand could have literally killed her as the other. However, it figuratively killed her as the other by ending the performance, forcing her to re-join the community by reclaiming her bodily agency. 

Even before the audience’s participation ultimately attempted to end the performance, the nature of the interactions themselves demonstrate how community constructs identity onto an identity-less other. According to archival images of the performance, the audience mainly consisted of men, pictured gazing giddily at the table of objects they could use on Abramović’s body. Through their interactions, the male audience constructed an identity onto Abramović’s objectified body, assigning her the roles of ‘madonna, mother, and whore.’ Despite this projection of identity constructed by the audience, Abramović’s performance of passivity ultimately renders her completely indifferent to these identifications. For example, one image shows Abramović holding a mirror with the words ‘I am Free’ inscribed. The obvious irony of this statement reveals how the ‘freedom’ is something only assigned to her, but ultimately sacrificed by her extension of bodily agency onto her audience. 

The true revelation of Rhythm 0 comes from what is created by the audience’s participation. In reaction to Abramović’s performance of extreme passivity, the audience’s participatory actions reveal the boundaries of the social contract of performance and the hierarchy that comes to be when this contract is inverted. When placed in a position of power by Abramović’s extension of agency, the participation of Rhythm 0’s audience enacts the dynamics of a self-regulating community when faced with the imposition of an identity-less other. Finally, this participation reveals how community constructs and imposes identity on this other, ultimately succeeding when the other’s difference is eliminated.

Works Cited

McEvilley, Thomas, ‘MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ/ULAY, ULAY/MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ’, ArtForum, 22.1 (September 1983)

O’Dell, Kathy, ‘He Got Shot’, in Contract with the skin: masochism, performance art and the 1970's, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 1-16

Richards, Mary, ‘Key Works’, in Marina Abramović, (London: Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, 2010), pp. 87-93

Ward, Frazer, ‘Abramović: “You can stop. You don’t have to do this.”’ in No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience, (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), pp. 109-130