Credit: Dangerous Minds / Marina Abramovic Institute

Finding the most dangerous art piece by Marina Abramovic would be akin to finding the deadliest animal in Australia. The average is already sky-high, so the peak must be something truly horrific.

After all, Abramovic is a woman who once stood stock still for six hours while a group of observers did whatever they wanted with her body. She even left out a number of tools for said audience to do with as they pleased. Tools that included pleasurable things like roses, bread, honey and wine, but also nails, razor blades, a scalpel, and even a gun with a single bullet. One that was loaded, put in her hand, then put to her temple.

Rhythm 0 went down as arguably the most iconic piece of work of her career, at least until The Artist is Present made her one of the most famous names in modern art in 2010. Yet still, it wasn’t the most danger she’d ever put herself in.

While the audience for Rhythm 0 did somewhat descend into a Lord of the Flies style loss of humanity from one half of the audience, the other protected Abramovic, leading the last hour of the show as this peculiar stand-off between one side of the audience who felt entitled to her body, and the other that still saw her as human.

Rest Energy looks a lot more humdrum on the surface, at least until you look a little closer and realise that there was absolutely no way of Abramovic protecting herself if the slightest thing went wrong.

It was a dual (perhaps that should be duel) piece with her art/life partner, Ulay, that they performed in 1980. Abramovic, dressed in a long, black, flowing skirt and a white shirt, stood holding a hunting bow while Ulay, in black trousers and shirt, stood opposite her, holding the bowstring and arrow facing towards his partner.

Together, they leaned backwards. Suddenly, Abramovic was facing the business end of a bow and arrow, ready to fire. If the slightest thing went wrong, she would be speared right in the chest at point-blank range. The finishing touch on the piece was three microphones set up. One each to record Ulay and Abramovic’s heartbeats, and another to record the creaking of the bow stretched tight and ready to strike.

Abramovic and Ulay stayed like that for four minutes and ten seconds. In a career spent putting her life and health on the line, Abramovic has stated on a few occasions that it’s the single hardest piece she’s ever done. Which is pretty fitting, as the whole piece is an eloquent statement on relationships between men and women. How they’re a delicate balance that involves both placing absolute trust in the other. Yet more often than not, the person most at risk in a relationship is the woman.

But this captures the beating heart of performance art as a whole, really. People putting their health, safety, even their very lives on the line in the name of saying something about the world that only they can say. It’s very easy to sneer at when it’s bad, but when it works, like on Rest Energy and the vast majority of Abramovic and Ulay’s works, it says something with the kind of power that words alone could never match.

Here’s hoping that someone else comes along to take Abramovic’s place as the performance artist that the mainstream embraces sometime soon.