Point 3

Artists subvert the objectification of women through challenging the audience to become aware of the their own inherent desire to objectify the female body. What exactly is objectification theory? As Szymanski states, “Objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) postulates that many women are sexually objectified and treated as an object to be valued for its use by others. SO occurs when a woman’s body or body parts are singled out and separated from her as a person and she is viewed primarily as a physical object of male sexual desire.” (Szymanski, 7-8). Marina Abramovic is an example of an artist that worked to expose this objectification theory through challenging the audience to recognize their own internalized desire to objectify. She opened an exhibit in 1974 called Rhythm 0, in which she placed 72 objects  on a table, and stood in the middle of the room, with the instructions, “I am an object. You can do whatever you want to do with me”. Through allowing the public to do whatever they wanted with her body, she pushed them to see how far they would go. Ultimately, an audience member picked up the pistol (one of the objects on the table), and this is when the exhibit was closed down. Up until that point, people from the audience had cut her skin, drank her blood, cut her clothes off, put a knife between her legs, and put rose thorns into her body. Then, at the end of the exhibit, she started talking, interacting back with the audience, and behaving like a human being again. The audience wouldn’t interact with her normally, and instead decided to leave the exhibit. Once you start seeing things as an object you treat them as such.