An artist who was ‘ready to die’ after letting spectators do anything to her for six hours has shared the long-term impact it had on her wellbeing.

Marina Abramović, famously took part in the ‘Rhythm 0’ performance in 1974 in which she placed 72 objects on a table and let strangers use them on her however they liked.

She said she would take full responsibility for anything that happened to her and by the end admitted she was ‘ready to die’.

While at first, people handed her the flowers or just watched her as she stood still, by the end of a six-hour period, Marina had been stripped of her clothing and suffered slash wounds to her skin.

At one point, a fight broke out among the audience after a loaded gun was put to her head.

The purpose of the performance was to see how far the public would go, but it came at a cost.

Decades on and Marina has spoken about the long-term impact it had on her, explaining that it affected her for some time afterwards.

Marina opened up about how the performance affected her (Marina Abramović Institute/YouTube)

“After the performance, I have one streak of white hair on my head,” she told the Guardian.

“I cannot get rid of the feeling of fear for a long time. Because of this performance, I know where to draw the line so as not to put myself at such risk.”

Last year, the artist told the Royal Academy: “If there’s something I would like to do, I don’t do it.

“I only do something if I’m afraid of it, because that’s the whole point.

“If we always tend to do things that we like, then we are creating the same pattern, making the same mistakes again, and we never get out into unknown territory.”

Marina put on a second extreme performance in 2010 (Dave Benett/Getty Images)

Years later, in 2010, Marina put on another extreme display, this time in New York.

At the Museum of Modern Art, Marina set up a table with an empty chair opposite her.

The performance was called ‘The Artist is Present’ and lasted two and a half months.

Marina sat in the chair for seven hours every day and welcomed strangers to sit in front of her to have a ‘silent conversation’, but they were told not to touch or speak to her at all.

Among those who took up Marina’s invitation was actor Alan Rickman.

“I gazed into the eyes of many people who were carrying such pain inside that I could immediately see it and feel it,” she later told the Guardian.

“I become a mirror for them of their own emotions. One big Hell’s Angel with tattoos everywhere stared at me fiercely, but after 10 minutes was collapsing into tears and weeping like a baby.”

Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist whose work explores the limits of the body, the possibilities of the mind and the relationship between the artist and their audience.

For her most famous performance, named ‘Rhythm 0,’ Abramović placed 72 objects on a table that spectators could use on her however they desired.

She would not move for six hours and no matter what the public chose to do to her, she said she would take ‘full responsibility.’

The 72 objects ranged from things like flowers, perfume and apples to more sinister items like razors and knives.

At first, the audience were tame in their response to the task. Some simply watched the artist as she stood still. Others handed her roses and held her hands.

But, things took a dark turn part way through the performance as people realised there were no limits to their actions.

By the end of the six hours, Abramović had been stripped of her clothing and a knife had been stuck between her legs.

Harrowing photos taken at the time show the artist crying.

Other reports say that Abramović – who has been hailed as ‘one of the most significant artists of the second half of the 20th century’ – ended up with a loaded gun to her head, sparking people to step in and end the performance.

In an interview on the Marina Abramović Institute YouTube channel, she called the piece ‘really difficult.’

As the performance went on, the public’s actions became more extreme, leaving the artist in tears (Marina Abramović Institute/YouTube)

“At the beginning, nothing really happened,” she reflected. “The public were really nice. They gave me a rose, they would kiss me, look at me, and the public became more and more wild.”

Speaking about what happened when the performance finally came to an end, she went on: “I start moving. I start being myself […] and, at that moment, everybody ran away. People could not actually confront with me as a person.”

She added: “The experience I drew from this piece was that in your own performances you can go very far, but if you leave decisions to the public, you can be killed.”

Further reflecting on this in a 2014 interview with the Guardian, Abramović said she was ‘ready to die’.

“I had a pistol with bullets in it, my dear. I was ready to die,” she told the newspaper.

She went on to say that she felt ‘lucky’ that she lived to tell the tale.