Body art: Encyclopedia - Body art

Body art

Body art is art made on, or consisting of, the human body. The most common forms of body art are tattoos and body piercings, but also includes scarification, branding, scalpelling, shaping (for example tight-lacing of corsets), and body painting.

More extreme body art can involve mutilation, or in some way pushing the body to its limits. One of Marina Abramovic's works, for example, consisted of her dancing until she collapsed from exhaustion, while one of Dennis Oppenheim's better known works saw him lying in the sunlight with a book on his chest until the skin not covered by the book was badly sunburnt. It can even consist of preserved bodies arranged and dissected in an artistic fashion, as in the case of the plastinated bodies used in the travelling Body Worlds exhibit.

In Western art, body art appears to be a sub-category of performance art in which artists use or abuse their own body to make their particular statements

EXAMPLES OF BODY ART

Vito Acconci: documented through photo and text his daily exercise of stepping on and off a chair for as long as possible over several months; Acconci also performed a 'Following Piece' in which he followed randomly chosen New Yorkers.

Chris Burden : In ‘ Shooting Piece’ (1971) he had an assistant shoot at him , and was wounded in the arm; in ‘Through the Night Softly’ he was crucified on the back of a Volkswagen; in ‘Locker’ he spent five days jammed into a two feet by two feet by three feet locker at UCLA; in ‘Sculpture in Three Parts’ (1974) he sat on an upright chair on a sculpture pedestal for 48 hours, until he fell off it from exhaustion; in ‘White Light/White Heat’ (1975) he spent 22 days alone and invisible to the public on a high platform in a gallery, neither eating, speaking, seeing or being seen. Most of these performances are known only through photographs.

The Vienna Action Group was formed in 1965 by Herman Nitsch, Otto Muhl, Gunter Brus and Rudolf Schwartzkogler. They performed several body art actions usually involving social taboos (such as genital mutilation).

Marina Abramovic : in 1974 her performance of ‘Rhythm O’ in Belgrade was closed down by the police. She had invited her audience to abuse her at will for six hours. Her clothes were cut away and her skin slashed. The police arrived when someone produced a loaded gun.

Paul McCarthy : he pursued the shamanistic trajectory of many of the above body art performances or actions, often dressed as a woman, and again focussing on taboo themes such as self-mutilation and castration

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Body art", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki