Body art
From Free net encyclopedia
Image:Bodypainting at Purim Carnival 01.jpg
Body art is art made on, with, or consisting of, the human body. The most common forms of body art are tattoos and body piercings, but other types include scarification, branding, scalpelling, shaping (for example tight-lacing of corsets), and body painting.
More extreme body art can involve things such as mutilation or pushing the body to its physical limits. For example, one of Marina Abramovic's works involved 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 his skin, excluding that covered by the book, was badly sunburned. It can even consist of the arrangement and dissection of preserved bodies 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 once documented, through photos and text, his daily exercise routine 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 actually had an assistant shoot at him in ‘ Shooting Piece’ (1971), and he 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 2' x 2' x 3' 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 due to 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 performed ‘Rhythm O’ in Belgrade, in 1974, until her performance 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 displayed a loaded gun. After the will of decompartmentalization of the artistic categories and inversion of the middle-class values strongly anchored in the corporal art of the years 1970, the movement gradually evolved to the works more directed in the personal mythologies, as at Jana Sterbak, Rebecca Horn, Youri Messen-Jaschin or Javier Perez.
External links
- Directory of body art websites
- Australian Museum's Body Art section
- American Museum of Natural History's Body Art section
- MyTAT.org - The Online Global Tattoo and Body Art Project
- [1]"Body art by Youri Messen-Jaschin"
- Adult Body Art website
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