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), full body tattoo 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 him in the arm in his piece ‘Shoot’ (1971), which was observed by a live audience. This was documented in an eight-second video and is a notorious example of video art as well as performance art. In ‘Through the Night Softly' (1973), Burden crawled naked through broken glass, which he saw as stars in the sky, and turned the video footage into a ten-second commercial that was aired on television. 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 or short video clips.

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.

Jake Lloyd Jones a Sydney based artist conceived a body art ride which has become an annual event, participants are painted to form a living rainbow that rides to the Pacific Ocean and immerses itself in the waves.Sydney Body Art Ride

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
• Body art painting by Youri Messen-Jaschin

Body art

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