Synopsis

If life is the greatest form of art, then it seems only natural for artists to use the
physical body as a medium. This is exactly what many Performance artists did to
express their distinctive views and make their voices heard in the newly liberated
social, political, and sexual climate that emerged in the 1960s. It was a freeing time
where artists felt empowered to make art ever more personal by dropping traditional
mores of art making and opted to using themselves as living sculpture or canvas.
This resulted in direct confrontation between artist and audience, producing a
startlingly intimate new way to experience art.

The body artists were a loose group - mostly categorized as a group by critics and
art historians - which developed early within the Performance Art movement. The
larger movement's main impetus was to evolve definitions of art to include situations
in which time, space, the artist's presence, and the relationship between artist and
viewer constituted an artwork. To the body artists, the artist's presence translated to
an artist's physicality; not only did they need to personally fulfill a role in the
presentation of an artwork, their own flesh and blood would become a key figure in
the work as well.

Key Ideas

Body art diffused the veil between artist and artwork by placing the body front and
center as actor, medium, performance, and canvas. Lines were erased between
message and messenger or creator and creation, giving new meaning to, and
amplifying the idea of, authentic first person perspective.
In the post-1960s atmosphere of changing social mores and thawed attitudes toward
nudity, the body became a perfect tool to make the political personal. What else
could be more demonstrative of an artist's passions, opinions, and voice than a
direct, literal representation of the self as the prime channel of communication in
making a point? Especially in matters of the hot button issues of the time, using the
body became a way for an artist to connect the individual with the universal human
experience - one person asking others to resonate as a whole.
By forcing audiences to partake in oftentimes violent, jarring, shocking, or
unimaginable experience, Body art asked its viewers to consider the role they were
playing in the dark and uncomfortable spaces between innocent bystander and
culpable voyeur.
Whether regarded as a temple and honored as a sacred vessel or treated as an
object to test, wield, or destruct, the body was placed on a pedestal and became a
literal (rather than just appropriated, imagined, or created by the artist's hand)
collaborator in the art making process. This focus so narrowly directed toward the
body, ultimately forced viewers to hone a spotlight on their own physicality and its
role in their fleeting existence.
Body art can be seen as a forebear to today's general mainstream acceptance of
tattooing, piercing, scarring, or otherwise adorning the body as a means to establish
one's own individuality as well as connections to certain forms of community and
likeminded mentality.

Most Important Art

Anthropomtrie sans titre (1961)

Artist: Yves Klein
In his Anthropometries series, Yves Klein covered nude women in
blue paint and had them press, drag, and lay themselves across
canvases to create bodily impressions. The piece was inspired in
part by photographs of body-shaped burn-marks on the earth,
which were caused by the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Klein crafted this idea into a performance piece, hosting
a formal event where guests observed the nude models executing
the piece.
The work makes reference to the painting practices of Jackson
Pollock, who would pour and drip paint onto his canvases. Klein
takes the physical element of painting even further by adding an
audience and using the human body to spread the paint. In
utilizing the female body as canvas and paintbrush, Klein
challenged viewers' expectations about the artistic process and
precipitated a new direction for performance art. By incorporating
the human body into the act of creating art, Klein gave the
performativity of the body an unprecedented privilege within its
discourse.

Notably, Klein's work and his objectifying use of women's bodies is

at odds with much of the feminist body art which came after it.
Many later female artists would have objected to this use of
women's bodies as mere tools, rather than as active participants.
Yet many of the women who participated in Anthropometries at
the time, said they felt as if they were co-creators of the work and
described the process as being fun.
Read More ...

Body Art Artworks in Focus:

From Our Sponsor. Article Continues Below

Beginnings

Performance Art

Body art has its roots in the Performance art movement, which sprung up among
avant-garde artists in the late 1950s when artists such as John Cage and members
of the Fluxus group were staging "happenings." These were performances that
accentuated a content-based meaning with a dramatic flair instead of traditional
performances meant for purely entertainment purposes. An interest in performance
as an alternative means of artistic expression began to spread through the US,
Europe, and Asia where collectives like the Viennese Actionists and Japan's Gutai
Group sprang up to produce live-action artworks that erased the need for an end
product or commodity. In many of these progressive new performances, the artist's
body became subject of, or object within, the overall piece, creating a literal
embodiment of the artwork.

The Nouveau Realisme movement in France was instrumental in developing

performance art in a way, which focused on the body of the artist and other
participants, arguably producing the first "body art". Yves Klein, in particular,
explored the idea of the human body as tool, medium and subject, particularly in his
Anthropometries series where he instructed naked women to drag and rub their
painted bodies against very large canvases that were placed on the walls and floors.

Although body art was frequently performative, it did not always involve a live,
performance-based process in front of an audience. Many body artists, such as
Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta, used photography or video art in order to stage
their bodies as central to the artwork.

Against Abstract Expressionism

In the early 1960s, Abstract Expressionism dominated the art scene in the US. The
canvases by artists such as Jackson Pollock were created through a painting
process that was highly action-oriented. However, the abstract qualities of the
movement meant it wasn't suited for making political or other content-driven
declarative statements. It was also a male-dominated art form, and many women
artists were seeking a new form of art that would highlight the female condition in
radical ways beyond the domestic. In 1963, Carolee Schneemann, who had
previously worked as a painter, started carrying out performances using her own
body to challenge the domination of Abstract Expressionism. In her
performance Eye Body: 36 Transformational Actions, she rejected the coldness of
Abstract Expressionism by painting and affixing multiple items to herself and then
merging as an eroticized character into her other painted environments. The
resulting photographs represented another dimension in which her gestural, creative
emotion was still felt even as she was inserted into the work itself. In her own words,
"in 1963 to use my body as an extension of my painting-constructions was to
challenge and threaten the psychic territorial power lines by which women were
admitted to the Art Stud Club."
From Our Sponsor. Article Continues Below

The Cultural Revolution

Body art's birth during the cultural revolution of the 1960s was well timed due to the
more relaxed attitudes affecting the Western world. The age of free love and
psychedelic drugs created new freedoms for both men and women in how they
looked and acted. Societal expectations were loose and people were able to
express themselves more meaningfully through their clothes and appearance. The
use of the body to make political and sexual statements was edgy but not all
together too far out in a world besieged by a new sense of wild styles with an
emphasis on personal freedom and empowerment.