A type of modern art which exploits the artist's - or someone else's - physical presence as a work of art in its own right. Artists may stand in the gallery like a living statue, perhaps singing; photograph themselves performing some banal action, such as smiling; or may deliberately injure themselves. A typical fad of the 1960s, it emerged again in the 1990s, with people using paint, tattoo, rings, and a variety of attachments.
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. 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.
In more recent times, body became a subject of much broader discussions and treatments that cannot be reduced to the body art in its common understanding. Important strategies that question the human body are: implants, body in symbiosis with the new technologies, virtual body etc. A special case of the body art strategies is the absence of body. The most important artists that performed the "absence" of body through their artwoks were: Keith Arnatt, Andy Warhol, Anthony Gormley and Davor Džalto.
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. This was documented in an eight-second video and is a notorious example of video art as well as performance art. They performed several body art actions, usually involving social taboos (such as genital mutilation). In the piece, the audience was given instructions to use on Abramovic's body an array of 72 provided instruments of pain and pleasure, including knives, feathers, and a loaded pistol.
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
Gallery
|
Youri Messen-Jaschin 1998: Halloween |
Youri Messen-Jaschin 2006: Halloween |
User Comments Add a comment…