Body art

Body art is art in which the body, often that of the artist, is the principal medium and focus

Arnulf Rainer
*Untitled (Body Language)* (c.1973)
Tate

© Arnulf Rainer

Body art covers a wide range of art from about 1960 on, encompassing a variety of different approaches. It includes much performance art, where the artist is directly concerned with the body in the form of improvised or choreographed actions, happenings and staged events. Body art is also used for explorations of the body in a variety of other media including painting, sculpture, photography, film and video.

Body art is generally concerned with issues of gender and personal identity. A major theme is the relationship of body and mind, explored in work consisting of feats of physical endurance designed to test the limits of the body and the ability of the mind to suffer pain. Body art also often highlights the visceral or abject aspects of the body, focusing on bodily substances or the theme of nourishment. Contrasts such as those between clothed and nude, internal and external, parts of the body and the whole are also a common theme. In some work, the body is seen as the vehicle for language.

In 1998 the art historian Amelia Jones published a survey titled Body Art.

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Performance art

Artworks that are created through actions performed by the artist or other participants, which may be live or recorded, spontaneous or scripted
Actionism

Actionism is the English version of the general German term for performance art, specifically used for Vienna-based group Wiener Aktionismus founded in 1962 whose actions were deliberately shocking, often including self-torture
Conceptual art

Conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.
Feminist art

Feminist art is art by artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory in the early 1970s
Video

Art that involves the use of video and /or audio data and relies on moving pictures

Explore this term

The Body is Present Even if in Disguise: Tracing the Trace in the Artwork of Nancy Spero and Ana Mendieta

Joanna S. Walker

In the early 1990s Nancy Spero (born 1926) composed a series of homages to the Cuban artist, Ana Mendieta (1948–1985). These works recreated a performance by Mendieta which Spero had witnessed in 1982. Using this encounter as a lens, the article examines how these two artists share a feminist strategy of self-representation.
Extending bodies

Lisa Le Feuvre

How artists have explored and utilised prosthetic technologies both to satirise humanity and help in the quest to expand the human body beyond its limits
Abject Modernism: The Male Body in the Work of Tatsumi Hijikata, Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler

Lucy Weir

Focusing on the works of Tatsumi Hijikata, Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, this paper examines the representation of the male body in post-war performance, demonstrating that butoh in Japan and Viennese Actionism emerged from a cross-cultural exploration of modernist concepts of abjection.