CategoriesStyles and Movements
Body Art
Art in which the artist's own body is the material, site or subject, often through performance, endurance, marking or display.
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About
In the 1960s and 1970s many artists stopped making objects about the body and began working with their own. There were forerunners: Yves Klein's Anthropometries (1960) used paint-covered models as living brushes, and Carolee Schneemann's Meat Joy (1964) rolled performers together with raw fish and chicken.
Bruce Nauman filmed himself slowly applying layers of coloured make-up. Chris Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm for Shoot (1971). Marina Abramović offered her passive body to an audience with seventy-two objects in Rhythm 0 (1974). Ana Mendieta pressed her figure into earth, grass and mud for the Silueta series (1973–80), and in Paris Michel Journiac staged a mass using his own blood. Much survives as photographs, film and relics. Later artists such as Janine Antoni, who mopped a floor with her dye-soaked hair in Loving Care (1993), kept testing the body as a tool.