Knowra Body art Body art Body art is art that uses the artist’s body as material, subject, or site of action. It includes practices such as performance, self-transformation, and bodily intervention.
Performance art : Art in which live action, often by an artist, constitutes the work. Body art frequently takes the form of an action unfolding before an audience.
Rhythm 0 : A 1974 performance by Marina Abramović in which the audience could use 72 objects on her body. The work makes audience agency and bodily vulnerability unusually explicit.
Dada : An early twentieth-century avant-garde movement that rejected established artistic and cultural conventions. Dada’s irreverence and live experiments helped make actions, rather than objects, artistically viable.
Feminist art : Art that examines gendered power and challenges the exclusion or representation of women. Body artists have used physical presence to contest control over women’s bodies.
Endurance art : Performance art built around an artist sustaining a demanding physical or psychological condition over time. Duration and bodily limits become the work’s central materials.
Shoot : Chris Burden’s 1971 performance in which an assistant shot him in the arm with a rifle. The controlled injury turned physical risk into the work’s central event.
Happenings : Loosely structured live events combining performance, visual art, and audience activity, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. These events helped establish the body and live action as materials for art.
Body politics : The ways institutions and social norms regulate bodies and shape their meanings. Bodily actions can expose how power governs appearance, movement, and vulnerability.
Body modification : The deliberate alteration of the human body through practices such as tattooing, piercing, and scarification. Artists use lasting bodily changes to make identity, pain, or social norms visible.
The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan : A series of cosmetic-surgery performances by French artist ORLAN, begun in 1990. Surgical transformation makes the body a site for challenging ideals of beauty.
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