Body Art

Category

Body art is radical performance art that explicitly uses the artist’s own body to comment visually, sensually and often viscerally on identity and to enact the body’s social meanings and expressive possibilities. It began after the Second World War with artists actually using their own and others’ bodies in their art. Body art came to prominence in the 1970s as part of a growing recognition that the body’s specificity and social significations mean it can never be neutral, either as an artistic medium – the actor’s body – or as the author of meaning – the artist’s body. Body art was led by feminist artists who put themselves in their work, collapsing the distance between artist and artwork, subject and object and process and product, and insisting that their embodied gendered experiences affected their work, its reception and its meanings. Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama, Karen Finley, Annie Sprinkle and numerous other artists have performed naked or semi-naked to challenge audiences to confront the ways in which pornography, fine art and other forms of representation persistently portray women as commodified sexual objects rather than as active subjects. As well as exploring the social significations of bodies differentiated by gender, sexuality, ‘race’, ethnicity, illness and so on, body art has explored the body’s material capabilities and limits. This work has focused on and tested the body’s material borders as well as the limits of mental endurance, provoking audiences to consider the ethics of their passive spectatorship. Body art also explores responses to pain, transgressed taboos, the putatively ‘obscene’, masochism, the presence of the performer, the mortality of the body and the complexities of subjectivity. It is practised in artistic contexts such as theatres and galleries, but it also occurs much more widely – and with many of the same meanings – through everyday life activities of costuming and body adornment such as tattooing, piercing and scarring. Body art might explore the body in time and in psychoanalytic understandings of pain and pleasure and provoke varied interpretations as celebratory, exhibitionist, self-abusive or liberating. From the RCTP

Image: Human Altar, courtesy of La Pocha Nostra

BODY/BAG

Gavin Krastin is a choreographer and performance artist. He describes himself as “a gay, white, South African of a certain privilege and class in relation to other bodies.” He suggests that BODY/BAG deals with race and is intended to “expose and speak to the larger politics that affect us all.”

GGP Ethno-Techno - Trimming Ones Identity - Asset Thumbail Image — El Cuerpo Politico: Trimming One’s Identity (Ethno-Techno)

This 1994 clip documents performance activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s work with his organisation, the international performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.

GGP Ethno-Techno - White on White - Asset Thumbnail Image — Identity Crisis: White on White (Ethno-Techno)

This 1994 clip documents performance activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s work with his organisation, the international performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.

Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits

The film is a documentary about the life of a female shaman Kim Keum-hwa, who was shunned for being possessed by spirits as a girl and oppressed for following superstitions as an adult. It depicts how she grows to be a great shaman who embraces the pain of all people, and how she comes to be honoured as a national treasure of Korea because of her outstanding artistic talents throughout Korea’s tumultuous history. The film is based on the autobiography “Bidankkob Neom-Se” by Kim Keum-hwa.

GGP Ethno-Techno - Censurado - Asset Thumbnail Image — Politics of Language: Censurado (Ethno-Techno)

This 1994 clip documents performance activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s work with his organisation, the international performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.

GGP Ethno-Techno - Ethnic Profiling - Asset Thumbnail Image — Politics of Language: Ethnic Profiling (Ethno-Techno)

This 1994 clip documents performance activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s work with his organisation, the international performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.

GGP Ethno-Techno - Sing-along Geography Lesson - Asset Thumbnail Image — Politics of Language: Sing-Along Geography Lesson (Ethno-Techno)

This 1994 clip documents performance activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s work with his organisation, the international performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.

powder

powder is a performance telling the story of the pain, and pleasure, of dressing, and undressing, the female body.

GGP Ethno-Techno - El Designer Warrior - Asset Thumbail Image — Reverse Anthropology: El Designer Warrior (Ethno-Techno)

This 1994 clip documents performance activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s work with his organisation, the international performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.

GGP Ethno-Techno - El Hombre Cucaracha - Asset Thumbnail Image — Reverse Anthropology: El Hombre Cucaracha (Ethno-Techno)

This 1994 clip documents performance activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s work with his organisation, the international performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.

GGP Ethno-Techno - Chicano Virtual Reality - Asset Thumbnail Image — TV Gone Wrong: Chicano Virtual Reality (Ethno-Techno)

This 1994 clip documents performance activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s work with his organisation, the international performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.

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Gómez-Peña, Guillermo

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is an artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. His work has contributed to debates on diversity and border culture.

Activism list — Category

Activism

Activism is the intervention of an individual or group, using varied tactics, to disrupt and challenge inequality, and create transformation in the social, political, cultural or economic realm.