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Body art, despite its interest in intervening with the physical flesh and creating blood and scars and so on, actually is not a violent practice. They’re really taking a kind of libertarian or civil libertarian attitude towards their bodies. It's my body I should be able to do what I want with it.
Professor Victoria Pitts
Professor Victoria Pitts
Much performance and body art draws on ritualistic and tribal practices and experiences that can be traced back though history, especially practiced in Native American culture. The original aim was to cross a pain threshold as a mark of adulthood, sometimes hanging with weights until the flesh actually ripped. So, performance art that involves body modification, such as flesh hanging, is not a new concept developed purely to provoke shock for shock's sake.
Today, performance and body artists perform in all ranges of venues from mainstream art venues like the Tate Modern to underground venues such fetish clubs - where audiences expect to see blood - to staging private performances. Performances are far removed from the modern art scene, staged for the benefit of their own communities.
In performance art there is both the live audience which view the artwork as it happens and a secondary audience that experiences the art as photographs, video or even just stories – for example through the Internet.
For the artists themselves, it's not violent but a controlled event. Their attitude is very much: it’s my body and I will do what I want with it…which includes cutting it, scarring it and looking deviant and shocking. As a community they support experimentation and are, arguably, changing the perception of art and what we can do with our bodies.
Just Self-Harm?
For some people, performance and body art is really just self-harm and self-mutilation. But for Professor Victoria Pitts there is very clear difference between body art and self harm.
One of the distinctions is that body art is always undertaken with other people and it's become sort of a group practice and there are people with who they share ideas and practices and it’s not the kind of thing they're ashamed of.
But can pain really make you feel good?
It seems inconceivable that putting hooks through your flesh could make you feel good. But Neurologists are starting to unravel the complex chemistry that lies behind this. Neurophamacologist, Dr Tony Dickenson explains:
In our brains the pain and the pleasure and the reward and the punishment systems are all acting alongside each other. So, conceivably, in cases of people producing a controlled pain that the emphasis switches to the so-called pleasurable effects of pain rather than the unpleasant ones.
What is clear is that these artists want us to watch. They are encouraging us to think about our bodies in new and radical ways – to make us think about what our bodies mean to us and how we relate to one another.
