Body Art

Over the course of the last 50 years, artists have investigated the aesthetic frontiers of the body. A central notion of human identity, the idea of the physical body and the human self -as stable - has eroded (think of two world wars, the Holocaust, Viet-Nam, AIDS, plus the redefinition of the body in light of the developments in psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology, medicine, etc). Artists have investigated the temporality, contingency and instability of the body within and beyond cultural boundaries. One can generally define several areas of investigation: 1- The gesturing body, or the performing body: A dual role of object and subject that becomes public and gets transformed by activism (here we have the FLUXUS performances of Ono, Klein, Beuys, Nauman, etc). 2- The ritualistic body, as one finds in the Viennese Actionists' use of the symbolic language of torture, slaughter and sacrifice (among them Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl, as a way to deal with the horrors of post-War Nazi Austria). Or the self-mutilated body of Gina Pane and Mike Parr and the dying body -as bravely documented by Hannah Wilke. Also the desecrating body (as in Serrano’s Piss Christ). 3- The body as "participatory," as in Chris Burden's symbolic antics, Carolee Schneemann performances and Yayoi Kusama's staged "orgies." 4- The body as identity; whether expanding the idea of gender (the transgender phenomenon), sexuality or race, identity is characterized as a cipher in constant evolution (through the use of props, masks, costumes or any other disguises). In this category, we have the works of Pierre Moliniere, Lynda Benglis, Laura Aguilar, Paul McCarthy and others. 5- The idea of body as boundary: The artist's body is the limit between the private and the public realms and what is inflicted upon that body is inflicted somehow in the social or collective body. These artists examine issues of power, control and intimacy regarding liberties we can and cannot take within our own bodies. In this category we have the works of Dennis Oppenheim, Vito Acconci, Gina Pane, William Wegmann and Marina Abramovic -among others. To better understand the context of body art, take a look at these interesting topics: body piercing, corseting, scarification, infibulation, self-flagellation.

Pornography vs. erotic art

Pornography refers to representation of erotic behavior (in books, pictures, statues, movies, etc.) intended to cause sexual excitement. The word comes from the Greek porni (prostitute) and graphein (to write). Since the term has a very specific legal and social function behind it, we must make a distinction between "pornography" and "erotica" (i.e. artworks in which the portrayal of the so-called sexually arousing material holds or aspires to artistic or historical merit). The problem is that what is considered "artistic" today, may have been yesterday's pornography. According to our definition above, there's evidence of pornography in Roman culture (in Pompeii, where erotic paintings dating from the 1st century AD cover walls sacred to bacchanalian orgies). A classic book on pornography is Ovid's Ars amatoria (Art of Love), a treatise on the art of seduction, intrigue, and sensual arousal. With Modernity, in 18th-Century Europe, a business production (designed solely to arouse sexual excitement) begins with a small underground traffic and such works became the basis of a separate publishing and bookselling business in England (a classic of this period is Fanny Hill or The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) by John Cleland). At about this time erotic graphic art began to be widely produced in Paris, eventually coming to be known as "French postcards." Pornography flourished in the Victorian era despite, or perhaps because of, the prevailing taboos on sexual topics. The development of photography and later of motion pictures contributed greatly to the proliferation of pornographic materials. Since the 1960's, written pornography has been largely superseded by explicit visual representations of erotic behavior that are considered lacking in redeeming artistic or social values. Pornography has long been the target of moral and legal sanction in the belief that it may tend to deprave and corrupt minors and adults and cause the commission of sexual crimes.

Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987). "We are born between the urine and the feces, Augustine says, and so was Christ, if there was a Christ, skidding into this world as we doon a tide of blood and urine. Blood, feces, urine—what the fallen world is made of, and what we make. He peed, ejaculated, shat, wept, bled—bled under Pontius Pilate, and I assume the mutilated god, the criminal, humiliated god, voided himself on the cross and the blood and urine smeared his legs and he ascended bodily unto heaven, and on the third day he rose into glory, which is what we see here, the Piss Christ in glowing blood: the whole irreducible point of the faith, God thrown in human waste, submerged and shining. We have grown used to beauty without horror. We have grown used to useless beauty."-- Andrew Hudgins