“BODY LANGUAGE has the essence of truth science of
humans that try to make a connection again with all the
powers of subconsciousness, with memory about
humanity, world, with spirit, PSYCHE , with pain and
death , so that subconsciousness could get it’s previous
strengths – ENIGMAS OF LIFE…”

Gina Pane


Inside of the performance art it sets apart one specific current that interpret body, along with the interpretation as an artistic material (that’s a similar with all others aspects of performance art) and goes further, where the artists do much more extreme actions on their body’s (putting it in to the fire, giving them self injuries with different objects and all the other different shapes of self injuring). Characteristic of performance as a work of art is that they are time based, whether it’s fifteen minutes long or it’s last for hours. There we can make analogy in-between human life and artwork, where that time interval has a main roll in interpretation of both things (life and art), time limitation gives a value and uniqueness to life and art also.

Precisely the extreme of those actions led to the examination is this pathology or art. At the beginning we have to separate this two determinations, we have to point out that when we are talking about pathological cases we have in front of us the actions which don’t have any kind of structure and don’t have the opportunity of progression except extremity - and that is death (as it was with the case of Rudolf Schwartzkogler, from the group Vienna’s actionists, who practically commit “suicide” – even thou that was not intension). Along with already mentioned Schwartzkogler, as with all of the members of Vienna’s actionists (Brus, Nitsch, Műhl) it has to be pointed out that they have admit from the beginning that theirs artistic actions have therapeutic characteristic, in other words that was need for personal release from emotive or any other kind of tension. Using that concept their actions are becoming the questions of psychoanalyzes and they are becoming border cases (art or pathology). Something that is not characteristic of psychiatric disturbed person is the possibility of exact and precise thinking and also further development of some idea. Extreme actions with body could be the consequence of some deep psychological problem, but also they could be one expression that is going to have clear methodology and also concise thought, because of that one action can be called the artistic one. Of course, we cannot talk about aesthetics of beauty anymore; even we cannot talk about the aesthetics of ugliness because for body art we use different categories or maybe it’s useless to speak about aesthetics, because the presence of aesthetics it could be seeable from action to action, so it’s not possible to make rules that are going to be used for every occasion. The artist, who will have extreme actions with their body, will drown the clear line until where they could go, they will make certain structure, because they don’t want death as an ending point and that kind of responsibility to their body is recognizable with an artists such as Gina Pane, Marina Abramovic, Cris Burden, Stelarc, Eric Hobijn, Franco B, Ron Athey, Orlan, Kira O’Reilly. Need for self-injuring doesn’t have obligatory pathological background, that’s just one-way of interpretation of death and pain itself. Making body consciousness to it’s extremity gives opportunity that something that could be pain for regular human being, for the artist doesn’t exist, but as Gina Pane refers it’s starting to be something as subconsciousness previous strength, and for here that’s enigma of life. Within body art, performers personalities are both, introverting and extroverting much more than with the other artistic disciplines, because if somebody wants to do performances it needs to have extroverting side and from the other point of view introverting side is seeable in the way how the certain problem will be interpreted and structuralize in it’s performance. At this point, I will turn to one Jung’s sentence, where he is speaking about the means that are orientating consciousness to experience or praxis, and that’s something that could be the key guide for understanding extreme performance actions. Jung says: “Sensitivity (sensitive perception), is saying to us that something exists; thinking is saying what that is; feeling is saying is that acceptable or not; and intuition is saying where that is coming from and where is going.” If we follow Jung thought, just to explain one of the body actions, we can make analysis of one Gina Pane’s performances in which she was climbing up an down on the ladder that had spikes on it, and that brought to injuring her legs and arms. Interpretation trough Jung’s theory looks like this: we could say that the artist trough pain or sensitivity got the consciousness about her body, thinking has brought the structure what that pain represent for her (suffering identified with moral), feeling that obviously told her that it’s acceptable (in here case that was look at Vietnam’s war) and intuition has direct attention on sociological awareness and rebellion of the artist to that kind of situation. I think that this Jung’s way of thinking can describe much better and explain most of the extreme body actions because it gives them the main characteristics: consciousness of their own (body) existence, thinking trough about certain problems with which they want to work with, acceptability of the thing that they are doing (the reason of the action) and at the end do they do that because of some psychological problem or not, and if that action has brought something that was the idea at the beginning (with that also the possibility for further investigations).

At the same time when body art performances are created one other praxis also starts with its life. That’s the body modifications praxis whose father in modern times is Fakir Musafar and the movement that will get the name “New primitives”. Everything that new primitives use in their praxis has already existed in different tribes and ancient people, but in context of modern times they are becoming a part of art and individual expressions. Tattoo, scarification, suspension, piercing, branding are just a part of new primitives praxis. Comparing to performance art, actions of new primitives are more spread among young people especially, but influence on each other is obvious. Ron Athey performances (besides his tattooed body) with his group are very much similar to those on new primitives gatherings and at some point have tribal ecstasy, that you can see during shamanistic dances for example. From the other side performance group Psycho Cyborgs directly combines body modifications with very conceptual acts of stretching the boundaries of the body. We have to acknowledge in modern art history “new primitives” as its part, because of the their role in body art in all of it forms.

Every from these artists is turning to extreme actions interpreting the body as a spending material, which body is (but for the most people that is hard to swallow), and from the other side every of mentioned artist shows a big social awareness. Thou it could be looked as a masochistic, artist that are doing performances where they do something with their body doesn’t have that kind of feeling, that kind of characterization comes only from the viewers side. Being a body artist myself I have to say that resistance on pain became bigger not only during performances but in life also. It changes the perception of the outside world, although the resistance on pain getting bigger, the chance to connect with other people who are in pain is becoming also bigger, because you have the better understanding for their condition by experiencing on your own body. Number of the body artist is bigger than from mentioned, but the key idea of this article was not to connect to the artist themselves as much is it was on one artistic discipline which was considered as a problematical and hard for understanding even with art historians. Concept of body and it use in art is expanding trough body art, showing that the pain is one of the main part in creation of the artwork. That is much more explicit in body art because the pain is becoming excelled through extreme actions. Here you can see the strength of spirit and possibility of human consciousness to control the body to the extreme points, and reflection of art on pain is making specific body, where every cut on the skin becomes clearly said attitude and every drop of blood something that confirms it.

Gabrijel Savic Ra

(Original article was published in Remont Art Magazine No. 14