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Body Art fits into the context of this dematerialization of the work that is specific to the seventies. Far from the static quality of traditional representation, the body here becomes the site for all kinds of artistic experiment. Questioning our presence in the world, with a critique of declining social, sexual and identity values, artists confront the viewer with a novel perceptual experience taking in space and time. As the bearer of an anti-establishment order, Body Art pushes back man’s physical and mental limits to the utmost. In contemporary society where the new ideal body demands slimness, youthfulness and physical health, artists also take issue with established aesthetic values and practices. They question our perception of reality, denounce standardization of the body by transgressing society’s major taboos – death, religion, old age, illness, sex or physical deformity. Like archaeologists, they go back to the body’s origins, explore its plastic qualities, and, with no false modesty or dramatizing, produce fragmented self-portraits, compositions that are often frontal and serial, akin to primitive sculpture. This piecemeal approach to the body indicates no longer a unitary but an exploded perception. Far from seeking to uncover some inner psychology of the subject, the artist now confronts the human figure with the space, with respect to a heavily connoted social or architectural context.
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