The chief preoccupations of this spring’s Costume Institute exhibition, “Costume Art”—putting fashion, an “embodied art form,” into direct dialogue with other artworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection—can’t help but call to mind those artists who make thought-provoking and innovative use of their own bodies in their work.
From the avant-garde and conceptual art–derived body art of the 1970s to more modern interpretations by artists including Annie Sprinkle and Carmen Winant, here’s a roundup of body-centric artists whose respective oeuvres you should know.
Marina Abramović
This Serbian conceptual artist and performer has used her own body in her work many times (remember when she and her longtime partner, fellow artist Ulay, met in the middle of the Great Wall of China to end their relationship?), but perhaps the most memorable instance of Abramović making art out of embodiment is her 2010 MoMA retrospective and exhibition “The Artist Is Present,” for which she sat silently in a chair for 736 hours over three months, inviting visitors to sit across from her and meet her gaze.
Chris Burden
Burden changed the landscape of performance art with the bold, often dangerous works he staged beginning in the 1970s, including the 1971 performance piece Shoot (in which he arranged to have himself shot in the arm with a .22-caliber rifle by a friend in a gallery), 1973’s B.C. Mexico (in which he spent 11 days on a secluded beach in Baja with no food, just water), and 1979’s Honest Labor, which featured him digging a large ditch.
David Hammons
Born in Illinois, Hammons is most closely associated with the art of Los Angeles, where he moved in 1963 and began creating his Body Prints series in the late 1960s. This series brought together monoprinting and collage, with Hammons greasing a body (often his own) with substances including margarine or baby oil, pressing or rolling the body against paper, and topping the surface with charcoal and powdered pigment to create a wholly new vision of Black postwar artistic identity in America.
Frida Kahlo
Many artists have painted their own portraits, but Kahlo’s 1944 painting The Broken Column stands out as a particularly vivid example of an artist using her own body (and, in Kahlo’s case, her own pain and suffering) in her art. This oil-on-masonite painting was created shortly after Kahlo underwent spinal surgery to address an injury she suffered in a traffic accident at 18 years old. “Kahlo’s body, punctured by countless nails and torn open to reveal a crumbling architectural column as a metaphor for her own spinal column, is held together by an orthopedic brace,” wrote Margaret A. Lindauer in her 1999 book Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo. “At the same time that the painting is considered to represent the accident, Kahlo’s psychological and sexual health are implicated.”
Ana Mendieta
This Cuban-American performer and sculptor’s Mexico- and Iowa-based “Silueta” series, in which she carved and shaped her figure into the earth using materials including flowers, moss, gunpowder, and fire, has a haunting resonance in the wake of Mendieta’s 1985 death. Mendieta’s husband, fellow artist Carl Andre, has remained under a cloud of suspicion following her fall from the window of their 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment. Decades after his acquittal, protestors at an exhibition of Andre’s in 2017 unfurled fabric with silhouettes representing Mendieta’s physical body and her work, chanting “¿Dónde está Ana Mendieta?” (“Where is Ana Mendieta?”).
Yoko Ono
Ono developed a significant conceptual practice after moving to New York from Japan in the early 1950s. One especially memorable work was 1964’s Cut Piece, in which she sat on a stage, laid a pair of scissors in front of her, and invited the audience to cut pieces of her clothing off—raising questions about agency, identity, violence, and power.
Catherine Opie
It’s impossible to talk about queer embodiment in art without nodding to Opie—especially her 1993 photograph Self-Portrait/Cutting, in which the Ohio-born, Los Angeles–based artist stands with her back to the camera, displaying a bloody, crudely cut drawing of two skirt-wearing stick figures holding hands in front of a domestic scene. Opie also probed her viewers’ assumptions around pain, pleasure, selfhood, and nurturing with the 2004 photograph Self-Portrait/Nursing, in which Opie can be seen nursing her child with the word “Pervert” visibly cut into her chest.
Gina Pane
This French artist of Italian origin is perhaps best known for her 1973 work The Conditioning, in which she lay on a metal bed frame suspended over a group of lit candles. (Marina Abramović would later recreate The Conditioning as part of her “Seven Easy Pieces” series at the Guggenheim in 2005.) Elsewhere, in her 1974 work Action Psyché, Pane inflicted wounds upon herself and photographed the result.
Carolee Schneemann
There is perhaps no more literal interpretation of using the body as art than Schneemann’s 1975 work Interior Scroll, in which she undressed, painted her body with mud, read from her book Cezanne, She Was a Great Painter, and then slowly pulled a scroll from her vagina to read a response to male criticism of her work.
Laurie Simmons
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The Queens-born artist used herself as a photographic subject on numerous occasions. Indeed, Simmons’s daughter, the writer, actor and director Lena Dunham, described her mother’s early artwork at length in her 2014 memoir Not That Kind of Girl, writing: “On occasion she turned the lens toward the mirror so her face was obscured by the chunky black camera body, pulling focus to her dry heart-shaped lips and rabbit teeth (the same ones I have, the same ones she has since
capped). But mostly, the eye is drawn to her nakedness. Legs spread defiantly. This wasn’t officially her art, but she was committed.”
Annie Sprinkle
This trailblazing sexologist and performer has worked as a sex educator, feminist stripper, and pornographic film actor, director, and producer, but she illustrated sexuality in a wholly new and bold way with her performance piece Post Porn Modernist Show, which ran between 1989 and 1996. “My whole purpose is to bring what’s hidden out in the open so people can look at it and discuss it,” the artist has said. “And sexually oriented material is very important to study in an academic setting. Controversy is part of the fun.”
Carmen Winant
This Columbus, Ohio–based artist came up with the concept of her “Body Index” series when she worked as a model for figure drawing classes and began ruminating on themes of gender, surveillance, and representation. Winant includes in it images of all kinds of individuals, “from lesbian separatists to massage therapists and beyond,” to create a kind of taxonomy of physicality that is deeply affecting when considered as a whole.
