Shots, cuts, surgeries: the radical artists who made their bodies a battlefield

Ever since, beginning in the sixties,

made the body the definitive artistic medium, not a few creators have worked with their physique to turn it into a moldable support that is permeable to transformations.

Even those caused by violence.

A tool to radically experiment with the limits of pain and pleasure and raise new debates about that uncertain place where identity resides.

Peruvian non-binary gender artist Wynnie Mynerva has caused a sensation in Arco with a video in which she documents the operation she underwent to sew up her vagina.

The process consists of a kind of sex reassignment with which to escape from the dictates of the canons that define the feminine and, also, the masculine.

Her cry of protest, which is also an exercise of freedom over her own person, picks up the witness of other radical artists who, before her, made her body an artistic battlefield.

DVD1095.

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Work of the Peruvian artist Wynnie Mynerva a Arco.

Alvaro Garcia.

02/23/2022Alvaro Garcia

Chris Burden:

Died in 2015, the American is one of the great references of

art .

In his best-known work,

(1971), documented on video, Burden stood in front of a gallery wall, motionless, as if he were a sculpture himself.

Then a friend shot him with a rifle.

The bullet hit him in the arm, but it could have been worse.

At that time, as he explained years later in an interview with

the artist watched all the time on television “how many kids my age were shot”.

It was the years of the Vietnam War and the images charged with violence had become one more element of everyday life, a background noise that, due to so much buzzing, had become imperceptible.

With his

of him, Burden wanted to highlight the complicit role that we all play as silent witnesses of situations that we should not allow.

'Shot', by Chris Burden.

Gina Panne:

The French artist, who produced her best-known works in the 1970s (she died in 1990), made art with her body to highlight some of its dualities: the distance between physical and psychological existence, the individual and society, life and death, the presence in the moment and the memory that remains.

Her vision, intimately connected with the tenets of feminism, was holistic and intersectional.

By cutting her belly with cross-shaped slits, she recreated images of reproduction, linked to the blood of menstruation, and alluded to the religious component installed in the idea of ​​conception.

Climbing up spike-covered steps, she was expressing her rejection of the Vietnam War.

And by appealing to pain through fire,

Marina Abramovic

She is probably the artist best known for the brutality she has inflicted on herself.

In one of her first

of her,

Held in 1979, Abramovic proposed a sociological experiment with which to shed light on the helplessness to which we are all subjected as social beings.

In a room he placed all kinds of objects, some harmless, like a feather boa, and others as dangerous as a loaded gun, so that the spectators present could do what they considered with them.

She promised not to resist, and she complied.

The evening, six hours of submission to the unpredictable, ended with Abramovic naked and covered in blood.

Although, as she herself admitted, she had come to make peace with the idea of ​​dying.

Since then many of his

They have included cuts, beatings and all kinds of violence against their own bodies.

It's not about masochism.

On the contrary: for Abramovic, the conquest of pain is his greatest song to life.

Orlan:

In the early 1990s, this French

underwent nine cosmetic surgery operations that radically transformed her face.

The project, entitled

, lasted for several years, during which the artist reconstructed her features with some attributes taken from key works in the history of painting and sculpture, from

Botticelli 's

.

Its objective was to denounce the pressure to which women are subjected by beauty canons that are often imposed from art.

She named her style Carnal Art.

These interventions, where the operating room acquired the qualities of a baroque theater, were broadcast several times live.

a multifaceted musician and artist, also transformed her body with artistic and transcendental intentions.

In her case, she wanted to look like her wife, who also had surgery.

Her common dream consisted of merging into the same "pandrogynous" being.

'Performance' of 'Matar al Artista', by Abel Azcona, at the Eñe.Uly Martín Festival

Abel Azcona:

The Navarrese's personal history has been fundamental in defining his extreme practice.

The son of a drug-addicted prostitute who abandoned him, the artist has claimed that he would have liked to have exercised his right if he had not lived.

In 2013, he locked himself in a six-square-meter room in a Madrid gallery.

The objective of that project,

was to emulate the living conditions in the placenta for 60 days, without light and without any contact with the outside.

He wanted to be born again.

He lasted 42 before having to be hospitalized.

In many of his

of him, the artist invites the viewer to abandon their passive subject status to become part of the work.

It is he, the artist, who becomes an object.

For example in

(2013-2015), offered her body to the highest bidder for three minutes.

And, in

(2018), stood on a pedestal at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid and invited far-right and religious groups to carry out the threats of violence they made against him on the internet.

Other issues that Azcona has addressed in his works, always controversial (he has been summoned on several occasions to testify before a judge), include colonialism and church abuses.

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