This research proposes a reflection on the relevance of a "art -action" current, based on an analysis of the acts for the art, characterized as "off limits", through a use of the physical presence, such as origin and support of the visual art, begun in the 1920s by Marcel Duchamp, and declined throughout the twentieth century with artistic groups as Dada, the Happening, the Viennese Actionnism, or the Body Art.We study here, through artists performers selected around the singular practices of Albrecht Becker, Ron Athey and Lukas Zpira, the possible limits of artistic acts, staging in extreme way, through performances considered shocking, aggressive, including piercings, tattoos, daring an art of faintness sometimes, being played of conventions, the taboos and the social-cultural codes in place. Thus we see whether it is necessary, today, to still speak about artistic acts political, militant, after the golden age of the Seventies, through a choice among many new esthetics of the human body, successively “hero, subject, material, object, victim, screen” of this transgressive acting-art. Our will is to understand the ambiguity contained in the representation, and all the shown symbolic system, compared to a first intention which is disintegration both thematic and formal in the plastic arts. The discussion is thus about the authenticity and the survival of these artistic extremists and transgressive practices, treating the concept of identity or even the genetics, the discussion being also about their avant-gardist position in the history of “the art for art” brought by the modernity, position to be reconsidered in a society called post-modern.Do this “body- hacking” bring us then towards a future virtual human being, a single existence in the digital universes? Is the body lost or, paradoxically the ultimate recourse, saved by these painful and radical modifications?
Performance in visual arts today : Tattoos and piercings