Body Painting & Body Art History
Body painting, or sometimes bodypainting, is a form of body art. Body art is art made on, with, or consisting of, the human body:
- body painting, tattoos, body art performances, body piercings, scarification, branding, scalpelling, full body tattoo.
Unlike tattoo and other forms of body art, body painting is temporary, painted onto the human skin, and lasts for one day, or at most (in the case of Mehndi, "henna" or temp tattoo, glitter tattoos) a couple of weeks. Body painting that is limited to the face is known as face painting.
Body art is also a sub-category of performance art, in which artists use or abuse their own body to make their particular statements.
Bella Volen has separated the visual development of Body Art and Body Painting in 3 parts.
Part 1-Ritual body art
North&South America, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, Melanesia, Oceania, India, Middle East, China, Japan, Bulgaria, Kosovo and more
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Body painting with clay and other natural pigments existed in most, if not all, tribalist cultures. Often worn during ceremonies, it still survives in this ancient form among the indigenous people of Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific islands, parts of Africa, India, Japan and more.
In this ritual art forms we find body painting, tattoos, piercing, nose-ears-mouth plugs, Mehndi, henna and scarification.
The place of body art forms in this old cultures is very important.
It is a part of their social and spiritual life and is a main element in the important moments of the human life:
Rite of passage ( Rites of passage are often ceremonies surrounding events such as other milestones within puberty, coming of age, marriage and death.)
- The child becomes adult:
- Weddings
- Preparation for war or hunt
- The birth of a child
- Spiritual rituals
- Death
Body art also shows the position of a person in a certain group.
It can represent:
- your origin, your position, symbol of power, what you have reached and experienced, it can be like an ID card (Maori and Polynisia), it protects from evil forces, it shows bravery and beauty, can be an act of transformation, mourning, connecting with the spirits of animals or the earth, symbol of fertility. In the last 100 years in some countries like Japan it has been also connected with the mafia and crime.
Some rituals are connected with personal preparation: a period of silence, no sexual activities, isolation, some tribes also have to fast.
Part 2- 1960-1980- the birth of a new art form
Big changes are coming in times of crisis.
In the time around 1960 artists are searching of new ways of expression, new forms of painting, provoking and shocking. They need attention and have a massage!
- The work of the Actionists developed concurrently with—but largely independently from—other avant garde movements of the era who shared an interest in rejecting object-based or otherwise commodifiable art practices.
- In this times body art performances and body painting are in one hand inspired by Fluxus and Happenig movements, where it is all about the moment of creating, sexual freedome and not the final result of the art work. In another hand other artists like Verushka are creating beautiful images of transfigurations where the body melts with the nature and becomes a part of the environment, becomes sometimes an object.
- One of the main body art momevnts in this period was in Austria:
The term Viennese Actionism describes a short and violent movement in 20th century art that can be regarded as part of the many independent efforts of the 1960s to develop "action art" (Fluxus, Happening, Performance, Body Art, etc.). Its main participants were Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. As "actionists", they were active between 1960 and 1971. Most have continued their artistic work independently from the early 1970s onwards.
In my Body Art History Workshops I show a lot of their videos!
- Verushka, born as Vera Gottliebe Anna Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort, can be called The Mother of Contemporary Body Painting.
- Yves Klein and his Blue Anthropometries and fire paintings are also a very important part of the Body Art History
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