CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Endurance Art
Performances stretched over hours, days or years, or built on physical hardship, so that time, fatigue and pain become the material.
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About
Endurance art makes duration and physical strain the material of a performance. It grew out of the performance and body art of the late 1960s and 1970s, when artists treated their own physical limits as a medium.
Chris Burden spent five days folded inside a university locker in 1971. Tehching Hsieh made the most extreme commitments: for a year from 1978 he lived in a cage in his studio without speaking, reading or writing, and in 1980–81 he punched a time clock every hour, day and night. Gina Pane cut her skin with razor blades in staged actions, and Marina Abramović and Ulay walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China to meet and part in The Lovers (1988). Zhang Huan sat in a Beijing public toilet smeared with honey and fish oil in 12 Square Meters (1994). What remains is documentation: photographs, video, logs and relics.
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