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Yann Marussich, Bleu Remix (2007), stands among the most radical investigations of the body in contemporary performance art. The Swiss artist remains motionless inside a transparent vitrine while blue liquid slowly emerges from his eyes, nose, mouth and skin. Tears, sweat and saliva become the visible substance of the work. The piece unfolds through duration, concentration and the progressive transformation of perception.
Marussich belongs to a lineage of artists who use the body as medium and site of revelation. Stillness governs the work. Attention shifts to minimal physical transformations: moisture, viscosity, rhythm of secretion, the pressure of time. Time sculpts the image.
The transparent vitrine structures the performance, evoking museum display, medical chamber and reliquary. The body appears under observation and preservation, suspended between specimen and sacred object. The work activates questions of vulnerability, discipline and control.
Blue structures the symbolic and visual force. In Western culture it evokes spirituality and transcendence. The reference to Yves Klein is clear, but inverted: Klein projected blue onto bodies, Marussich draws it from within. The invisible enters the visible through organic matter.
The work also resonates anthropologically. Across cultures, bodily fluids relate to suffering, ecstasy and purification. In Bleu Remix, these materials enter ritual visibility and acquire new meaning.
Marussich reveals the body as matter and language, transforming organic processes into image. The work shows how performance can generate intensity through minimal physical manifestation.
Follow the page for more radical performances and suggest the artists who changed your way of seeing.
Flamenco acts as an archive of the living. The voice carries traces of lives shaped by history and transmits them as present vibration. Andalusia holds layers of crossings, migrations and coexistences. El cante transforms this into sensory experience. Each vocal emission carries memory still active in the present.
Sound emerges as breath pressing on memory. The throat becomes a passage between individual and transgenerational time. Melisma links blood and language. The verse exceeds meaning and produces embodied knowledge. Singing creates a direct relation between interiority and shared vibration.
Duende activates the living. Federico García Lorca described it as an energy passing through the performer and transforming presence. It intensifies the relational field. Vulnerability becomes active, shared intensity.
Compás builds a temporal architecture where risk can emerge with precision. The guitar sustains emotional exposure. Palmas create a collective intelligence of rhythm. Together they form a temporary community based on listening, trust and responsibility.
During a long session at Cedric’s home, from 14:00 to 23:00, time itself shifted. Aesthetic and existential experience coincided. Singing revealed a ritual dimension of being together, intensifying relationships over hours.
The voices of Davinia Jaén and Lidia Fernández, carried by the Spanish guitar, activated a transmission where memory and desire took form. Sound created a space where listening and friendship gained density.
Flamenco is a practice of knowledge rooted in the body. It transmits living memory, connects fragility and strength, and inscribes existence within shared time.
Among the calcareous rocks of Capri, where cliffside vegetation meets the geometry of terraces and dry-stone walls, the garden surrounding Casa Solitaria unfolds under the attentive care of Benoît and Umberto like a living score, each species assuming its place with musical precision. Strelitzia reginae open their corollas like unexpected birds, while Chamaerops humilis and other Mediterranean palms establish a vibrant verticality, receiving and modulating light against the luminous limestone of the island.
The bromeliads lean towards the air: they anchor themselves to trunks, suspending their weight within the lattice of branches, shaping ascending relationships that echo the inner verticality of Capri’s landscape. Roots insinuate themselves into calcareous earth, penetrating fissures of stone, articulating a quiet tension between elevation and grounding. Tillandsia, almost devoid of soil, enter into dialogue with ferns and Philodendron, while porous rock retains humidity shaped by sea winds and time.
Suspended lanterns introduce a measured rhythm, marking the path like discreet signals accompanying the passage between tropical density and Mediterranean clarity. Among Agave, Euphorbia, columnar cacti and clusters of Polygala myrtifolia, botanical presences from distant latitudes find equilibrium within the microclimate of the island.
In sculptures emerging from foliage and passages unfolding between terraces and stone, one recognises a form of attention guiding growth through listening. At Casa Solitaria, Benoît and Umberto, with all the crew, compose continuity between human gesture and vegetal autonomy, allowing the garden to resonate with the layered memory of Capri and with the generative force of solitude.
Work on the park and the restoration of the house advance apace: if this year Casa Solitaria will welcome only a few friends, 2027 shall mark the moment of its full opening, when this patiently composed landscape may finally be shared in its complete form. 🌿
The most extreme art performances in history (Part VIII)
These artists use the body as operative material. Performance becomes a concrete action that intervenes in the social sphere, in the construction of identity and in the physical perception of the viewer. Each work establishes a real situation that produces observable consequences.
• William Pope.L — The Great White Way
For years he moved across New York by crawling along the pavement, often wearing a vulnerable version of the Superman costume. The body exposes the friction between urban mobility and social inequality, transforming the street into a critical device.
• Viktoria Modesta — Bionic Performances
Prostheses designed as sculptural elements construct an image of the body that integrates technology and desire. Artificial physicality becomes visual language and affirmation of aesthetic autonomy.
• Hanatarash — Bulldozer Performance
During a noise concert a bulldozer enters the performance space and destroys part of the stage. Destruction becomes sonic composition and introduces actual danger as structural component of the work.
• Alessandra Zerbinati — durational performance, Winter NoiseFest, Genoa (2025)
The body undergoes prolonged exposure to sonic pressure and physical strain. Endurance produces a visible transformation of presence and intensifies the relation with the viewer.
• Guillermo Gómez-Peña — Border Brujo
A hybrid ritual figure combines religious iconography, anthropological codes and postcolonial critique. The body operates as symbolic territory shaped by cultural tension.
• Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis — La Conquista de América
A public action employs the queer body to intervene in the colonial memory of Latin America and alter the reading of historical space.
• Yann Marussich — Bleu Remix
A blue liquid slowly emerges from the skin and mouth of the performer seated motionless inside a transparent vitrine. The process makes visible a real physiological alteration.
Which performance artists have most influenced your perspective on the body?
Share your suggestions for the next chapters of this series.
STELARC — Sitting Suspension (1979–80)
In Sitting Suspension, Stelarc realises one of the most radical actions in the history of performance: the body is lifted from the ground through hooks inserted into the skin, transforming the surface of the body into an actual point of support. The skin becomes load-bearing structure. The weight of the body enters into direct relation with gravity, making the material dimension of existence perceptible.
Stelarc, an Australian artist active since the late 1960s, develops a pioneering investigation of the body as a modifiable system. His works explore mechanical prostheses, electronic interfaces, robotics, telematic connection. Performance becomes a field of experimentation in which the body is understood as a structure open to extension and reconfiguration.
The seated position, a familiar gesture associated with stability, is transferred into an extreme condition. The body remains suspended in space while maintaining an ordinary posture. This displacement produces a profound perceptual shift: what appears familiar becomes an experience of limit.
Suspension alters spatial perception. The body oscillates, responds to the tension of the skin, reveals the relation between weight and force. The action introduces an acute awareness of corporeality as physical structure.
This practice marks a decisive threshold in the history of extreme performance: the body emerges as active matter, surface of experimentation, site of transformation. Sitting Suspension presents the body as biological architecture capable of sustaining unexpected configurations.
Which configurations can the body assume when understood as an operative structure?
Write in the comments.
Follow the page to continue exploring the performances that have transformed our understanding of the body and presence.
In 1964 Lucinda Childs presented Carnation, one of the founding gestures of the postmodern sensibility developed within the Judson Dance Theater. The work establishes a new economy of movement and a renewed conception of intensity grounded in concentration, structure, precision and continuity.
The body remains seated on a chair. Space becomes an operational field. Ordinary objects enter into relation with time: sponges, bottles, elastic bands, fabrics. Each element acquires a compositional function. Movement unfolds through measured sequences. Repetition produces perceptual transformation, and minimal variation generates formal tension.
Childs develops a choreography of attention. Movement becomes a device of perception. Rhythm organises duration, and action renders time visible as both plastic and mental material.
Intensity emerges through discipline and continuity. Exactness of gesture opens a shared space between performer and viewer. Performance becomes a site for the co-construction of experience and the redefinition of the gaze.
This research later converges in collaborations with Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt, where choreography, music and visual structure form architectures of perception based on continuity and variation.
Carnation shows how the everyday object can activate an almost ritual dimension of gesture. Simplicity becomes a vehicle for complexity. The minimal becomes threshold and instrument of knowledge.
The work still asks a living question: what intensity can emerge from an elementary structure and a rigorous score? What kind of presence arises from an economy of gesture grounded in precision and continuity?
Performance as a practice of attention, a construction of time, and a shared space of perception and transformation.
For further explorations in performance and the performing arts, follow the page and join the conversation.
🎥 Lucinda Childs. Carnation (1964) performed at The Bonnie Bird Theatre at the Laban Centre, London, 1990.
Every encounter with an animal discloses a threshold that thought alone cannot reach.
The gaze of the living transmits a knowledge that circulates beneath language and restores continuity between inner life and embodied presence.
Animal existence expresses a primordial dignity that precedes every hierarchy and silently orients the ethical imagination.
To protect animals affirms a vision of the world founded on reciprocity between species and on the recognition of a shared condition of vulnerability and splendour.
My dog, this marvellous being, Majnûn, reminds me that love moves with equal intensity through instinct and consciousness and reveals a subtle joy that refines both gravity and grace.
Depth welcomes lightness.
Lightness reveals depth.
To feel deeply clarifies existence and restores tenderness and kindness as forms of intelligence.
Majnûn 🤍
#saluki #respectallbeings #love
The body becomes site and instrument of confrontation.
This chapter of The Most Extreme Performances in History (of Art) brings together works that expose the cultural structures shaping desire, morality, authorship and authority. Each action produces an image that transforms the body into evidence, placing the viewer before situations that demand interpretation and responsibility.
• Hannah Wilke, Starification Object Series (1974–82)
Wilke applies small chewing-gum sculptures shaped as vulvas onto her skin. The seductive pose becomes marked surface where attraction and stigma coexist.
• Karen Finley, We Keep Our Victims Ready (1989)
Finley covers her naked body in chocolate while speaking about sexual violence and domination. The gesture confronts the consumption of bodies and language.
• Leigh Bowery, performances at Taboo and Anthony d’Offay Gallery (1980s–90s)
Bowery constructs extreme costumes and prosthetic silhouettes that reshape the body into living sculpture and destabilise fixed identity.
• John Duncan, Blind Date (1980)
Duncan produces a radio work based on an encounter with a corpse, bringing the listener to confront ethical limits of representation and artistic agency.
• Joe Coleman, self-harm performances (1980s)
Coleman stages ritual actions drawing from martyr iconography and vernacular culture, transforming injury into symbolic theatre.
• Pierre Pinoncelli, actions on Duchamp’s Fountain (1993–2006)
Pinoncelli strikes the urinal with a hammer and stages acts of bodily risk, reopening the question of iconoclasm within conceptual art.
• Kiki Smith, Tale (1992)
A wax figure crawls forward leaving a long trail behind her body. The work exposes vulnerability as material presence and transforms fragility into image.
As the series expands, many artists included emerge from your suggestions. Before proposing further names, explore the previous chapters to avoid repetitions and to extend the shared map of radical gestures. Each contribution refines the constellation and strengthens the collective research.
Follow the series to continue tracing how artists have pushed the limits of the body, representation and engagement.
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