The act and the object

Therefore, by the time viewers arrive at the photograph of Aktion-inspired Peter Weibel's 1973 tongue-in-concrete insertion (which we are told resulted in the deformation of his tongue), the Austrian school of self-sacrifice looks positively Catholic - that is, redemptive. It is also curious to note that while Viennese body art eventually led to the arrest of Brus or the self-imposed exile of other artists, it incited actionism in artists in the United States and Australia. Almost a decade later, Chris Burden and Australia's Mike Parr ventured into treacherous forms of self-sacrifice, betting on the kind of purgative manipulations that made the Viennese work seem vital, hieratic, and potent, but respectively pulled empiricism and psychoanalytic narrative back into the domain of self-inflicted violence.

The years that followed the demise of the Nazi regime in Europe constituted a contradictory period of collective soul-searching and decadent denial. With respect to the feminist issues forcibly bound up in this work (pardon the pun), many women in these postwar performance cultures were known to collude with the power of the masculine unconscious, allowing - if not aiding - men to orchestrate their blatant objectification. In the case of the female pawn-brokering that produced the kittenish splatter effect in Yves Klein's ubiquitously-known blue body paintings, "Out of Actions" manages to level the idea of nymphomania and Faustian domination by opposing it with documentation of self-orchestrated performances by women working in Eastern Bloc countries or outside the European context.

Documents of works by Marina Abramovic or Yoko Oho certainly rival the Viennese in art-world stature, given their radical plotting of public self-offerings, which threw the spotlight on the issues of intimacy and trust rather than on primal regression. The exhibition also illuminates the strange tools of self-examination invented by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, whose holistic studies of what catalogue essayist Guy Brett calls the permeable membrane often go unmentioned in U.S. discussions of performance art.

"Out of Actions" also captures the paradoxical weight of spatial manipulation, especially where the transmuted body is implicated in the operations of industry, science, and fashion. It was hard to resist the envy and regret of not being present for "The Second Outdoor Gutai Exhibition" in Tokyo in 1956, when Gutai member Atsuko Tanaka first performed in her brilliant electric dress (in the exhibition it is accompanied by a group of magical little drawings that give the viewer some idea of Tanaka's light body). One also needed to use imagination to visualize the gravity-in-action of Rebecca Horn's luminous, black-leathered armature, accompanied by photo-documents to give an idea of what it was like when being worn.

But herein lies the crux of "Out of Actions": it is the drawings, sculptures, photographs, and texts that remain to conjure a history, narrative, and myth about prophetic artistry. To that end, MOCA has gone to some expense to dust off and in some cases reproduce the curio cabinet of now near-religious artifacts, securing numerous photographs as evidence and introducing the magical grocery store wand that allows each viewer to zap a bar code to download the desired montage of extant video imagery. The irony is that many of these objects produced for performance were done so in a direct assault on a devouring military-industrial complex (remember the term?) that has proven itself through electronic means to have, for the moment, won the high-stakes war on culture, at least in the Euro-American sense of the term. In that regard, the exhibition locates performance in mid-century Europe, the United States, and Japan as a project that straddles a rueful Arts and Crafts rejection of high technology and the out-and-out embrace of its Leviathan possibilities.