By forcing audiences to partake in oftentimes violent, jarring, shocking, or unimaginable experience, Body art asked its viewers to consider the role they were playing in the dark and uncomfortable spaces between innocent bystander and culpable voyeur.

What else could be more demonstrative of an artist's passions, opinions, and voice than a direct, literal representation of the self as the prime channel of communication in making a point? Especially in matters of the hot button issues of the time, using the body became a way for an artist to connect the individual with the universal human experience - one person asking others to resonate as a whole.

In the post-1960s atmosphere of changing social mores and thawed attitudes toward nudity, the body became a perfect tool to make the political personal.

Lines were erased between message and messenger or creator and creation, giving new meaning to, and amplifying the idea of, authentic first person perspective.

Body art diffused the veil between artist and artwork by placing the body front and center as actor, medium, performance, and canvas.

To the body artists, the artist's presence translated to an artist's physicality not only did they need to personally fulfill a role in the presentation of an artwork, their own flesh and blood would become a key figure in the work as well. The larger movement's main impetus was to evolve definitions of art to include situations in which time, space, the artist's presence, and the relationship between artist and viewer constituted an artwork.

The body artists were a loose group - mostly categorized as a group by critics and art historians - which developed early within the Performance Art movement. This resulted in direct confrontation between artist and audience, producing a startlingly intimate new way to experience art. It was a freeing time where artists felt empowered to make art ever more personal by dropping traditional mores of art making and opted to using themselves as living sculpture or canvas. This is exactly what many Performance artists did to express their distinctive views and make their voices heard in the newly liberated social, political, and sexual climate that emerged in the 1960s. If life is the greatest form of art, then it seems only natural for artists to use the physical body as a medium.

Body of lies movie summary