Bodily Fluids

We ritually sanitise our bodies and our environments by removing visible bodily fluids, regarded as polluting secretions. Our fluids, poised between internality and externality, provoke feelings of abjection and disgust. When fluids escape from our bodies, we are also reminded of our fragility and mortality, thus we eliminate our external fluids to prevent infection, disease, and death. Fluids represent uncontrollability and anarchy; they haemorrhage from our orifices and disrupt our ordered, controlled lifestyles. Thus, our taboo against them is also a repression of our fear of chaotic disorder.

Fluids are also eliminated to prevent disease and thus preserve life. Shit is intrinsically associated with diseases such as cholera, and sanitation keeps it out of sight and out of mind. Blood is essential for survival, thus our fear of blood's visibility represents our sanctification of life. However, menstrual blood and HIV-positive blood are regarded by many as the ultimate fluid taboos. Bodily fluids, usually neglected in studies of censorship, are fundamental to the two central aspects of obscenity - sex and violence - as blood is censored from horror films and semen is censored from pornography.

Proudly undermining these taboos, Gilbert+George created giant, garish photographs of the most reviled bodily fluids. For their Fundamental Pictures (1996) exhibition they used microscopes to photograph the individual cells and particles of their bodily fluids, the resulting images being surprisingly appealing abstract patterns resembling mosaic fractals.

So enchanting are these alchemical images that the only indication of their baser origins comes from their titles, the most comprehensive being Spunk Blood Piss Shit Spit (1996). G+G's Spunkland (1997) resembles Richard Hamilton's collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different So Appealing? (1956) in its trepidatious/celebratory depiction of a new Eden; more directly, it is an homage to Marcel Duchamp's literally seminal Paysage Fautif (1946), a small sheet of card stained with semen.

Andres Serrano also took a series of abstract photographs of bodily fluids: his Semen And Blood (1990) is a swirling, polymorphous mass of red and white translucent liquid, a startlingly beautiful and luminescent image. Again, the title is the only clue as to the true nature of the photographed fluids. Serrano's Piss Christ (1987) generated intense controversy, it being a photograph of a statue of Jesus immersed in a tank of urine. Jesse Helms was predictably outraged, though the urine's opaque, yellow glow resembles amber resin, giving the statue the reverential appearance of a fossilised artefact, an interpretation clearly oblivious to the fulminating Helms. (Piss Christ was the central focus of a right-wing backlash in the early 1990s, when Helms and other American senators criticised the National Endowment for the Arts and its funding grants.)

Piss Christ's literal and linguistic combination of the sacred and the profane - Jesus and urine - was subtly echoed by Chris Ofili's The Upper Room (2002), a group of thirteen paintings of monkeys, each one a different colour. The animals were positioned to represent Christ and his disciples at the Last Supper, and were decorated with discreet lumps of elephant dung. Animal dung also features in Pink Flamingos (1972), the underground film by 'Pope of trash' John Waters: the film ends with Divine, self-proclaimed 'filthiest person alive', scooping up a pile of fresh dog shit and eating it. MTV's stunt shows, and their film spinoffs (notably Jim Hickey's Dirty Sanchez: The Movie and Jeff Tremaine's Jackass II, both from 2006), are the legacy of Pink Flamingos.

In her music video Firecracker (2003), Roxy Saint is seen bathing in her menstrual blood. Slayer's video Live Intrusion (1995) includes footage of Mike Meyer carving the band's name into his arm and burning the bloody wound. Blood is extracted with a syringe, decanted into a glass, and consumed in Alejandro Jodorowsky's film Fando Y Lis (1968).

Abjection

Specialising in a more profoundly chaotic appropriation of bodily fluids were the singers GG Allin and Genesis P Orridge. Allin, lead singer with of The Murder Junkies, was repeatedly arrested due to the obscenity of his stage act. He would defecate, eat it, then spit it out into the audience - if indeed there was anyone left in the audience. Allin is profiled in the documentaries Hated by Todd Phillips (1994) and Affliction by Mark Hejnar (1996). Orridge, from the band Throbbing Gristle, masturbated with a maggoty chicken's head on his penis, gave himself blood and urine enemas, then excreted them onto the stage and licked them up again. These confrontational spectacles represent the antithesis of our idealised culture of order, precision, and sanitation.

For Hermann Nitsch, abjection and art were inseparable. His Aktionist ritualistic and quasi-religious performance art events began in 1962 with the disembowelling of a dead sheep. They reached their zenith in 1998 with the Bacchanalian excesses of his six-day orgy of blood, gore, and entrails. Performance artist Samppa VonCyborg's film Scabs (2006), and his music video for The Wildhearts (Kill All Monsters, 2007), share the Aktionists' abject aesthetic. Franko B, though displaying none of Nitsch's frenzied blood-lust, nevertheless also uses the bleeding body as the basis of his performances, and has cited Nitsch as an influence.

With Otto Muhl, Gunter Brus, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Otmar Bauer, Nitsch formed the Weiner Aktionists collective, whose performances involved coprophagy, masturbation, and animal slaughter. In Zeigt (1969), for instance, Bauer eats a revolting mixture of food, vomit, and urine. Muhl's performances, notably 20 September (1967), Sodoma (1970), and Oh Sensibility (1970), reached a wider audience as they were filmed by Kurt Kren. Muhl also appeared briefly in Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie (1974), another exercise in scatological excess.

The less anarchic side of 'body-art' is represented by performance artists such as Marina Abramovic and Gina Pane. Both artists have used razors to slash their skin, exploring the nature of human suffering and culpability.