Conclusion: Reckless people

The conclusion brings together underlying themes of the preceding chapters, under the conceptual problems posed by recklessness and impossibility as cultural logics. The reckless and the impossible are framed by a final case study, namely the work of Stephen Cripps, whose dangerous and risk-prone pyrotechnic performances and interactive sculptures can be understood as significant to the development of performance art – and the incipient cultural logic of the performance of extremity – in the 1970s. The conclusion offers final thoughts on the performance of extremity, and on art’s optimistic promise to manifest or achieve the reckless, the impossible, the incorrigible, or the unlimited.

The art of sabotage

From the early 1970s, the Kipper Kids (Harry Kipper and Harry Kipper, aka Brian Routh and Martin Von Haselberg) became notorious for the danger, excess, strangeness, and baffled hilarity of their frequently drunken ‘ceremonies’. This chapter accounts for the former notoriety of the Kipper Kids to ask further questions about the performance of extremity as an aesthetic category in the 1970s. The theme of sabotage – or self-sabotage – emerges as a crucial element in the performance art of the Kipper Kids, in terms of their devising and presentation of specific ceremonies and works, and in their pursuit of careers as artists committed to art’s anti-aesthetic sensibility.

The preferred ordeal

An Eight Day Passage (1977) is an exemplary example of a performance of extremity. This chapter looks at Kerry Trengove’s landmark performance of endurance, in which the artist was bricked into a breezeblock cell in a gallery and tunnelled his way out by hand over eight uninterrupted days. The performance was accompanied by a sophisticated invitation to active participation, co-co-creation and conversation by its audience. By reading this work in the aesthetic context of other practices of endurance art in the 1970s and the historical context of the miners’ strikes in Britain, as well as in dialogue with the decolonial pedagogy of Paolo Freire, this chapter discusses An Eight Day Passage in relation to duress, masculinity, limit-acts and limit-experiences, work, agency, and relationality.

Introduction: Performance – action – extremity

The introduction defines and contextualises the performance of extremity. If extremity assumes a limit, what might be made of the borders, gaps or ruptures between art and its purported outsides? The introduction provides detailed contexts for performance art in the 1970s; the action as an emergent practice for performance art; extremity as a conceptual frame for exploring limits of bodily experience, aesthetics and spectatorship; and broadly contextualises the 1970s in social and political terms. It introduces a number of performances by artists, beginning with a public intervention by Ana Mendieta, to set the scene for the sustained analysis of case studies in each subsequent chapter. The ethical, political, and affective implications of the performance of extremity are discussed in detail.

The dirtying intention

Genesis P-Orridge has been a controversial figure in British art since the late 1960s. This chapter explores the national scandal of the Mail Action (1976), a performance at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court that consisted of P-Orridge’s indecency trial, after the artist was charged for sending pornographic mail art through the Royal Mail. P-Orridge’s performances with and as COUM Transmissions suggest the vital intersections between performance art, pornography, counterculture and crime in London in the 1970s. The Mail Action is placed in dialogue with P-Orridge’s subsequent exhibition (with COUM Transmissions) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in October 1976 to document the threats posed by explorations of sex, crime, controversy, esoteric ritual, in the context of the performance of extremity.

Impossible things

Since the late 1960s, Anne Bean’s performances, public interventions, drawings, videos and writings have been actively pursued as a ‘continuum’, and she strives to diminish the distinctiveness or iconicity of each in favour of a democracy of forms and effects. Bean’s pursuit of a continuum is discussed as a performance of extremity with regards to specific works of performance as well as her broader assault on critical and theoretical understandings of performance and art, in terms of the potential of performance art to blur the boundaries between art and life. The argument is channelled through the theosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff – a touchstone for Bean in the 1970s – and the dubious critical methods of magic and the occult, ending up at the persistence of her refusal to be fixed or found by history.

A criminal touch

In 1976, Ulay undertook an exemplary performance of extremity by stealing ‘Germany’s favourite painting’, namely Carl Spitzweg’s The Poor Poet (1839). This chapter discusses the action at length in the context of Ulay’s earlier works as well as examples of performance art that seek to make interventions into institutional spaces of art as a means of aesthetic and political critique, highlighting the way such actions shed light on the border between art/life and art/crime. The chapter argues that in Ulay’s theft, the transgressing of the perceived limits of art was not simply art crime or vandalism, part of a sustained project of questioning and deconditioning his own gendered and national identity, here, specifically, by taking aim at his own German-ness in the postwar period.