Oleg Kulik
Ukrainian-born Russian performance artist, sculptor, photographer and curator. Kuliks creates a symbolic set of parameters, which define the environment the dog-personae will inhabit and then devise a series of actions that unfold as a response. The artist describes the dialogue within his practice as “a conscious falling out of the human horizon” which places him on hands and knees. His intention is to describe what he sees as a crisis of contemporary culture, a result of an overly refined cultural language that leads to barriers between individuals. Thus, he simplifies his performance language to the basic emotive of a domestic animal.
Chris Burden
Burden's reputation as a performance artist started to grow in the early 1970s after he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the 1971 performance pieceShoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters.
One of Burden’s most famous pieces, Trans-Fixed took place in 1974 at Speedway Avenue in Venice, California. For this performance, Burden lay face up on a Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into both of his hands, as if he were being crucified on the car. The car was pushed out of the garage and the engine revved for two minutes before being pushed back into the garage.
Burden shut himself in a locker for five days, with only the bare necessities for survival. Over the next few years he undertook many feats of physical endurance. These simple, shocking acts constituted what came to be termed as Body Art and were part of a wider criticism of institutional definitions of art. They also took place at the time of American involvement in Vietnam and reflected some of the extremes of public reaction to the atrocities commited by both sides in that war.