Hybrid experimental setups

Carolee Schneeman knew how to play with the status of the image, but like most people she drew a clear distinction between art and life. The French performance artist Orlan has been the most radical in siting her personal artistic identity in the relationship between internal image and external perception and ascription. Since 1990, in the course of her «The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan» she has undergone a series of surgical operations on her face in order to re-embody certain physiological features that have served as models in the history of art. Her «models» were Venus, Diana, Europa, Psyche and Mona Lisa.[60] Christine Buci-Glucksmann refers to the notions of scenography and the event when referring to Orlan's oeuvre: «What is distinctive about Orlan is that she creates an art of the event in itself.»[61] Not only were Orlan's operations based on mediated images, after all—they took place as media events for the camera.

In work ranging from Timm Ulrich's «Self-Exhibition» over that of Gilbert & George and Abramovic/Ulay up to Tanja Ostojić's more recent «Personal Space,» it was the case that not only seeing and using one's own body as an art object but also publicly exhibiting it as such

simultaneously placed the body beyond the touch of its viewers. While many artists went one step further and symbolically exposed the body to potential public interference, aggression and violation, a small number even made this part of a real participatorial event. One example was Yoko Ono's «Cut Piece,» restaged by Lynn Hershman for video in the early 1990s—incidentally, similar examples of recurrence have taken place with the works of Vito Acconci, as shown (again in the 1990s) by Paul McCarthy's/Mike Kelley's «Fresh Acconci.» Cutting and cutting out, as well as shaving, burning and injuring, became one of the trademarks of later body art. From the contemporary media-society perspective, however, the consistency of Ono's reflection of mediated conditions (later also as a reaction to her husband John Lennon's popularity with the mass media) has even more impact than the later actions that directly deployed the body. Able to negotiate and transgress the borders between the esoteric Fluxus circles and the mass media Beatles events, together with the Austrian public broadcaster ORF Ono and John Lennon produced the television broadcast «Film No. 6, Rape» (1969). As Reality TV—an unknown woman was genuinely stalked by a camera—