The human body has inspired artists throughout the ages – traditionally the body was often used to explore allegory, beauty and sexuality but in the twentieth century there was a significant shift in both how the body was perceived, and how it was used to create art. Use of the body, frequently the artist’s own body, as a medium is often associated with performance art. Performance art came to prominence in the 1960s and can be seen as a branch of conceptual art. Conceptual artists think beyond the use of traditional media and explore ideas in whatever materials or form is appropriate.

An important influence on the emergence of performance were the photographs of the abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock making his so-called ‘action paintings’, taken in 1950 by the photographer Hans Namuth. Pollock, with his canvas laying on his studio floor, dripped and poured household paint onto the surface. Throughout the 1950s artists such as Yves Klein continued to experiment with the application of paint, blurring the lines between painting and performance.

In his Anthropometries paintings (1960) Klein used the human body as a paint brush when naked women, smeared in paint, where pulled across large canvases creating abstract tracings of the human form. The element of performance in the creation of these works was further enhanced through an audience of spectators dressed in formal dinner-wear. While Klein, was known for developing new techniques and attitudes to art, others, such as those associated with Fluxus, had more overtly political agendas.

The 'action' began as soon as the artist landed in the USA, when he was wrapped in felt in New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, and driven in an ambulance to René Block's Manhattan gallery. He spent three days in the gallery space with a coyote before being driven straight back to the airport and flown home. The coyote is significant because it is sacred to Native Americans, representing an aspect of the country's past which Beuys felt affection for. Each day of the 'action', he made two piles of the current Wall Street Journal. These would be duly torn or urinated on by the coyote – his statement on contemporary USA. Two works in the ARTIST ROOMS collection Coyote I (1980) and Coyote II (1980) reference items used in the action including a felt blanket and newspapers set in the room where the action took place. Beuys would often use felt in his actions and sculptures because of the materials insulating properties, which are integral to the meaning of the work. Beuys would also have a suit tailor made for him from felt, which he would use for the earlier performance Action the Dead Mouse / Isolation Unit (1970). Felt Suit (1970), one of Beuys’s many multiples, evokes the image of the artist almost as if a self portrait, despite the absence of the body.

While Nauman was investigating the role of the artist and various physiological states Gilbert & George were presenting themselves as sculptures at art schools and galleries in London. Dressed in suits, with their faces painted in metallic silver and gold they mimed and performed music-hall songs, making minimal robotic movements for up to eight hours. Realising that they could reach only a handful of people at a time, they began to create films and pictures that could extend the idea of living sculpture without requiring their physical presence. Performance pieces were recorded in photography, film and video, and these eventually became the primary means by which their performances reached a wider public. Like Beuys, Gilbert & George’s appearance would become an integral part of their work.

harles Ray was similarly thinking of sculpture as an activity rather than object when he created early photographic works such asPlank Piece I & II (1973) . In this photographic documentation of Ray, he is pinned against a wall with a plank of wood. Ray creates a minimal, graphic image that is at once humorous and unsettling. In Ray’s later works such as Oh Charley, Charley, Charley… (1992) he creates casts from his own body where the lifeless bodies allude to a sense of play in the artist’s absence.

The physical absence of the artist’s body is apparent in the work of Richard Long, who often creates art by walking in the landscape. The formative work A Line Made by Walking (1967) was created when Long was on his way home and he stopped in a field in Wiltshire. He then walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. Long photographed this work, recording his physical interventions within the landscape which underplay his own presence in the work.

Francesca Woodman similarly created works which question the presence of the body while indicating a sense of life. A prolonged exposure technique creates a spectral blur of Woodman’s body giving her a ghostly presence in works such as Space², Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1978 (1975-8). Woodman’s work often captured her in isolation, in dilapidated interiors, where her body is partially absent or obscured. She is both present and absent – her identity removed by the obscuring of her features.

Creed’s work provokes an emotive response because we are familiar with these basic functions – our memory of similar experiences can be distressing or negative. The American sound and video installation artist Bill Viola’s work is often emotional in a classical sense, recalling medieval or renaissance painting. The two works by Viola in ARTIST ROOMS: Four Hands (2001) and Catherine’s Room (2001) are from a series known as The Passions, which explores human emotions, inspired by early European devotional paintings. The bodies in these works perform rituals and gestures that accompany emotional states and relate to the cycles of nature.

Just as Viola uses fragmented body parts in works such as Four Hands concentrating the viewer on single body part or gesture the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe often zoomed in on single area once stating "I zero in on the body part that I consider the most perfect part in that particular model". In the work Derrick Cross (1983) the body’s core fills the frame. The arch of the body suggests movement while the draped fabric around the waist enhances the sense of performance and sculpture. Mapplethorpe, like Viola, also takes his inspiration from classical and renaissance art, however, emotion is overridden by the bodies’ physical perfection.

The partial and fragmented body parts in Douglas Gordon’s A Divided Self I & II (1996) belong to the artist himself but this is not evident at first glance. The work consists of two screens; both showing two arms struggling with one another which appear to belong to two different people: one is hairy and the other, hairless. The fact that both arms belong to the artist illustrates a personal identity conflict. Gordon frequently uses his own body in his artwork often wrestling, constraining and disfiguring himself, manipulating his body making his audience aware of their own fugitive subjectivity, questioning how we give meaning to our experience of things and our relationship to ourselves.