ABSTRACT
R ecognizing in the early seventies that SoHo itself wasan art gallery, a Turk named Tosun Bayrak, scarcely young at the time, did radical performance pieces-“actions” they could be called-whose audacity remains unrivaled. When his wife was evicted from a West Broadway building that was sold to a new owner, Bayrak embedded bags of bovine blood and entrails in the walls and ceiling of her loft and replastered them. Inviting people into the loft one Saturday afternoon, he chopped at the walls with an ax to “free” the gore, so to speak. White pigeons, very much a symbol of peace at the time, were released from beneath the floorboards. This piece he called The Living Loft.
