ABSTRACT
The most recent survey of performance art theory to appear in the United States, the Spring 92 issue of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, while it treats a number of performance-related issues - auto-destructive art, Viennese Actionism, even "what is left of performance art" - pays astonishingly little attention to the body of the audience and virtually no analysis is applied to the question of the function of the audience body in/during high-risk performance.
This essay offers an overview of the phenomenon of so-called pain or risk art as produced in the United States and Europe with special attention to the stresses and dangers brought to bear against an audience often perceived by the artistic community as a mere consumer of art, if not downright recalcitrant. The articulation of this rarely acknowledged hostility is itself the breaking of a taboo.
