The Turbine Hall at Tate Modern is an uncompromising theatre. You can imagine a lot of artists drying up here. But there is one kind of contemporary art which shouldn t shrivel in these surroundings - film and video projection. Performing Bodies, a season of film and video projections presenting a montage history of performance art, is the first attempt since Louise Bourgeois' opening installation to use the hall's leviathan scale.
A screen was hung from the bridge below Bourgeois's spider showing a crisp image floating in space with the darkened power station rising up behind. This was the Body Politic, a journey through the extreme, pathetic things artists did to their bodies in the 20th century, from Mara Mattuschka cutting her scalp with a razor to Russian Oleg Kulik, chained up naked outside a Swedish art gallery in 1995, barking like a dog and sniffing the crotches of western gallery-goers.
We began with Leni Riefenstahl's spectacular and scary Olympia (1938), the Nazi filmmaker's documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Riefenstahl's camera dwells melancholically on the ruins of ancient Greece, Wagnerian music building to a crescendo as she reveals the renewal of the classical ideal in the muscular body of a German athlete. Riefenstahl's film was a foil for what followed: here was the Nazi ideal of the body beautiful, now let's see what artists have done to it.
They have attacked, mocked, humiliated the body. In Carolee Schneeman's 1964 In Search of Meat Joy, performers writhe on the floor smearing themselves with paint, rubbing dead fish and chickens against their bodies. In her 1990 Sausage Film, a bashful Sarah Lucas slowly eats an enormous sausage.
At first, Vito Acconci's 1970 film of himself, blindfolded, trying to catch tennis balls someone throws at him is hilarious. But people stopped laughing as its nightmarish quality sank in.
The star of the evening, however, was Joseph Beuys. Riefenstahl's fascist aesthetic provided the correct context to see Beuys's 1974 performance I Like America And America Likes Me. Beuys's opposition to the Vietnam war precluded him setting foot on American soil, so when he went to New York he had himself stretchered into a fake ambulance which drove, siren blaring, from the airport to Manhattan.
His colleagues are stopped by cops but somehow make it with their sinister cargo to the gallery where Beuys rises, Dracula-like, to be sealed in a cage with a coyote. Riefenstahl's rituals of physical triumph are replaced by a ritual of shamanistic death and transformation which culminates in a man humbling himself, lying down on a bed of straw with a wild desert dog.
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