Body art is art made on, or consisting of, the human body. The most common forms of body art are tattoos and body piercings, but also includes scarification, branding, shaping (for example tight-lacing of corsets), and body painting.
More extreme body art can involve mutilation, or in some way pushing the body to its limits. One of Marina Abramovic's works, for example, consisted of her dancing until she collapsed from exhaustion, while one of Dennis Oppenheim 's better known works saw him lying in the sunlight with a book on his chest until the skin not covered by the book was badly sunburned. It can even consist of preserved bodies arranged and dissected in an artistic fashion, as in the case of the plastinated bodies used in the travelling Body Worlds exhibit.
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