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There are no aesthetic criteria for dealing with such works. If some artist shows a clutch of Polaroids of himself playing table tennis, this is called "information." But who is informed, and about what? "Information" has become the shibboleth of the '70s, a vogue word, as "flatness" was in the '60s and "gesture" was in the '50s. Information is somehow opposed to "culture." For all the pretense of entering the world out there, however, conceptual art remains inexorably culture-bound. Its very existence hinges on the privileged status of art itself, a status drilled into the world audience by decades of institutional art-worship. No matter how nugatory an event or object seems, it is nevertheless special, being art. And within this protective box, the conceptual artist—as Sculptor Robert Smithson acerbically put it—disports himself "like a B.F. Skinner rat doing his 'tough' little tricks."
These matters do not afflict body art to the same degree, even though the atmosphere of suspension and privilege peculiar to the recent avant-garde remains. But the trouble with most body pieces is that they are either so small in conception as to be negligible—for instance, Dennis Oppenheim slowly tearing off a section of his fingernail—or so grotesque in their implications, as with poor Schwarzkogler, that they amount to overkill. Triviality or threat: take your choice.
There is something indubitably menacing about the work of people like Vito Acconci, one of whose recent pieces was to build a ramp and crawl around below it, masturbating invisibly; or the young Los Angeles artist Chris Burden, who had himself manacled to the floor of an open garage, between live wires and buckets of water, so that (in possibility) anyone who cared to might kick over the pails and electrocute the artist. The sight of such gratuitous risk is a vulgar frisson for the spectators, and unlikely to appeal to those who believe that art and life interact best at a distance from one another. At least the psychodramas of body art connote a desperate involvement that is missing from the other, and colder, latitudes of conceptualism. If conceptual art represents pedagogy and stale metaphysics at the end of their tether, body art is the last rictus of Expressionism.
But faced with the choice between amateur therapy and finicky, arid footnotes to Duchamp, the mind recoils. In fact, the term avant-garde has outlived its usefulness. The hard thing to face is not that the emperor has no clothes; it is that beneath the raiment, there is no emperor.
Robert Hughes