Flesh and Freedom: The Artists Using Their Bodies to Burn Down Your Comfort Zone

The first thing you notice when you walk into Simone Varga's installation at a converted warehouse in Bushwick is the smell — beeswax and something floral, maybe jasmine. The second thing you notice is that you're surrounded by suspended casts of human torsos, dozens of them, hanging at eye level from the ceiling, each one unique, each one lit from within by a soft amber glow. Some are scarred. Some are full-figured. Some are visibly post-surgical. All of them are beautiful in a way that your brain takes a moment to catch up to, because you've been trained — by advertising, by Hollywood, by years of being told what bodies are supposed to look like — to see them otherwise.

Varga, who uses she/they pronouns and describes their practice as "a sustained argument with shame," spent three years casting the torsos of volunteers, most of them people who had never considered their bodies worthy of being art. The piece is called Permission Granted. The title is not subtle. Neither is the work. That's the point.

"Subtlety is a luxury that people with marginalized bodies don't get," Varga says, standing in the middle of the installation during a preview. "The world is not subtle about telling certain people that they don't belong, that they should cover up, that they should be ashamed. So why should the response be subtle?"

The Body as Political Act

We are living through a strange cultural moment in which the human body — particularly the bodies of women, queer people, people of color, disabled people, fat people — is simultaneously more visible and more legislated than it's been in decades. Abortion rights have been gutted. Drag performances are being banned in public spaces. Trans healthcare is under attack in state after state. Against this backdrop, artists who use the body as their medium aren't just making aesthetic choices. They're making arguments.

The sex-positive art movement — if we can call it a movement, given how deliberately unorganized much of it is — has roots stretching back through the feminist performance art of the 1970s, through the AIDS crisis activism of the 80s and 90s, through the body positivity reckoning of the 2010s. What feels distinct about the current moment is the combination of urgency and accessibility. This work isn't only happening in elite gallery spaces anymore. It's in DIY venues, community centers, pop-up events, and online platforms that reach audiences who never set foot in a museum.

"The institutions are catching up, slowly," says Jordan Reeves, a curator at an independent art space in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood. "But a lot of the most vital work is still happening outside them. Because outside is where you can actually take risks."

Performance Art That Makes You Squirm — On Purpose

If installation art about the body tends toward the contemplative, performance art about the body tends toward the visceral. And some of the most talked-about performance work happening right now in American cities is explicitly designed to create discomfort — to locate the exact place where the audience's conditioning kicks in and then refuse to let them look away.

Consider the work of collective Bare Frequency, a group of six queer performance artists based in Los Angeles who stage what they call "intimacy interventions" in public and semi-public spaces. Their performances involve nudity, physical contact between performers, and extended eye contact with audience members — but they're carefully choreographed and consent-forward in ways that distinguish them from mere provocation.

"We're not trying to shock people for the sake of it," says Kai, one of Bare Frequency's founding members. "We're trying to locate the shock — to find the exact moment where someone's discomfort tells them something true about what they've been taught. That's the work. The nudity is just the tool."

A recent Bare Frequency performance in a Silver Lake warehouse drew a crowd of around two hundred people and generated the kind of conversation that lingers for weeks — the kind where people are still processing what they felt and why they felt it, which is, by any measure, what good art is supposed to do.

Galleries Getting Explicit

It would be wrong to suggest that institutions have been entirely absent from this conversation. A handful of galleries and museums have been quietly — and sometimes not so quietly — expanding what they're willing to show.

A group show at a small but respected gallery in New York's Lower East Side last spring featured work that included photographic series depicting queer intimacy in frank and tender detail, a video installation exploring the intersection of chronic pain and sexual desire, and a series of paintings depicting masturbation that were hung, without irony, next to a coffee station. The opening was packed. Several pieces sold before the show officially opened. The gallery director, when asked about the curatorial decision, shrugged.

"People are hungry for work that tells the truth about bodies," she said. "We've been lying to ourselves in art for a long time about what bodies actually do and feel and want. The audience knows it. They're relieved when someone finally says it out loud."

Not everyone is relieved, of course. Online backlash to explicit body-positive art is a reliable constant — the comment sections, the think pieces from conservative outlets, the occasional call for funding to be pulled. Artists who work in this space have largely made peace with the noise.

"If nobody's uncomfortable, you haven't said anything," says Varga. "Discomfort is just the feeling of a belief being challenged. I can live with that."

DIY Spaces and the Democracy of the Body

Perhaps the most exciting development in this space — and the one least covered by mainstream arts journalism — is the proliferation of DIY venues and underground events creating community around explicit, body-positive art outside any institutional framework.

In cities across the country, these spaces function as something between gallery, theater, support group, and party. Attendees are often asked to sign community agreements before entering — commitments to consent, to not photographing performers without permission, to engaging with the work rather than simply spectating. The result is an environment that feels genuinely different from a conventional gallery opening: more intimate, more vulnerable, more alive.

"When you take away the velvet ropes and the wine glasses and the price tags," says Jordan Reeves, "you get people actually talking to each other about what they just saw. About what it made them feel. About their own bodies. That's when art does what art is supposed to do."

Simone Varga's Permission Granted runs through the end of the month. There is no admission charge. There is a donation jar. It's usually full by closing time.

That, too, feels like a statement.