Abstract
A strong force of 20th century art was the endeavor to break boundaries and find forms that never existed before. In the process, not only were genres, styles and media created anew and others destroyed, but boundaries were also transgressed that had been untouchable in the centuries before. Works of art that were exceptional were admired, distinguished and entered the texts of history. The quality of the extraordinary, however, always referred to the exceptionally beautiful, the exceptionally monumental and the exceptionally technically perfect work. An important question is whether artists had no other means of pushing the boundaries or whether they were merely individual obsessions? It could be possible under conditions of extreme concentration and extreme exposure to achieve the sublime, but this happens in duration. The text looks at three topics under which artists have explored practices which reached the extreme and the sublime. These three means are reduction and actions with one’s own bodies that demanded the unbearable for the performers and the spectators, the “nothingness” of time in video art and the non-colours black and white in painting. The reduction manifests itself in forms of expression of almost nothing and is analysed in the white paintings of Robert Ryman, the black Abstract Paintings of Ad Reinhardt, and the film piece Zen for Film by Nam June Paik. The body actions focus on the life-threatening performances Rhythm 0 and Rest Energy by Marina Abramovic, the live video-transmitted surgical interventions by Orlan, and finally Stelarc’s body experiments exoskeleton and cell cultures.