Artist Pyotr Pavlensky has made eyes water all over the world with his protest against Russia's descent into authoritarianism – nailing his testicles to the ground in Red Square on Sunday to denounce Vladimir Putin's "police state". Yet connoisseurs of performance art are probably already saying: "Meh, seen it all before." For Pavlensky's protest is the latest in a long line of performance art pieces that have endangered life and limb.
1. The vanishing Dutchman
No one will ever know if Bas Jan Ader expected to die in his performance In Search of the Miraculous. In 1975, the Dutchman set out from Cape Cod in a small sailing boat to cross the Atlantic. This was part of an artwork that also included a series of pictures of bland Los Angeles scenes. It was as if he sailed out to find something deeper than freeways and fast food. His broken boat was found 150 miles off the coast of Ireland. It was empty.
Mail & Guardian pick:
11. Steven Cohen and the cock
No list of extreme performance art is complete without mentioning South Africa's very own Steven Cohen. Cohen was arrested in September in a "highly touristic place of Paris" and charged with sexual exhibitionism for parading around Trocadero Square facing the Eiffel Tower, clad in a bird costume, high heels and a living rooster tied to his genitals.