Numb -Anastasia Zaravinos.
A woman is wrapping long skeins of red wool around her naked boobs, tighter and more tightly still. The body is corpulent; the camera drops below the waistline and turns side-on. Around the thighs she's smearing the red paint of make-believe menstrual blood over the floor and in the crack between her legs. The camera cuts back to more windings around the breasts now bulging dark purple against the vivid red string. This finely resolved conceptual work is performing a strict regime of painting via the performing body. Body painting with string, from the inside out.

The performer is Anastasia Zaravinos; the work is entitled Numb. Gallery goers are wincing from the felt connection between cognition, sighted experience and the transference of pain. And yet is an extraordinary work, not only about perception (looking is enough to emit an empathetic 'ouch'), but also about the tension between abstraction and the body, between an abstract conceptual form of expression experienced in the mind and the clarity of pain as expression.

You can imagine Artaud lauding the work, not because pain is cruelty, but for reasons of clarity, cutting through the bullshit of representation. Toute nue, totally nude, the work is direct and deeply formalist - body painting with more than a twist or two.

In many respects, it's also about abjection, the body as filth and the repulsive real of messy lived materiality. Out of control corporeal largesse is punished for its sins of enjoyment by a merciless regime of string cutting into flesh and return circulation, making the boobs bulge larger and purpler. The paint and menstrual references exaggerate the female grotesque to the point of excess where the work begins to be about that more conceptual entity called painting, achieved though the tools of monstrous sublimated flesh and domestic string. In the performance tradition of Marina Abramovic (Rhythm O) use of the body achieves a conceptual leap.

The weather’s always fine/ a cell in the social body
Adam Costenoble

Adam Costenoble also pairs video intimacy with large-scale world events; the gallery goer's tread triggering the scattering of a flock of pigeons on video, whilst simultaneously a helicopter is brought crashing down on the opposite screen. Playing on the idea of interconnectedness - the flapping of a butterfly's wing in Japan causes an avalanche in the Andes - unthinking personal action creates a ripple effect. As does inaction. The helicopter (pictured below) could be coming down in Iraq or any of the world's war zones; it could be real or taken from a high simulation video game; it could be a military toy. The point is that this symbol of conflict falls and crashes, linked through the obscure workings of the world and politics to the action/inaction of citizens.

Costenoble's work extends Dan Graham's early 1974 use of sensors, video and mirrors to film and then project the gallery goers' own immediate past in the mirror of his own future (Present Continuous Past); Costenoble is less reiterating this splitting of the self (using the mirror and time delay to deconstruct the self into the component parts of being and image) than using the senor to eliminate time, and press distant political events into the here and now of the viewer's implicated body.

Back in Black - George Tillianakis.
This time the near-naked body is red, bright stumpy red, topped with a ridiculous high head of Planet of the Apes style curls meets Marie Antoinette. Redman moves with a stumpy gait, monkey-like along suburban footpaths, dangling long awkward arms, and is not quite upright; sensing himself along as if that head of hair was bouncing back radar frequencies from overhanging branches, stray pedestrians and obstinate lampposts. The red man in a nappy (white undies) possesses primitive bat powers, an allegorical representation of naive humankind out for a stroll in twenty first century horrors.

At the sight of empty syringes in a deserted druggie flophouse he contorts in a kind of epileptic seizure, a body compromised by what the mind rejects.

The opposite video screen is all luster, glamour and composure, putting redman in an allegorical coupling with the epitome of high culture civilization: a figure with black hair, black dress, black sequins, and black face of the urban sophisticate. This poser, more at home admiring his own image, never steps outdoors and is more at ease affirming his own image in the psychoanalytic mirror. Stumpy Red, by contrast, hasn't yet learnt to look at anything or anyone, averting his eyes from stimuli and passers-by. Pre-mirror phase he senses along, seeming to sniff the air, and comically bends down low to accommodate his altered gravity going down hill.

Another black clad figure, stocking over the face, enters the civilized screen, and eats a Granny Smith apple, lurid green and out of place among the artifice. This figure then reads unemotionally from a manuscript about the death of a young acquaintance from a drug overdose. That's it. Tillianakis' allegorical coupling compresses the history of civilization. The apple is allegorical, tainted with the contemporary temptation of drugs. Evolution condenses to psychological states of mind. Have we come to this? To this level of indifferent artifice and loss of sensitive sensate innocence? Large questions are going begging here.

It's rare to see an allegorical work. Allegory fell out of fashion in the postmodern turn and not since Paul de Man's 1970s Allegories of Reading has theory negotiated its loaded planes of registers of meaning In the eighteenth century allegory had peaked in layers of artifice, often played out in art-nature debates. Back in Black ambitiously recasts big picture epic style allegory in intimate terms. The history of civilization's rise and fall from Kubrick primitive (2001) to late capitalism's indifferent and drug-ridden decadence is allegorically condensed to a walk in the burbs and a figure in black (impassive as the rigor mortis of death) reading from a script.

Yet Tillianakis achieves this big picture sweep without losing video's intimate contact with the politicized performing body. He brings it all home layering the casual eating of an apple with the crisis of contemporary culture. A few simple props - body paint, white undies, an apple, the luster of a Freedom drop chandelier, a walk taking in the freeway feeders choked with cars - is enough to summon a sense of crisis.

Position of Balance 6, 7, 8 - John Wah.
Finally, there's John Wah, finely balancing on a seesaw, his arms outstretched, reaching towards the reflected image of himself playing on the monitor balancing him on the other end. On the wall behind him are overlaid images from past performances. Wah has replaced the Buddha in what is perhaps Nam June Paik's most well known work TV Buddha - Buddha contemplating his own image in the relay of the TV monitor.

Wah's first version had balanced his body against a crate of beer. Now he's facing off against the image of himself; the whole is wavering quietly in this intense, contemplative endurance work.

The thread of connection, of the intimacy of the performing body in action, runs through all these works, in direct connection to video performing the body in the late 1960s and 70s. The personal is still political, the body staked in risk: John Wah and the monitor are an equal risk of falling, of crashing and burning in metaphorical terms, in a situation as fragile as Costenoble's helicopter, Tillianakis' reported drug taker or Zaravinos' body out of control.