From Bizarre to Macabre: 50 of the Strangest Art Performances

The Russian performance art collective Voina threw live cats at unsuspecting McDonald's employees in Moscow to "break up the drudgery of workers' routine day" on International Workers' Day in 2007.

Marina Abramovi?'s static and silent performance art piece, The Artist Is Present, lasted for 736 hours and 30 minutes, during which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium and faced 1,545 sitters, including celebrities like James Franco, Björk, Alan Rickman, Jennifer Carpenter, and Lou Reed.

The character of Maude, played by Julianne Moore in The Big Lebowski, was based on two real-life performance artists, Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann, who were known for painting canvas while suspended naked on a harness attached to the ceiling in the mid-1970s.

Carolee Schneemann's Meat Joy was a surreal and visceral performance art piece in which she and her collaborators danced and writhed in piles of raw meat.

Marina Abramovic and Ulay's performance art piece, The Great Wall Walk, involved the artists walking the entire length of the Great Wall of China, meeting in the middle to say goodbye to each other and end their personal and professional relationship.

In 1965, Joseph Beuys performed a three-hour art performance piece in which he wandered around the gallery while cradling a dead hare, his face covered in honey, and talked to the animal about his paintings. The public was allowed in after three hours of watching through the windows.

In 2020, a Berlin-based artist filled a wagon with 99 smartphones, opened Maps navigation on all of them, and slowly pulled the wagon along Berlin streets to trick Google Maps into thinking that an empty street was bursting with traffic.

The Shia LaBeouf memes were part of a performance art piece by Shia LaBeouf and two other artists. This included the "Just Do It" meme, the infamous Paper Bag incident, and an experiment where the three were isolated inside separate cabins with their only means of communication being a video link to a cabin inside Helsinki's Kiasma Museum. Visitors to the museum could speak to the artists via this link, but the trio could only communicate with the visitors by text and not with each other.

John Jairo Villamil, a young artist student, died from asphyxiation while performing with a plastic bag covering his head. No one helped him because they thought the convulsions and heavy breathing were part of the performance.

Performance artists Teching Hsieh and Linda Montano spent one year tied to each other at the waist with an 8-foot-long rope. They had to stay in the same room while indoors, including at Montano's teaching job, and were not allowed to touch each other until the end of the one-year period.