Art has always been a mirror of society’s most primal fears and desires. The sacred and the profane, the body and the corpse, the euphoria and the comedown—all exposed through pigment, form, and performance. Some artists create beauty; others rip it apart, dissecting the guts of existence and forcing us to see, feel, and confront our most exquisite horrors and fantasies.
When it comes to art, and all things wretched and wonderful, it is the ones who dare to break taboos that create a fluid influx of change. It’s the ones who make us uncomfortable who throw a wrench into the machine of convention and watch it sputter, fail, and rebirth itself anew.
The following are artists who didn’t just make art—they detonated cultural landmines and rewrote the rules of creative rebellion across multiple mediums.
Visual Artists Who Shattered Boundaries
1. Egon Schiele (1890–1918) – The Eroticism of Death
Nothing about Egon Schiele’s work was meant to comfort you. His raw, skeletal figures contorted in states of lust, agony, or both, were an affront to early 20th-century propriety. He didn’t just paint the body—he stripped it of illusion, revealing the hunger, the isolation, the vulnerability of flesh. His “Death and the Maiden” (1915) captures the obsessive entanglement of love and decay. Schiele himself would die of the Spanish flu at 28, leaving behind a legacy that proved that eroticism and mortality are not opposites, but lovers intertwined.
2. Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) – Blood, Earth, and the Feminine Wound
Before “performance art” became a buzzword, Ana Mendieta was slicing open the fabric of reality, merging her body with the land. A Cuban exile, a woman in a patriarchal world, an artist who lived and bled for the work—Mendieta used her own flesh, blood, and bones as a medium. Her ‘Silueta Series’ (1973–1980)—ritualistic sculptural performances via imprints of her body in nature, sometimes filled with blood, sometimes set aflame—explored exile, identity, and the violent erasure of women. Her death, a fall from a 34th-floor apartment, remains a mystery soaked in tragedy and suspicion, a tug-of war between suggested suicide and spousal collusion…and one of the biggest art scandals of the last 50 years.
3. David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) – Rage, Queerness, and the Plague Years
When the world turned its back on the AIDS crisis, David Wojnarowicz took a blowtorch to silence. A firebrand of the 1980s East Village scene, his work was a brutal scream against homophobia, death, and government indifference. “Untitled (Falling Buffalo)” (1988–89) became an icon of queer suffering and resistance, depicting a herd of buffalo plunging off a cliff—a metaphor for the mass death during the AIDS epidemic. Wojnarowicz’s work was raw, blistering, and unflinchingly confrontational. He didn’t go gently; he left claw marks on history.
4. Tracey Emin (b. 1963) – The Confessional as Art
Tracey Emin turned personal trauma into high art, flinging her rawest, most intimate moments onto gallery walls for all to see. Her infamous installation “My Bed” (1998)—a chaotic, stained, and unmade bed littered with empty bottles, cigarette butts, and used condoms—wasn’t just a scandal; it was a statement. Emin dragged sex, depression, and self-destruction into the white-cube sanctity of the art world, forcing it to reckon with the visceral, lived experience of womanhood.
5. Basquiat (1960–1988) – The Language of the Streets
Jean-Michel Basquiat took the grime of New York City’s underground and splattered it across the canvas of high art. His work was a visual manifesto of race, poverty, addiction, and rebellion—graffiti turned fine art, poetry turned rage. “Irony of a Negro Policeman” (1981) sliced into racial identity, systemic violence, and internalized oppression with razor-sharp urgency. Basquiat lived fast, painted faster, and left behind a body of work that still pulses with electric, uncontainable energy.
8. Suzanne Lacy (b. 1945) – Performance as Social Action
Suzanne Lacy doesn’t just make art—she orchestrates experiences that force society to face its own injustices. A pioneer of feminist and activist art, Lacy’s work has tackled everything from sexual violence to ageism, using performance and audience participation as tools for political transformation. “Three Weeks in May” (1977) was an audacious public intervention, mapping reported rapes in Los Angeles, and effectively exposing the epidemic of gendered violence in an era that preferred silence. Lacy turned a visual representation of the city itself into a canvas, making the invisible impossible to ignore.
9. Chris Burden (1946–2015) – The Body as a Bullet
Chris Burden’s art was not for passive spectators. He made pain the medium, the body the battlefield. “Shoot” (1971)—where he had himself shot in the arm by an assistant with a rifle—was a visceral critique of American gun culture, the Vietnam War, and our desensitization to violence. His work dared the audience to look away, testing the limits of endurance, control, and complicity. He lived, and sometimes almost died, by the belief that art should not be safe.
10. Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953) – Race, Power, and the Black Gaze
Carrie Mae Weems weaponizes the camera, turning it into a tool of reclamation. Her photography interrogates history, power, and the ways Black identity has been constructed and controlled. “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” (1995–96) repurposed 19th-century slave portraits, staining them blood-red and overlaying them with text, forcing America to confront the brutal dehumanization of Black bodies. Weems doesn’t just capture images—she reframes history in the truth of systemic oppression, demanding that we see the silenced and unseen.
11. David Hammons (b. 1943) – The Art of Resistance
David Hammons operates in the margins, where art and activism collide. A master of found materials and subversion, his work is a raw critique of race, capitalism, and the art world itself. “Bliz-aard Ball Sale” (1983) was a guerrilla street performance where he sold snowballs in different sizes on a New York sidewalk—an absurdist, biting commentary on value, race, and commodification. Hammons reminds us that art is everywhere, especially where we least expect it.
12. Orlan (b. 1947) – The Face as a Manifesto
Orlan doesn’t just challenge beauty standards—she obliterates them. Using her own face as a canvas, she underwent a series of plastic surgeries in the 1990s to transform herself into a hybrid of Western art’s idealized women—Botticelli’s Venus, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, and more. Her “Carnal Art” series dissected the male gaze and the tyranny of beauty, turning the operating room into an art studio and her own flesh into a living sculpture. Orlan’s work is a defiance, a provocation, and a dare: Who owns the body?
13. Andres Serrano (b. 1950) – Profanity, Piss, and the Sacred
Few works have ignited as much outrage as “Piss Christ” (1987)—a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s own urine. Serrano’s piece, equal parts sublime and sacrilegious, was an assault on religious idolatry and the commodification of faith. Was it desecration or devotion? Art or heresy? The backlash was explosive, including vandalized exhibitions, public funding debates, and condemnation from religious leaders. Yet, Serrano’s work endures, forcing us to reckon with the uncomfortable intersection of faith, flesh, and fluid.
14.. Chris Ofili (b. 1968) – The Virgin in Elephant Dung
Chris Ofili doesn’t just challenge religious iconography—he defiles it with vibrant, irreverent beauty. His “The Holy Virgin Mary” (1996) depicts the mother of Christ adorned with elephant dung and surrounded by cut-out images of female genitalia. The piece, showcased in the Brooklyn Museum’s controversial 1999 Sensation exhibition, drew the fury of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who tried (and failed) to have it banned. Ofili’s fusion of African spiritualism and Catholic iconography subverts the sanitized narratives of the sacred, dragging them back into the visceral, chaotic world of the living.
15.. Hermann Nitsch (1938–2022) – Blood, Guts, and the Theatre of Orgies
Hermann Nitsch’s art was a baptism in blood. As the founder of the Viennese Actionists, he orchestrated elaborate, sacrificial performances that fused Christian ritual with animal slaughter, bacchanalian excess, and extreme physical endurance. His “Orgien Mysterien Theater” (1957–2017) transformed sacred liturgy into raw, carnal spectacle—participants bathed in blood, drank wine from gutted carcasses, and reenacted crucifixion as a rite of sensory transcendence. To some, Nitsch was a blasphemer. To others, a high priest of Dionysian resurrection.
The Avant-Garde Across Mediums
Art is not confined to a canvas or a stage. Here are more examples of revolutionary boundary-pushers across various creative realms:
Film
Jodorowsky’s “The Holy Mountain” (1973) – A surrealist, anti-religious odyssey that eviscerates capitalism, colonialism, and spirituality.
Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist” (2009) – A psychological horror film reveling in the obscene, exploring grief, sexuality, and religious trauma.
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” (1975) – A brutal deconstruction of fascism and human depravity.
Music
GG Allin – Punk’s most infamous provocateur, known for violent, bodily-fluid-laden performances.
Diamanda Galás – A vocal terror who uses avant-garde operatic shrieks to explore themes of disease, exile, and suffering.
Death Grips – An aggressive, industrial hip-hop act that obliterates musical conventions.
Fashion
Alexander McQueen – Fused gothic romanticism with raw brutality in high fashion.
Rick Owens – Embraced the dystopian, androgynous, and grotesque in luxury wear. Creator if the “Human Backpacks” collection, where models carried other models on their backs…a a critique of labor, gender roles, and human commodification.
Leigh Bowery – A performance artist turned fashion icon whose grotesque, surreal costumes challenged the boundaries of identity and self-expression.
Rei Kawakubo’s “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body” (1997) – A collection of padded, misshapen garments that distorted the human form, questioning conventional beauty ideals.
Businesses/Brands
The Order of the Good Death – A Death positive, LGBTQ+ safe, solutions-focused brand and community built to openly critique current practices in the deathcare community, push boundaries, and amend legislation to provide support for alternative forms of deathcare.
Liquid Death – Canned water, known not only for it’s tongue-in-cheek nods toward the macabre, death-themed art, and cans that look suspiciously like adult-beverages…but also for their collabs, and environmentalist approach to giving back to the planet.
Photography
Joel-Peter Witkin – Merged classical compositions with macabre, grotesque imagery.
Nan Goldin – Documented raw, unfiltered intimacy, addiction, and LGBTQ+ life.
Robert Mapplethorpe – Pushed the boundaries of sexuality, race, and eroticism in photography.
Written Word (Poetry, Literature, etc.)
Georges Bataille’s “Story of the Eye” (1928) – A violent, erotic novella that blends surrealism, sexuality, and death in a relentless assault on bourgeois morality.
“We did not lack modesty – on the contrary – but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible”
Kathy Acker’s “Blood and Guts in High School” (1978) – A punk, feminist deconstruction of literature, blending experimental prose, pornography, and political rebellion.
“Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you’re someone else. IF THERE IS A GOD, GOD IS DISJUNCTION AND MADNESS. Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation”.
Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America” (2001) – A controversial, politically charged poem that dissected American imperialism, racism, and post-9/11 paranoia.
“Who got the tar, who got the feathers
Who had the match, who set the fires
Who killed and hired
Who say they God & still be the Devil”
Animation
Ralph Bakshi’s “Fritz the Cat” – X-rated counterculture animation.
Shinya Ohira’s “Blood the Last Vampire” – Visceral, frenetic anime that subverts the medium.
Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion films – Nightmarish surrealist animation.
Comics/Graphic Novels
“Maus” by Art Spiegelman – A graphic novel that redefined Holocaust literature.
“The Invisibles” by Grant Morrison – A psychedelic, anarchist manifesto in comic form.
“Preacher” by Garth Ennis – A profane, violent, religious satire that upended expectations.
Dance
Pina Bausch’s “Café Müller” (1978) – A dreamlike, disorienting piece that strips dance down to raw, emotional movement, exploring themes of trauma and loss.
Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” (1964) – A performance that invited the audience to cut away her clothing, exposing the intersection of vulnerability, violence, and consent.
Sergei Polunin’s “Take Me to Church” (2015) – A defiant ballet performance set to Hozier’s song, using the body as a medium for rebellion and self-destruction.
Food
Grant Achatz – A Chicago-based chef that specializes in provocative, interactive and shocking dinner experiences that push the boundaries of art and food.
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “Untitled (Free)” (1992) – A conceptual art installation where the artist cooked and served Thai curry in a gallery, turning consumption into performance.
Heston Blumenthal’s “Meat Fruit” (2010) – A hyper-realistic dish that looks like a mandarin but is actually chicken liver parfait, blurring the line between perception and reality.
As artists and creators, it is our duty and responsibility to explore and face the dark, the unforgiving, the uncomfortable, and the grotesque with fearlessness and vigor. Do yourself a favor, and peruse the art referenced in this article. Get a taste of the profane and courageous ways that these creators have pushed up against or even broken the fences of society for the sake of evoking thought and feeling to provoke change. The greatest art doesn’t just ask questions—it dares you to answer. Taboo art forces society to confront its hypocrisies, fears, and suppressed desires. It shatters illusions, challenges authority, and refuses to be silenced. Without these provocateurs, art would stagnate, trapped within the confines of the acceptable and the palatable. By daring to transgress, these artists create space for new conversations, new freedoms, and new ways of seeing the world. Art that challenges taboos is not just rebellion—it is revolution.
Gigi Fenyx is the CEO and Coeditor-in-Chief at M3V Magazine. Wordsmith, Whimsy-Chaser, Cosmic Creator, Musician, and Professional Muse. HypnoCAREapist. Load-Bearing sense of humor. Black coffee drinker with big Orange Cat Energy. Cult Classic MPD Girl.
