In Paris in 1965, the artist Myriam Bat-Yosef, who has died aged 92, presented, with the Uruguyan dancer Teresa Trujillo, and the lettrist poet François Dufrêne, the performance Éryximaque. Trujillo, her body painted by Bat-Yosef in psychedelic patterns, rolled and threw similarly decorated diabolo-shaped stools across a triangular, white-walled space, as Dufrêne chanted a syncopated, alliterative text.
The performance, which melded surrealist ideas with the psychedelic, pop art sensibilities of the time, was in particular a repudiation of Yves Klein’s femmes-pinceaux (women paintbrushes), who in 1960, their nude bodies painted blue, obediently followed their master’s directions to press themselves against canvas. For Bat-Yosef, a contemporary of Klein, his Anthropometry performances merely reinforced the old binaries of male/female, artist/model, active/passive.
