straying away from normal social rituals and capabilities. Studying abjection has proven to be suggestive and helpful for considering the dynamics of self and body hatred. This carries interesting implications for studying such disorders as separation anxiety, biologically centered phobias, and post traumatic stress disorder. In art The roots of abject art go back a long way. The Tate defines abject art as that which "explore themes that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety, particularly referencing the body and bodily functions." Painters expressed a fascination for blood long before the Renaissance but it was not until the Dada movement that the fascination with transgression and taboo made it possible for abject art, as a movement, to exist. It was influenced by Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. The Whitney Museum in New York City identified abject art in 1993. It was preceded by the films and performances of the Viennese actionists, in particular, Hermann Nitsch, whose interest in Schwitter's idea of a gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) led to his setting up the radical theatre group, known as the Orgien-Mysterien-Theater. The group used animal carcasses and bloodshed in a ritualistic way. Nitsch served time in jail for blasphemy before being invited to New York in 1968 by Jonas Mekas. Nitsch organised a series of performances which influenced the radical New York art scene. Other members of the Viennese Actionists, Gunter Brus, who began as a painter, and Otto Muehl collaborated on performances. The performances of Gunter Brus involved publicly urinating, defecating and cutting himself with a razor blade. Rudolf Schwarzkogler is known for his photos dealing with the abject. In the late 1960s, performance art become popular in New York, including by Carolee Schneemann. Mary Kelly, Genesis P. Orridge and GG Allin did this type of art. In the 1980s and 1990s, fascination with the Powers of Horror, the title of a book by Julia Kristeva, led to a second wave of radical performance artists working with bodily fluids including Ron Athey, Franko B, Lennie Lee and Kira O' Reilly. Kristeva herself associated aesthetic experience of the abject, such as art and literature, with poetic catharsisan impure process that allows the artist or author to protect themselves from the abject only by immersing themselves within it. In the late 1990s, the abject became a theme of radical Chinese performance artists Zhu Yu and Yang Zhichao. The abject also began to