Coming Up Creative Director Jamie Lewis-Hadley is a hero in the IdeasTap office. His parallel pro-wrestling and performance art careers feed off each other to form an all-round heroic personality willing to transcend the pain barrier for his art. Jamie has backflipped and bled his way into his audiences affections. So, in honour of the man here are a few superheroes from the pantheon of performance art who put their personality into their work.

Matthew Barney

Star college quarterback, Yale medicine graduate, and former J.Crew model, Bjork’s squeeze is a perfect equalateral triangle of brawn, brains and beauty. Barney exploded onto the 90s New York art scene with his Drawing Restraint series of videos melding sports, celebrity, creative clichés and mythical hubris - two satyrs wrestling in a limousine anyone? As a young art student I was blown away by his Wagner-esque Cremaster series of films. They enthralled me with their breathtaking ambition and bizarre cast of characters, some of whom embody biological processes in what must be the strangest narrative curve of a sequence of films: the descent of the testicles. Barmy but brilliant.

Joseph Beuys

As much a green prophet and sage, Beuys is a shaman-like figure in the history of art. His self-made mythology as an artistic hero has attracted criticism and a quasi-religious following. Beuys was a Luftwaffe pilot who crashed in Siberia while on a bombing mission and was rescued from certain death by tribespeople who wrapped him in felt and fat and fed him honey. These materials became his signature medium. His most notable works are the most shamanic, from How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, to Coyote: I Love America and America Loves Me and Boxing Match for Direct Democracy in which the artist has a boxing match with a philosopher.

Chris Burden

Burden is no stranger to physical thresholds. As a young art student he decided he needed a shot in the arm to kickstart his career. In 1971 he got just that when he instructed an assistant to fire a rifle into his arm from five meters in what is perhaps still the most nerve racking piece of live performance art ever produced. Burden has also electrocuted himself, starved himself, locked himself in a locker for five days and had himself nailed to a car to push his body to the limit for his art. In later life Burden has dedicated his amazing intellect to hyper-efficient automobiles, robotic toy airplane production lines and pilotless yachts.

Santiago Sierra

Bad guy or good guy? That’s the question everyone asks themselves when confronted with the most self-righteous artist around and current critics choice of the global art scene. Sierra confronts us with all the most awful aspects of modern life in such a stark way we sometimes question his sanity. Bringing us face to face with abject poverty, prostitution and injustice, camera-shy Sierra is the Dark Knight of the art world, the good guy with a dark side. He treats his subjects with a precise and frankly amoral sadism to expose our own complicity in economic systems stacked on misery, in true superhero style it’s like punching someone to prove violence is wrong.

Picasso

You can’t talk art-hero without mentioning the main man of the 20th century. Picasso the personality is inextricable from his work. The crazy-eyed, bare-chested Spaniard pictured in front of the easel is the epitome of the brave master risking the ridicule of smirking philistines. Picasso’s less than private life was one big performance.

Steve G