Marni Kotak, an artist whose plans to give birth in a New York gallery as an act of performance art provoked criticism and concern, delivered a healthy baby boy Tuesday. Kotak, 36, gave birth to baby Ajax, weighing nine pounds and two ounces at 21 inches at 10:17 a.m., before an audience in a home birthing center she constructed at the Microscope Gallery.
“Making use of twenty knives and two tape recorders, the artist played the Russian game in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of her hand. Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of twenty she had set up, and record the operation.
After cutting herself twenty times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging together past and present. She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body – the pain and the sounds of the stabbing, the double sounds from the history and from the replication.” From wikipedia.