One could describe Rainer Ganahl’s work as a mutant strain of endurance-oriented performance art. Whereas most such work, created in the late ’60s and ’70s, centered around the body—getting shot or cut, squeezing into a confined space, living in extreme conditions for a prescribed period of time—Ganahl’s contemporary version is based on testing the intellect. Over the past decade, Ganahl has taught himself a variety of languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese—he’s now embarking on Arabic) and created projects like Reading Karl Marx, 2001, in which he led groups in various