Men flying through the air suspended from cranes, women dousing themselves with strange fluids, members of both sexes miming and mimicking the bourgeoisie and the working class — we’ve seen it all before. It’s performance art, the sort that can be seen in abundance in a new show at the Museo del Barrio. But here, there’s a twist.

Performance art, the clamorous hybrid of life, theater, and the fine arts, originated in Europe in the early years of the 20th century, and was crucially developed and enhanced in America during and after the 1960s. But the case could be made that Latin America has had a greater affinity for the discipline than any other part of the world; and that, in the past half century, the artists of Central and South America have exerted themselves far more in this direction than anyone else. Their various actions and interventions are now subject to a nearly encyclopedic review, “ARTE =/ VIDA: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000.”

Even if one accepts the assumption of Latin American primacy in performance art, the reasons for it are not clear. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the people involved occupy a midpoint in the political spectrum. Over the four decades covered by the Museo del Barrio’s show, the governments of Latin America have tended to be dangerously corrupt and often repressive, but not to the totalitarian degree seen in other parts of the world. Yet Latin America also has witnessed spasmodic outbursts of freedom. Unlike the more stable and established democracies of Europe and North America though, there has been a corrupt social order against which the citizens have felt compelled to speak out. And unlike the far more oppressive regimes in Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Arab world, Latin America has afforded the freedom, tentative and imperfect, in which this rebellion could take place.

Is there a specifically Latin American style to performance art? On the basis of the works in the Museo del Barrio, this does not appear to be the case. Performance art fits hand in glove with the environment in which it occurs. There is often a specific Latin American component to this art, as one might expect, but in terms of its larger style or aesthetic, it partakes of a pan-Occidental Dadaism that emerged out of postwar Europe. The spirit of such European-based movements as Situationism and Fluxus, those exuberant outbursts of neo-Dadaist aestheticism, conceptualism, and anarchism, hangs heavily over the events recorded at the Museo del Barrio. Thus in “Border Door,” from 1988, Richard A. Lou carried a doorframe through the countryside, presumably to frame it and claim it for art.

Another example of this tendency is by an artists’ collective named GRAV (Groupe de recherche d’art visuel), and is titled “A Day in the Street.” This action took place in Paris on April 19, 1966. (The art covered in this exhibition more often than not takes place outside of Latin America, above all in Paris and New York.) “Into the network of daily, repeated acts of a day in Paris, we want to place a series of deliberately orchestrated interruptions,” the artists involved state. This included handing out gifts to surprised passengers on the Parisian Métro, building and then disassembling sculptures in public places, and — de rigueur in art of this sort — distributing balloons to children.

But in dozens of other performance pieces documented in the show, whether through video loops, still images, or ephemera, what often distinguishes Latin American practice from that of other geographic centers is a sense of urgency. European and American performance artists often make apolitically aesthetic points or, when the points are political, the artists give the ineffaceable impression of posturing. Among Latin American artists, there is, if nothing else, a contagious sense of freedom, a need to communicate the essential and unwelcome truths of the world they inhabit. An example of this, from 2000, is by Colectivo Sociedad Civil. Their action, “Lava la bandera” or “Wash the Flag,” consisted of literally washing the Peruvian flag in the Plaza Mayor in Lima.

More dramatically, in “The Parthenon of Books / Homage to Democracy” (1983), the Argentine artist Marta Minujin created a life-size reproduction of the Parthenon out of books that had been banned under the recently ended military dictatorship. This was erected in the very center of Avenida 9 de Julio, the main thoroughfare of Buenos Aires. The books were then distributed to the public.

In a somewhat similar spirit in 1977, the artist Papo Colo performed a piece called “Superman 51,” in which he dragged heavy objects along the West Side Highway of Manhattan before he collapsed from exhaustion. The point seemed to be to agitate for his native Puerto Rico to become the 51st state of the union, or alternately to condemn American oppression of the island.

The inevitable problem with the Museo del Barrio’s exhibition is that works of this nature can really be appreciated only when directly experienced. In most cases, a typed statement of intent, a grainy loop of film, or a corroded relic of a long vanished performance is as close to being there as a fossilized femur is to standing in the presence of a living, breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Until May 18 (1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street, 212-831-7272).