I have always longed for grand opera to do this for me. The fact that it has not has caused me to suffer many disappointments over the 33 Edinburgh Festivals I have experienced. From all these festivals I recall two outstanding examples of this art form I call 'animated painting'. They rivalled my favourite form of European art which is the very sculptural and ritual structure of the religious services I have witnessed in the great Gothic cathedrals of York, St Magnus, Chartres and Orvieto. These 'animated paintings' were presented outside any neatly defined concept of 20th century art or the avant-garde. They certainly did not fit into the Festival programme which quite obviously separates music from theatre, and dance from exhibitions. Indeed, it mattered not whether they were part of the official or Fringe Festival programmes.

I suppose the two artists responsible - the German, Joseph Beuys, and the Pole, Tadeusz Kantor - transformed my life. They were the teachers I had always required in order to begin my art education. For want of a better word, the art world defined their work as 'performance' - alas, a much misunderstood and badly used word in the art terminology of the '70s. I prefer to think they were making three-dimensional paintings out of the physical reality of human beings properly related to a space, so that the space itself became part of the painting.

The 'performance' which Joseph Beuys presented, under the title of Celtic Kinloch Rannoch was an undoubted masterpiece. It was presented under the aegis of the Demarco Gallery, and the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle sponsored the exhibition which was aptly entitledStrategy Get Arts as part of the 1970 official Edinburgh Festival. The experience of it taught me that art does not have to occur within an officially recognised 20th century space such as an art gallery, theatre or concert hall, nor does it have to conform to the ideas we have come to consider as natural for us to bear witness to art.

Celtic Kinloch Rannoch was performed daily for eight hours over a period of six consecutive days. It demanded extraordinary powers of concentration from both Beuys and his collaborating artist, the Danish composer and musician, Henning Christiansen, but also from the so-called audience who became an integral part of the 'painting'. Joseph Beuys transformed one of the vast life rooms of the Edinburgh College of Art into a painting in progress. It was a room which was familiar to me as the space in which I had learned, as an art student in the early 1950s, that making art was all about making life and still life paintings in an academic tradition.

How had Beuys done this? This question has been asked of me by many of the student artists to whom I have lectured in subsequent years in an attempt to describe the nature of the art of Joseph Beuys. My short answer is simply that Joseph Beuys made that great formal Edwardian room into a sacred space, rather like the interior of a cathedral - a place fit for a religious ritual to be enacted. My attempts are frustratingly inadequate at discussing how he acknowledged the sacred reality of the room by the strategic placing and organising of 'ordinary' objects: six tape recorders, a grand piano, two portable tape recorders, a wooden ladder, a metal tray, a walking stick, countless globules of jelly, a small blackboard, two milk bottles, and a 15 foot plank of wood.

The paint bespattered floor and walls were mute evidence of the presence of countless generations of art students who had attempted to make art before Joseph Beuys in that room. By his very physical presence in relation to his audience, Beuys made even those who entered that room by accident reconsider the mystery of their own being, confronted by the mystery of art.

One of Joseph Beuys student assistants had pinned upon one of the walls three small pieces of paper - one above the other. On the first was written Where are the souls of...? The second contained a list of artists who symbolised our idea of Western European art, every name imaginable from Duchamp, Matisse, Van Gogh, to Giotto and Rembrandt; and the third piece of paper had upon it the words and Leonardo da Vinci - the one outstanding personification of the artist who could never be contained within the definition of 'painter' as someone apart from 'sculptor', or even 'poet' apart from 'scientist'.

In 1972, '73 and '76, Tadeusz Kantor and his colleagues in The Cricot 2 Theatre from Cracow further extended my view of sculpture beyond the limits of my imagination, controlled as it had been by an educational system which had contrived to compartmentalise not only the arts from the sciences but the visual from the performing arts.

The 1972 Cricot 2 production of Stanislaw Witkiewicz's play The Water Hen was rightfully acclaimed as a fountainhead of contemporary experimental theatre. I saw it as a pure form of sculpture, integrated totally within the framework of a building which was neither an art gallery nor a theatre but a much neglected slum - the ideal space in which the Witkiewicz-Kantor view of the world could be revealed: the world of pre-war Poland coming to a tragic end with the German invasion of 1939.

The ideal space had been for 50 years a plumbers' workshop: long before then it had been a medieval poorhouse, abutting the walls of the historic Greyfriars churchyard. On close examination it could be seen that the grey flagstones of the floor and the rough stone walls had at one time constituted a medieval street. The whole of Edinburgh's history, and indeed European history, seemed to be present in these walls.

The University of Edinburgh, which owned the building, referred to it simply as Forresthill. Was the whole building and the cemetery part of one of those ancient sacred groves so beloved of the Celts? The building undoubtedly marked a place of intense human activity going back in time to prehistory. Tadeusz Kantor and his fellow artists acknowledged the building's sacred nature, as Joseph Beuys had done with the Art College. The Water Hen, like the Celtic Kinloch Rannoch performance, lasted six days, each daily performance a subtle extension and rethinking of what had been defined by the building itself over all the countless days of its existence.

The audience were ushered into 'a work of art' even before any dramatic action began. The very seats and benches upon which each member of the audience was invited to sit were unquestionably part of a space restructured by Cricot's sensibility to become super-reality or rather intensely real.

No spotlights or theatre scenery were used, and when the space was transformed into a banqueting room, the table, with every object upon it recalling a Morandi still life, became a magnificent large-scale sculpture impossible to imagine within the walls of the Tate. The actors and the audience were transformed by the way they were positioned and related to a central corridor-like area in which the action was defined rather in the way it is perceived in a tennis match. Conversations and actions took place all around each member of the audience. One had the feeling of being an eavesdropper of an action beyond recall. 'Real' Polish waiters were seen to be inviting one to drink 'real' Polish vodka.

In 1976 the Cricot presented Lovelies and Dowdies. This invited an even greater degree of audience participation, not just as a group but as individuals. The most important space was defined as The Cloakroom, the space wherein you divest yourself ritually of your outer garments and commit yourself to the space of art. The cloakroom was festooned with the overcoats of the audience as the very stuff and substance of the action. The audience were introduced into the space by two cloakroom attendants who acted as masters of ceremonies. Tadeusz Kantor himself played the role of director of the whole proceedings and at the same time managed to look like a member of the audience. During the the course of the action members of the audience were rehearsed to play the vital role of 40 Mandelbaums - a crowd of religious fanatics whose purpose was to trample to death The Princess Abenceraga, the personification of female energy and the spirit of art.

Beyond the long corridor space with the audience seated on either side enveloped and wrapped together by long cloth covers which 'collectivised' them at certain moments of tension, there was the space of theatre behind two doors constantly opened and closed by the cloakroom attendants. Behind these doors the actors and the Mandelbaums rehearsed for a final scene - A Dance of Death - reminiscent of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, with the remainder of the audience transformed into another crowd of actors standing within the debris of what they could then see was another stage upon which they had been called, individually, to play the role of their own lives.

The 1976 Cricot production was acclaimed as a masterwork of theatre. It was presented within the Art College just outside the life-room where Joseph Beuys had performed his own ritual. I have never since then been able to visit the Art College without hearing and seeing the sounds and sights created by Joseph Beuys and Tadeusz Kantor, by a process which seemed to follow the laws governing experimental painting rather than what I had come to think of as experimental theatre. I had now learnt to expect from the hands of twentieth-century visual artists an experience of total theatre, incorporating the human presence in something beyond the individual crafts of dancer, actor, mimic, musician, into what I can only define as three-dimensional animated painting.

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