A book written in a foreign language and migrated to the US along with its author, an art historian, finds a new communicative dimension by becoming a ready-made for art making purposes. Starting with an introduction explaining the genesis of the collaborative project "Access Denied," this article focuses on one of the series' artworks, namely a video-happening, by exploring its genesis, development, and outcomes. Staged during the day of finals in an advanced art history seminar, the experiment provided an embodied artistic experience and some reflections on art history course content in the debate that followed. The video happening became a basis for further reflection in this essay on the role of performance in stimulating arts-based research at the interstices between biography and scholarly inquiry, between art and art history, between modernism and postmodernism, between object and action, and between creation and destruction as the two opposite poles in modern creativity.