Ron Athey
There are so many ways that Ron Athey has been named: people call him a blood artist, a masochist , an art criminal, or using his own words, “a poster boy for bullshit.” His works usually involve his body, profuse bleedings and religion iconographies, and are often deemed disturbing, extremist and controversial . However I think these words only float in proximity, or outside Athey’s body of work; looking at clips of his performance documentation, I saw monstrosity and beauty, pain and pleasure, alienation and intimacy all intertwined together. Quoting Clare Armitstead, “the purpose is not to shock, the purpose is to enable the audience, or the people who follow him through that journey, to actually come to terms with this (being shocked).”
Athey’s body of work includes ensemble performances, solo pieces, experimental theatre and opera. In this blog I wish to introduce his St. Sebastian seires, his 1994 performance at the Walker Art Center, and his most recent work, “Incorruptible Flesh: Messianic Remains.”
Athey has been using St. Sebastian as an inspiration for his works since the 90s. Looking at classical paintings of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows, it is not hard to see how such iconography got carried into Athey’s live performance works. He made arrows out of very long medical needles, and during the performance he had these needles inserted into his head, arms, belly and legs. When the needles were removed from his head, large quantities of blood were released . Athey started performing St. Sebastian as short actions, and gradually incorporated it into longer pieces such as “Martyrs and Saints” (1992) and “4 Scenes in a Harsh Life” (1994).
Blood-letting as a spectacle in Athey’s performance cannot be discussed without relating it to the AIDS epidemic. In 1985, Athey was tested positive for HIV. In an essay he wrote Athey said that “death by AIDS-related disease was inevitable, and I had prepare myself for it, but that didn’t stop me from tattooed every Friday” . In another interview that he did with VICE, Athey related his work with the generational experience of AIDS : “with the intense conditions of the time — real scenes, real activism, real death, real loss — I effortlessly made all of that into work because of the way the pressure was. i wasn’t performing therapy or catharsis with my work, but i was just completely observing and trying things out while I had a fire under my ass because there was this big black cloud over my head.”
On March 4, 1994, an excerpt of Athey’s Four Scenes in a Harsh Life was performed at Patrick’s Cabaret in Minneapolis, with support from the Walker Art Center. During one section of the performance, Athey made “light cuts in co-performer Darryl Carton’s back, placed strips of absorbent paper towel on the cuts and then, using a pulley, hoisted the blood-stained clothes into the air” and into the audience. A false report, claiming that the performance exposed the audiences to HIV-infected blood, triggered a culture war that involved other queer artists, conservative politicians, and the National Endowment for the Arts. More accounts of the performance and its “aftermath” can be found in Athey’s article here. Athey was blacklisted from the U.S. art world until 2005 when he performed in Los Angeles. Looking back on the controversy, Athey wrote that “what it came down to was the polemic of blood in that minute — the belief that all blood is HIV-positive.”
Athey’s most recent work, the final installment of his series Incorruptible Flesh, was presented in May 2015. Segments of this piece can be found on Vimeo.
The piece consisted of two parts: in the beginning Athey invited audience members to anoint his body; in the second part he rises from the “dead” and delivered a piece of text that referenced Divine, the drag queen featured in Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, and Divine, from Jean Genet’s novel “Our Lady of the Flowers.”
