Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey 9781783200351, 1783200359

Table of contents :
Title......Page 3
Copyright......Page 4
Contents......Page 9
FOREWORD......Page 11
INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS A MORAL AND JUST PSYCHOPATHOLOGY......Page 12
GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT......Page 44
‘THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO SAY HALLELUJAH!’......Page 56
‘DOES A BLOODY TOWEL REPRESENT THE IDEALS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE?’: RON ATHEY AND THE CULTURE WARS......Page 66
BOMBS AWAY IN FRONT-LINE SUBURBIA......Page 96
DELIVERANCE: THE ‘TORTURE TRILOGY’ IN RETROSPECT......Page 102
THE IRREPLACEABLE BODIES: RESISTANCE THROUGH FEROCIOUS FRAGILITY......Page 112
ATHEY-ISM, COLLABORATION, AND HUSTLER WHITE......Page 120
SEX WITH RON......Page 126
THE MAN AND HIS TATTOOS (BY THE MAN WHO DID THEM)......Page 132
THE MILK FACTORY ON WINCHESTER......Page 138
FLASH: ON PHOTOGRAPHING RON ATHEY......Page 144
HOW RON ATHEY MAKES ME FEEL: THE POLITICAL POTENTIAL OF UPSETTING ART......Page 154
RAISED IN THE LORD: REVELATIONS AT THE KNEE OF MISS VELMA......Page 182
JOYCE: THE VIOLENT DISBELIEF OF RON ATHEY......Page 196
JUDAS CRADLE: INVASIVE RESONANCE......Page 200
ILLICIT TRANSIT......Page 208
BY WORD OF MOUTH: RON ATHEY’S SELF-OBLITERATION......Page 228
THE NEW BARBARIANS: A DECLARATION OF POETIC DISOBEDIENCE FROM THE NEW BORDER......Page 236
FURTHER READING......Page 240
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES......Page 244
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......Page 246
INDEX......Page 248
UNTITLED......Page 250
BackCover......Page 252

Citation preview

Ron Athey is an iconic figure in the development of contemporary art and performance. In his frequently bloody portrayals of life, death, crisis, and fortitude in the time of AIDS, Athey calls into question the limits of artistic practice. These limits enable Athey to explore key themes including: gender, sexuality, SM and radical sex, queer activism, post-punk and industrial culture, tattooing and body modification, ritual, and religion.

Contributors

Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey presents the first critical overview of this major artist ’s work . It demonstrates how Athey foresaw and precipitated the central place afforded the body and identity politics in art and critical theory in the 1990s and beyond.

Tim Etchells

Ron Athey Homi K . Bhabha Alex Binnie Jennifer Doyle Guillermo Gómez- Peña

Adrian Heathfield Antony Hegarty Dominic Johnson Amelia Jones Bruce LaBruce Lydia Lunch Catherine Opie Juliana Snapper Julie Tolentino Robert Wilson

EDITED BY DOMINIC JOHNSON

At long last, Dominic Johnson’s book begins the dauntingly exhilarating task of assessing the richly provocative art of Ron Athey. Incorporating Athey’s own prose version of his extraordinary childhood, astute critical essays, and moving appreciations from other artists, Pleading in the Blood advances Performance Studies and Art History by forging a mode of commentary expansive enough to address an artist who consistently works to expand the intricate drama of human embodiment. Athey’s art refuses the usual distinctions between pleasure and pain, or faith and doubt, and has been both blamed and celebrated for its radical inquiries into the limits and possibilities of queer bodies. Athey emerges from these pages as one of the most compelling theatre artists of our time. Peggy Phelan, Stanford University

PLEADING IN THE BLOOD

Catherine (Saalfield) Gund

T H E A R T A N D P E R F O R M A N C E S O F R O N AT H E Y

Matthew Goulish

Honest, pure, generous, uncompromising... a baptism by fire. Robert Wilson, artist and Director of The Watermill Center In his bloody self- obliterations, Ron Athey reveals the profound enigma of the body as a primary location of SELF. His flesh is a source of Life and a source of Death. Athey creates vital images drenched with human violence; his blood is spilled to placate our fear of the unknown and of mortality. Yet his performances are also implicit celebrations. Genesis BRE YER P- ORRIDGE, artist and cultural engineer

ISBN 978-1-78320-035-1

9 781783 200351

PLEADING IN THE BLOOD THE ART AND PERFORMANCES O F R O N AT H E Y EDITED BY DOMINIC JOHNSON

PLEADING IN THE BLOOD THE ART AND PERFORMANCES O F R O N AT H E Y

CREDITS First published in the UK in 2013 by Live Art Development Agency, The White Building, Unit 7, Queen’s Yard, White Post Lane, London, E9 5EN, UK www.thisisLiveArt.co.uk and Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK www.intellectbooks.com First published in the USA in 2013 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Edited by Dominic Johnson, 2013 Contributions © the individual contributors, 2013 Cover image: Ron Athey, Solar Anus (2006), Hayward Gallery, London. Photo by Regis Hertrich. Back cover image: Ron Athey, Self-Obliteration I (2008), Galerija Kapelica, Slovenia, Ljubljana. Photo by Miha Fras. Endpapers image: Glass walls covered with blood, after Ron Athey and Julie Tolentino, Resonate/Obliterate (2011), Los Angeles. Photo by Franko B and Thomas Qualmann. Designed by David Caines Unlimited www.davidcaines.co.uk Printed and bound by Bell & Bain, UK ISBN 978-1-78320-035-1

Intellect Live Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey is part of Intellect Live – a series of publications on influential artists working at the edges of performance. Intellect Live is a collaboration between Intellect Books and the Live Art Development Agency. The series is characterized by lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed books, created through close collaborations between artists and writers, each of which is the first substantial publication dedicated to an artist’s work. Series Editors: Dominic Johnson, Lois Keidan and CJ Mitchell. ISSN 2052-0913 Published with the support of Arts Council England. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. All opinions expressed in the material contained within this publication are those of the artists and authors and not necessarily those of the editor, publisher or the publishers’ partners. The editor and publishers have endeavoured to source accurate information about reproductions and image copyright wherever possible. In the case of incomplete or inaccurate information in image captions, the editor may make corrections to subsequent editions upon request. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

PLEADING IN THE BLOOD THE ART AND PERFORMANCES O F R O N AT H E Y EDITED BY DOMINIC JOHNSON

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Previous pages: Ron Athey, Self-Obliteration I (2008), Donau Festival, Krems, Austria. 6 Photo by Florian Weiser.

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FOREWORD ANTONY HEGART Y

10 I N T R O D U C T I O N : T O W A R D S A M O R A L A N D J U S T P S YC H O PAT H O L O G Y DOMINIC JOHNSON 42

18 0 R A I S E D I N T H E L O R D : R E V E L AT I O N S AT T H E K N E E OF MISS VELMA R O N AT H E Y 19 4 J O Y C E : T H E V I O L E N T D I S B E L I E F O F R O N AT H E Y LY D I A L U N C H 19 8

GIF TS OF THE SPIRIT R O N AT H E Y

5 5 ‘ T H E R E A R E M A N Y W AY S T O S AY H A L L E L U J A H ! ’ C AT H E R I N E (S A A L F I E L D) G U N D



J U D A S C R A D L E : I N VA S I V E R E S O N A N C E JULIANA SNAPPER

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ILLICIT TRANSIT A D R I A N H E AT H F I E L D

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 Y WORD OF MOUTH: B R O N AT H E Y ’ S S E L F - O B L I T E R AT I O N T I M E TCH E L L S

6 4 ‘ D O E S A B L O O D Y T O W E L R E P R E S E N T THE IDEALS OF THE AMERICAN P E O P L E ? ’: R O N AT H E Y A N D T H E C U LT U R E WA R S DOMINIC JOHNSON



9 4 B O M B S A W AY I N F RON T- L I N E SU BU R B I A HOMI K. BHABHA



10 0 D E L I V E R A N C E : T H E ‘ T O R T U R E TRILOGY’ IN RE TROSPECT R O N AT H E Y 110 T H E I R R E P L A C E A B L E B O D I E S : R E S I S TA N C E T H R O U G H FEROCIOUS FR AGIL IT Y JULIE TOLENTINO 118

A T H E Y- I S M , C O L L A B O R A T I O N , AND HUSTLER WHITE BRUCE LABRUCE

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SEX WITH RON JENNIFER DOY L E

13 0 13 6

T H E M A N A N D H I S TAT TO O S (BY T HE MAN W HO DID T HEM) ALEX BINNIE

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T H E N E W B A R B A R I A N S : A D E C L A R AT I O N O F P O E T I C DISOBEDIENCE FROM THE NEW BORDER G U I L L E R M O G Ó M E Z- P E Ñ A

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FURTHER READING

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AUTHOR BIOGR APHIES

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ACK NOWLEDGEMENTS

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INDEX

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U N T I T L E D ROBERT WILSON

T H E M I L K FAC TORY ON W I NC H E S T E R M AT T H E W G O U L I S H

14 2 F L A S H : O N P H O T O G R A P H I N G R O N AT H E Y C AT H E R I N E O P I E 15 2 H O W R O N A T H E Y M A K E S M E F E E L : THE POLITICAL POTENTIAL OF UPSET TING ART AMEL IA JONE S

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FOREWORD AN TON Y HEG ART Y

Ron Athey, with the cut of mind, a hollow him, upon a stream, towards a minefield, an unlight. He pressed his hand onto a hook, so stained in blues and green. He took his rice blue halo an ee wept for saints ascended. Athey gave a knife a gunny, an ee never happened.

Opposite: Ron Athey, Self-Obliteration I (2008), Abode of Chaos, Lyon, France. Photo by Lukas Zpira.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N : T O WA R D S A M O R A L A N D J U S T P S YC H O PAT H O L O G Y DOM I N IC JOH NSON Given the unlimited opportunities which the media landscape now offers to the wayward imagination, I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element [...] and swim. I take it that the final destination of the 20th century, and the best we can hope for in the circumstances, is the attainment of a moral and just psychopathology. – J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition1

Opposite: Portrait of Ron Athey (2011). Photo by Tom Garretson. J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, Expanded and annotated edition (London: Flamingo, 1993) p. 37.

1

Dominic Johnson, ‘Perverse Martyrologies: An Interview with Ron Athey’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 18.4 (2008), pp. 503–13 (p. 508).

2

Ron Athey, ‘Dissections: Franko B’, Honcho (May 1998), pp. 58–9 (p. 59).

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Across three decades, Ron Athey has plunged into the viscera of intimate crises – both historical and personal – to consistently lay bare their affective charges upon his own tortured body. He has extended the repertoire of images and techniques in visual art, eking out a volatile space for scores in the skin, spilled blood, ritual pain, and the sensate orifices of his body. To watch Athey perform is to witness him turn his body inside out in performance, up to the brink of disaster, from which he manages to withdraw more or less intact, with a gravitas that is both beautiful and devastating. Athey has consistently explored the politics of modern subjectivity, and the profoundly disorienting effects of aestheticizing death and destruction, subjection and survival. Indeed, Athey has described his body in performances as a paradoxical manifestation of the ‘living corpse’, and his work has been celebrated (and sometimes vilified) for his absolute refusal to sanitize the body and its perverse pleasures, it excesses and its intimate failures.2 Swimming in the most destructive elements of a life, of culture, and of the imagination, Athey articulates the peculiar nobility of ecstatic, living flesh. Such embodied extremity is at once both enabling and confounding. In its uncompromising excess, Athey’s work reminds us that art and performance are most exciting and relevant when a work takes an audience up to and beyond a certain limit: of the beautiful, the bearable, and other coded manifestations of decency. ‘To be honest, some of my images scare me,’ Athey admits. ‘I’m terrified that I really got there, [to] this transcendent place where it stops just being an idea in your head and it takes on a physical life of its own’, by way of the seemingly magical transformation from a fleeting impression to an image rendered in ruptured flesh and spilled blood.3 Athey’s process of passing beyond the frontiers of the acceptable, of the rational, or of the conventionally beautiful are part and parcel of his commitment to the

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historical avant-garde project of radicalizing the everyday via artistic practice – scaring oneself along the way. Since his first performances around 1980, and profoundly since the early 1990s, Athey has had an intense and broad-based influence upon artists and audiences, especially in the United States and Europe. In his wake, key critical concepts – including agency, consent, identity, pleasure and desire – seem less secure, more volatile, and ultimately more vital. Pleading in the Blood is the first book to foreground the striking prescience of Athey’s work. Beginning with this introduction, the book’s contributing authors explore how Athey’s work poses difficult political and aesthetic challenges. The logic of the atrocity exhibition in my epigraph is a pertinent placeholder for Athey’s work. It references a collage-style book of the same name by J. G. Ballard, the stylish writer of science fiction novels for an apocalyptic age. Ballard is one of Athey’s favourite writers, and Athey has taken to heart his challenge to define and elaborate ‘a moral and just psychopathology’ – as the ‘final destination’ of a historical period that would otherwise curb our freedom to exploit the ‘wayward imagination’. Athey is circumspect about his peculiar burden: ‘Why do I choose to make disturbing images? This is the question, more accusatory than curious, that never goes away,’ Athey writes. As an answer of sorts, Athey adds (with tongue firmly in cheek), ‘it wasn’t the fault of the art movement I never belonged to, or the sick mentors that encouraged me, it’s the fault of my rotten life.’4

A pinch of the real

Ron Athey, ‘Some Thoughts on the Politics of the Body and the Problematics of Documentation’, Exposures, ed. by Lois Keidan and Manuel Vason (London: Black Dog, 2002), p. 6.

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5

ibid.

David Wojnarowicz, In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz, ed. by Amy Scholder (New York: Grove Press, 1999), p. 233.

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Athey has been a crucial participant in the development of performance art, club performance, and the intersections between punk, queer, industrial and alternative cultures. Yet understanding and interpreting Athey’s work often seems to demand a turn to his idiosyncratic biography. This has been prompted partly by his prolific practice as an autobiographical writer of texts that explore his childhood and early subcultural investments – as a ‘Grapes of Wrath darkness that was fatherless, an institutionalized schizophrenic mother, a fundamentalist Pentecostal upbringing by relatives, a decade of drug addiction followed by 15 years of HIV infection’.5 Athey’s life experiences undertake a magical translation into the stuff of artistic representation, from what David Wojnarowicz called ‘the sad gestures of human activity’ into events and images that carry a fuller weight – namely, the more precise densities of art and performance.6 Solo performance, body art and performance art have often prompted scholars to imagine that such work is motivated by a seemingly atavistic attempt at embodying truth, presence or authenticity. For example, Nicholas Ridout writes that performance artists whose work deploys wounding, endurance or pain may seek to ‘move beyond or evade representation’. He argues that in their ‘insistence on the “real” [they] are trying to achieve […] a condition of oneness and absolute singularity’.

Ron Athey, Sebastian@50 (2012), Abode of Chaos, Lyon, France. Photo by Kurt Ehrmann.

For such artists: however explicit they may be about the impulse to move beyond the merely theatrical in search of a ‘pinch’ of the real, the reality of their work is closer to the ‘pain of an impossible sainthood’ than it is to the achievement of this inhuman grace.7 Ridout suggests of Athey in particular that his work typifies ‘the antitheatricality of much performance art, with its conventional insistence on the presentation of “realness” rather than the representation of the real (or anything else)’.8 He reiterates a common conception of Athey’s work, namely that a reliance on the body, pain and the wound suggests an impossible attempt to get beyond representation through representation itself. In early statements, Athey did tend to discuss his work in terms of an attempt to evade fakery and representation. For example, Athey acknowledges that 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994) was ‘vaudevillian’ in form, yet he writes that it is ‘more of a controlled experience than it is theatre. The blood, pain and exhaustion are real’.9 Despite his assertion of the resistance to fakery in his performance of crisis, he adds nuance by acknowledging that this hardly necessitates a simplistic assertion of the work’s biographical truth-value: ‘It is an abstract interpretation of my life, using fetishes, ritual, and obsession as the main text’.10 For some twenty years, Athey has written short autobiographical texts towards a yet-unfinished book project called Gifts of the Spirit, and has published related essays in books and magazines. He recounts his childhood religious training, and discusses its implications for his practice in a series of detailed autobiographical essays in this

Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals and other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2006), p. 17.

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ibid., p. 5; p. 170, n. 14.

Cited in Kristin Tillotson, ‘Athey Pushes Taboo Envelope’, Minnesota Star Tribune (1 November 1994), p. A4.

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10 Cited in Kristin Tillotson, ‘Rituals are Essence of Artist’s Performance’, Minnesota Star Tribune (1 November 1994), p. A4.

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publication. Born Ronald Lee Athey Jr in Groton, Connecticut, on 16 December 1960, he moved to California as an infant after his parents divorced (he would not meet his father again until more than 20 years later).11 In 1961, Athey and his three siblings settled in Pomona, a poor, predominantly black and Latino suburb in the Inland Empire, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. As is now well known, he was raised in a fanatical household governed by three schizophrenic women: his grandmother, Annie Lou, and Aunt Vena, and, to a lesser extent, his mother, Joyce. Joyce lived with the family in Pomona intermittently for several years, between stays in Camarillo State Mental Hospital, until she was permanently remanded into psychiatric care when the young Ronnie Lee was 4 or 5 years old.12 Famously, he was raised under the spell of prophecies, scrying, visions, and spiritual powers; and in his adolescence he refused the faith that had been his ‘Calling’. However, the aesthetics, excesses and affectations of evangelism survive in his performances and writings. Athey’s childhood has become the stuff of performance lore, and its details are a familiar reference point in writings about his work. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that his work can be understood solely through reference to his idiosyncratic biography. As Alan Read argues in a critique of the political efficacy of performance tout court, ‘Lives are represented in theatre, yes, but life itself is an affect that performance makes manifest through a process of hide and seek, excitation and pleasure’.13 Rather than a reliable source for the production of meaning, the performer’s self is itinerant. This unavailability of the authentic self as source – what Read calls ‘a simultaneous binding and unravelling of instances of intimacy and engagement’ – is confirmed in the way Athey habitually collides biographical references with a broad and often complex range of historical, cultural and subcultural allusions.

Performance cultures

Athey discusses meeting his father in ‘Dissections: The Abject Muse Perplexed’, Honcho (June 1998), pp. 59–61 (p. 59).

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For more details see Ron Athey, ‘Gifts of the Spirit’, Unnatural Disasters: Recent Writings from the Golden State, ed. by Nicole Panter (San Diego: Incommunicado Press, 1996), pp. 70–80.

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Alan Read, Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 70.

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In his highly refined atrocity exhibitions, Athey combines and refigures interrelated political concerns in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly around three key themes: sexuality, religion, and the wound. This potent thematic conjunction is patent in his homages to Sebastian, in the battered saint’s throes of erotic crisis. Yet the conjunction of themes is made all the more powerful through a range of explicit contexts for Athey’s work. Firstly, Athey was 20 years old when the ‘gay plague’ began to be acknowledged as a public health concern in 1981. He began making work in the same year, though ‘came of age’ as an artist when his work responded more explicitly to the personal and greater tolls of AIDS. In Pleading in the Blood, essays by Catherine (Saalfield) Gund, Matthew Goulish, Julie Tolentino and Athey himself explore AIDS and its effects, in terms of love, grief, memory and loss. Secondly, Athey came to international prominence through the legislative and other responses prompted by confusions around the differences between art, pornography and obscenity during

Clockwise from top left: Christian Death (Rozz Williams) performing at Cathay de Grande, Los Angeles, January 1982; photo by Peggy Morrison. Ron Athey in 1982; self-portrait (Polaroid). Ron Athey in 1981. Photo by Peggy Morrison. Ron Athey in 1981. Photo by Jennifer Precious Finch. Ron Athey in 1983. Photographer unknown.

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the NEA controversies and ‘culture wars’ of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Essays by Homi K. Bhabha, Amelia Jones and myself explore this context. Finally, Athey’s work has drawn on the complex economic and political relations between mainstream, institutional histories of performance and marginal or subcultural practices. A number of the writings in this book look at such contexts, from the perspective of tattooing (Alex Binnie), sexual culture (Jennifer Doyle), ‘poetic disobedience’ (Guillermo Gómez-Peña), subcultural autobiography (Lydia Lunch), and rumour (Tim Etchells).

AT H E Y H A S G O N E F U R T H E R T H A N M O S T I N T H E P R O JE C T O F P U S H I N G A R T TO WA R D S I T S L I M I T S T H R O U G H T H E E X P L O R AT I O N O F PA I N , C R I S I S , A F F EC T A N D O T H E R D I S R U P T I V E Q UA L I T I E S

14 Ron Athey, ‘Dissections: Flirting with the Far Right’, Honcho (June 1997), pp. 77–79 (p. 77). 15 Catherine Gund, unpublished interview with Ron Athey, Los Angeles, May 1997. The interview was conducted for Gund’s feature-length documentary Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance (Aubin Pictures, 1998). I thank Gund for kindly providing the complete transcripts, and for her permission to cite from them.

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While Athey’s work might prompt comparisons to iconic predecessors of ‘ordeal art’ or ‘hardship art’, such as Gina Pane, Chris Burden, or the Viennese Aktionists, his work is more closely related – in style and substance – to artists who have rarely factored in the accepted narratives of art history. He often cites Johanna Went, Bob Flanagan and Lawrence Steger as formative influences. Other key motivations include post-punk and industrial bands such as Crass, Nervous Gender, SPK, Non (Boyd Rice), Monte Cazazza, and Throbbing Gristle, who each integrated provocative spectacles into their live acts, and were perhaps more accessible to Athey, especially in his early years, as an artist on the outer regions of cultural acceptability, self-defined at that time as ‘postpunk veering into a tribal aesthetic’.14 Scholarship often forgets the specific contexts and histories that artists subscribe to or admire. As Athey told Gund, ‘I can see the need to lump people together,’ which has necessitated comparisons between his work and that of his peers; he cites ORLAN, Fakir Musafar, Stelarc, Franko B and Mike Kelley, among others on account of superficially similar uses of the body and extremity in performance: ‘But I think out of all those people I’m the only one that’s doing theatre,’ he adds.15 The bridging of forms and histories has enabled Athey’s own itinerant boundary-crossing between styles and venues, and the combinations of remarkably different constituencies in his audiences, which include gallery- and museum-goers, scholars, students and ‘lay’ participantviewers from non-art subcultures. His work may speak to each in wildly different tongues. The project of accounting for an artist’s work inevitably entails a consideration of the tendency towards canonicity and canonization. An artist’s placement among contemporaries is contingent upon a range of discursive effects, including attempts to reposition an artist’s work in terms of discursive formations: the academic, curatorial, commercial and other institutional logics that are deployed to confer meaning upon art. These logics are mobilized in the production and sustenance of the art historical canon. These effects are thrown into stark relief when an artist

Left: Flyer for a performance by Premature Ejaculation (Ron Athey and Rozz Williams), Arts Building, Pomona, California, 18 October 1981. Overleaf: Premature Ejaculation (Ron Athey and Rozz Williams), untitled performance, Arts Building, Pomona, California, 18 October 1981. Photos by Edward Colver.

appears to challenge the assumptions and conventions of what might qualify as ‘art’, refusing normative understandings of skill, pleasure, beauty and aesthetics, as is the case with Athey’s signature style. Athey has gone further than most in the project of pushing art towards its limits through the exploration of pain, crisis, affect and other disruptive qualities. Such marginality is keenly felt in lived terms. Yet despite his transgressions, Athey has maintained a complex relation to the mainstream. He has contributed to and influenced the imagery of mainstream culture, including a performance in the music video for Sadness (1994), by Perry Farrell’s alternative rock band Porno For Pyros; and a direct appropriation by David Bowie in the music video for his single The Hearts Filthy Lesson (directed by Samuel Bayer, 1995), where porn actor Bud Hole performed Athey’s trademark surgical crown of thorns (without Athey’s consent). Bowie also made a digitally manipulated portrait of Athey and Darryl Carlton to accompany his contribution to a special issue of Q magazine in the same year, and references to Athey’s influence were a regular feature in Bowie’s discussions of his concept album Outside (1995).16

See David Bowie, ‘The Diary of Nathan Addler: or, The Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Belew – An Occasionally On-going Short Story’, Q (January 1995), pp. 176–81 (p. 181); and David Bowie and Brian Eno, ‘Internet Conversation, October 26, 1994’, Q (January 1995), pp. 182–83 (p. 183). Photographer Dona Ann McAdams sued Bowie for using her image without consent; see Charise K. Lawrence, ‘David Bowie Makes Amends over Bloody Good Photos’, National Law Journal (3 July 1995), p. A27.

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Opposite: Premature Ejaculation (Ron Athey and Rozz Williams), untitled performance, Arts Building, Pomona, California, 18 October 1981. Photos by Edward Colver.

Of these contributions, Bowie’s appropriation perhaps signalled the politically complex relations between artists on the periphery and those in the lucrative mainstream, as the latter often benefit from the unrecompensed radicalism of the former. But as novelist Edmund White noted in conversation with Athey, ‘the kind of theatre you do, Ron, draws maximum press attention and very few material rewards. You get reviewed a lot, you get people being hyper-critical, and yet you sometimes can barely pay the rent’.17 Like White and others, marginal cultural figures may become household names, but rarely reap the ‘material rewards’ of their notoriety.

Early years Athey began performing in Los Angeles in 1981, with his lover Rozz Williams. Athey’s early and later works capitalize in different ways on the crucial expansions of artistic practice in the 1960s, and the radicalization of identity politics in the 1970s. His genesis as an artist took place at a tumultuous moment, when newfound artistic and sexual freedoms were necessarily complicated after the horrific onslaught of AIDS in the early 1980s. Athey’s earliest works have, until recently, fallen outside of performance history.18 As a post-punk, proto-Goth collaboration with a libidinally charged and wryly self-abasing name, Athey and Williams’ group, Premature Ejaculation, created a series of interventions in clubs, performances in galleries, and experimental recordings of industrial sounds and recited texts. One of the rare published documents of their work was a series of performances for camera, photographed by Karen Filter, which appeared in the punk magazine No Mag in 1982. Bruce Kalberg’s editorial referred to the work as an ‘“action” in a bedroom’, described favourably as ‘a mode of activity not so commercially negotiable as “rock” or Charlie Manson’, and destined to reignite the dimmed excitement of performance art in Los Angeles, which for Kalberg resembles ‘the excitement of a used bedpan at a geriatric convalescent hospital on New Year’s Eve’. The six images were accompanied by three cut-up verses by Athey and Williams, namely Wedlock, Birth and 2nd Pregnancy – Tumor Removal Results. The latter reads, in full:

Ron Athey, ‘Dissections: 45 Minutes with Edmund White’, Honcho (February 1998), pp. 69-71 (p. 69).

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For brief references to this work, see Peggy Phelan’s important anthology, Live Art in LA (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 97 & 120.

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At knees in prayer – full mouth ecstasy Further all uterine tumor probing Removal violation penetrates religion disease conducts vacuum cleansing Broken glass cocksucker melts knife into ass Hole murderers, I worship insanity, all violent sadist offerings Worse – can you price my poison-system knifeblade contentment Who would cut you open concept?

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In their own preface to the layout, Athey and Williams describe their project as governed by ‘no limit, no rule, no sanity’, and a manifestation of an arcane ‘exhibit person-object human-open-sore sexuality’.19 Their cut-up texts typify this mode of production, via grisly imagery, and esoteric statements and questions that clatter and press at the limits of sense. The accompanying images drive home the voluptuous eccentricity of the lyrics. In the first three of Filter’s striking photographs, Williams wraps Athey in plastic film, slices him with a razor blade, and licks or kisses away the blood; in the subsequent two images, both wear masks made from various materials, and pose with crosses, surgical instruments, and collages made from photographs of premature babies. In the final, Athey lays in deathly repose in an inverted cross, as Williams hovers above him dressed in black garbage bags taped into skin-tight trousers and evening gloves. Williams described himself and Athey as ‘basically just a couple of insane people who make a lot of noise’, using a range of objects, including ‘samplers, metal pipes, piece[s] of meat which we mike up, anything we can find’.20 As an extension of their commitment to indecorous sound, Athey also designed and enacted stage shows for Williams’ now-iconic band Christian Death in 1982. Typically inflammatory early shows included a performance by Christian Death at Whisky A Go Go, in which Williams wore a wedding dress and a giant clown head, and was strapped by Athey to a wooden cross; Athey cut Williams’ wrists and proceeded to anoint audience members in Williams’ blood, provoking a small riot on the Sunset Strip. In another notorious performance by Premature Ejaculation in 1981, Athey made an assemblage from roadkill, using a found cat cadaver, which he crucified onstage. The visual horror of the piece was accentuated by a slave in chains, and spillages of split-pea soup.

AT H E Y A N D W I L L I A M S D E S C R I B E T H E I R P R O JE C T A S G O V E R N E D BY ‘ N O L I M I T, N O R U L E , N O S A N I T Y ’

19 The editorial, preface, photographs and poems appear on a two-page spread in No Mag 3 (1982), n. p. 20 Cited in Dave Thompson, The Industrial Revolution (Los Angeles: Cleopatra, 2004), pp. 92–94.

Ron Athey, ‘Rozz Williams, 1963–1998’, LA Weekly (8 April 1998), http://www. laweekly.com/1998-04-16/music/rozzwilliams-1963-1998/ [accessed 30/07/11].

21

22 For a detailed history (including an interview with Athey), see Zenon Gradkowski, ‘The Sound of Premature Ejaculation, 1981–1998’ (2008), The Lazarus Corporation, http://www. lazaruscorporation.co.uk/articles/soundof-premature-ejaculation [accessed 10/01/12].

22

Described by Athey as ‘a volatile relationship that revolved around music, art and monstrous public personas’,21 the first incarnation of Premature Ejaculation was relatively short-lived, disbanding when Athey and Williams’ relationship ended in late 1982. While Williams was motivated by the sonic aspects of the early collaborations, Athey used his involvement in Premature Ejaculation and early Christian Death to put his incipient self-education in performance into practice. By reading issues of High Performance magazine – Athey’s only mode of accessing documentation of performance art at the time – Athey learnt of the work of COUM Transmissions and Hermann Nitsch, after both artists visited Los Angeles in the 1970s. Athey adapted their uses of blood, pain and theatrical excess in new ways, supplementing this awareness by attending gigs by performance-oriented musicians, primarily the work of Johanna Went.22 Went’s influence is particularly potent from his descriptions of her work:

Premature Ejaculation (Ron Athey and Rozz Williams), untitled performance for camera, Los Angeles, 1982. Photos by Karen Filter. The series was commissioned by – and first published in – the punk zine publication No Mag (1982).

23

She’d just be tearing apart dead animals. She’d do a chorus line with six party dolls on a pole. She made wigs out of dildos. She was just always covered in slime and putting nasty things in her mouth and sucking eyeballs out of sheep heads. […] And she’d […] tear open a bag [and] a horse penis would flop out and she’d wrestle with it and bite into it.23 His description captures ‘the frenzied sort of demonic state’ she’d enter in performance, especially in early club works, such as Knifeboxing (Club Lingerie, Los Angeles, 1984). Her scene performances were often presented as warm-up acts for punk bands like The Germs or Black Flag. Her work is typified by a disconcerting mix of aggression and eccentricity, borne on her idiosyncratic persona, as a dumpster-diving urban witchdoctor of sorts. Athey recalls how Went resorted to creating a visceral impact upon a generally ‘macho’ punk audience by starting with a jolt and moving quickly into comical and ritualistic combinations between sound, stylized performance, and inventive uses of found materials. Went would avoid lulls in the intensity until the performance had ended. This manic intensity can also be seen in Athey’s early collaborative works of the early 1980s. Once Premature Ejaculation had run its course, Athey’s investment in performance was placed on temporary hold.24 He returned with a vengeance in the newly militant era of the early 1990s, reviving yet modifying his understanding of Went’s ‘frenzied’ approach to club performance.

Plague years

23

Gund, unpublished interview with Athey.

Rozz Williams reformed Premature Ejaculation as a new project in 1985, without Athey’s involvement. Williams went on to become one of the figureheads of death rock music. He committed suicide on 1 April 1998.

24

25 Athey briefly describes some of his non-art activities in the intervening period in his essay ‘Dissections: Split Personality, or So Many Men’, Honcho (January 1998), pp. 65–67. 26

ibid. p. 66.

24

Athey took a hiatus from artistic production from 1983 until the end of the decade – during this time he was a regular user of heroin and crystal methamphetamine, which diminished his capacity for art and performance.25 In 1990, after a period in recovery programmes, Athey began to develop short club performances, primarily at Club FUCK!, as well as at Sin-a-matic and other venues in Los Angeles. Between 1990 and 1992, Athey devised and performed vignettes such as ‘The Nurse’s Penance’, and his characteristic persona as a saintly martyr of the gay plague. In the performances that ensued, he writes, ‘I became a nun, St. Sebastian, Christ, a kinky Nazi, a house painter, a factory worker, a nurse, a eunuch, […] a Victorian woman, a fertility goddess (too complicated to go into), and sometimes even myself’.26 The vignettes and tableaux were heavily influenced by the aesthetics and techniques of industrial, BDSM and queer culture, and encouraged by fabled West Coast artists including Went, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose. The cult novelist Dennis Cooper commissioned a full-length performance for LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Enterprises) – the venue’s Advisory Board included Cooper and Flanagan – and Athey’s first major ensemble performance was presented there as Martyrs & Saints in November 1992. It was presented for two nights, accompanied by an

exhibition of portraits of Athey by the photographer Elyse Regehr. Athey describes Martyrs & Saints as an angry lament for those lost to AIDS, played out with a cast of survivors at the height of the plague years. Described on the poster as ‘using heavy S/M techniques and high drama to illustrate modern-day martyrdom’, the performance relates to a split between two divergent moral and political responses to the AIDS crisis: some activists and public figures developed a progressive model of affirmative action; others tended towards a more aggressive, nihilistic steadfastness against the normativity and seeming passivity that a more wholesome orientation might be understood to signify. Athey clearly adopted the nihilistic model, a politics bolstered by the availability of two AIDS fanzines published in the 1990s, Diseased Pariah News and Infected Faggot Perspectives. Athey was a contributor to the latter periodical, which described itself as ‘Dedicated to Keeping the Realities of Faggots Living With AIDS and HIV Disease IN YOUR FACE Until the Plague is Over!’ and refused to shy away from the ‘DOOM & GLOOM’ that it identified as an inescapable fact of survival in a time of crisis.27 Its editors and contributors fought homophobia and AIDSphobia by lambasting the Pollyanna-ism of some responses to AIDS; they perversely laid claim to the persona of the pariah and, in the words of zine historian Thomas Long, ‘celebrated social anxieties about their public danger as vectors of infection, and repudiated the sympathetically sentimentalizing images of “AIDS victims”’,28 the latter typified in contemporary commercial representations such as Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993). The zine included letters, features and polemics, alongside explicit images of naked men – often with visible symptoms of AIDS, including KS lesions, wasting and emaciation – and images of

Left: Ron Athey, Michelle Carr, James Stone, and Cliff Diller at Club FUCK!, Los Angeles, ca. 1992. Photo by Sheree Rose. Right: Rick Castro, The First Family of FUCK! (Bobby Wildfire, Kristian White, Ron Athey, James Stones and Miguel Beristain), Los Angeles, 1992. Photo: www.rickcastro.com. Courtesy Antebellum Gallery, Hollywood.

27 Infected Faggot Perspectives, 11 (September/October 1992), cover. 28 Thomas L. Long, ‘Plague of Pariahs: AIDS ‘Zines and the Rhetoric of Trangression’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 24.4 (2000), pp. 401–11 (p. 402).

25

Opposite clockwise from top left: Ron Athey spanking Bob Flanagan, Club FUCK!, 1992. Photo by Sheree Rose. Ron Athey and Michelle Carr go-godancing at Club FUCK!, early 1990s. Photo by Annabelle Fort. Julie Tolentino, Ron Athey and Lauren Pine, in untitled club performance at Pork at The Lure New York, 1995. Photo by Liz Price. Ron Athey and Bob Flanagan, Club FUCK!, 1992. Photo by Sheree Rose. Ron Athey go-go-dancing at Club FUCK!, early 1990s. Photo by Annabelle Fort. Dancing at a club in Los Angeles, early 1990s. Photo by Ron Athey. Ron Athey and Michelle Carr go-godancing at Club FUCK!, early 1990s. Photo by Annabelle Fort. Ron Athey and Nicola Bowery at Pork at The Lure, New York, 1995. Photo by Liz Price. Kristian White, Jill Jordan, and Ron Athey, at Jordan’s tattoo studio after receiving ta moko-style chin tattoos, 1992. Photo by Sheree Rose. Ron Athey binds Alex Binnie in plastic wrap and bondage tape, during a performance at Pork at The Lure, New York, early 1990s. Photo by Efrain Gonzalez. Ron Athey, Lauren Pine, and Brian Murphy. Personal photo. Ron Athey dancing at Club FUCK!, 1992. Photo by Sheree Rose. Ron Athey and Cliff Diller dancing, Club FUCK!, 1992. Photo by Sheree Rose.

29 Beowulf Thorne, ‘Ask Aunt Kaposi: Advice for the Loveworn’, Diseased Pariah News, 5 (1992), pp. 14–15 (p. 15). 30 The classic anthology of essays of similar critiques is AIDS: Cultural Activism/ Cultural Analysis, ed. by Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).

Johnson, ‘Perverse Martyrologies’, p. 508.

31

26

celebrities such as Liberace or Magic Johnson. Like its sister publication, Diseased Pariah News (DPN), it was put together using a homemade cutand-paste aesthetic, and reproduced cheaply, using a photocopier. AIDS zine subculture was an important rallying tool for Athey. Athey’s work in the ‘plague years’ can perhaps be read as a response to Beowulf Thorne’s encouragement (in DPN) to ‘ritualize your perversions, perfect your pitch,’ and stage one’s ‘stigma with style, child!’29 While some artists chose to limit their practices to the formal constraints of artistic production, Athey found new and challenging ways to enable performance to address the fact of near-genocidal government inaction, incessant public and media stigmatization, and the horror of a generation lost to AIDS.30 Conditioned by the anti-affirmative politics of AIDS fanzines and industrial culture, Martyrs & Saints would be Athey’s first major touring piece, as the first instalment of the now-legendary ‘Torture Trilogy’ (1992–95) – a name used as shorthand by Athey. In this trilogy of powerful works, Athey challenged the purported sanctity of the flesh, and specifically those meanings and orthodox values that claim sovereign command of the body through religious, moral and other disciplinary logics. After Martyrs & Saints toured to New York and Chicago, he completed the trilogy with 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1993– 96), and the final instalment, Deliverance (1995). He has performed each piece separately in the US, but mostly in Europe – except for a rendition of the first two pieces and sections from Deliverance in one epic night, at Museo Ex Teresa (the ruins of the opulent Shrine of Santa Teresa la Antigua), in Mexico City in 1995 (a further double bill was presented in Copenhagen in the same year). The trilogy re-established his presence on the Los Angeles arts scene and, perhaps more crucially, placed him in a diverse and challenging context of international touring performance artists. In the 1990s, such artists include Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Nao Bustamante, Marcel-lí Antúnez-Roca and La Fura Dels Baus, Franko B, Annie Sprinkle and the late Lawrence Steger. The ‘Torture Trilogy’ must be understood primarily in the context of the ravages wrought by AIDS in the years between 1981 and 1995. Athey recalls his own sadness at the deaths of his friends, at a time when weekly funerals were common, and he might have had five friends in hospital at any one time. He remembers: ‘If I look through my personal photographs from that era, and see a table full of people, a small percentage of them are still alive. AIDS destroyed my world, so, how to go forward? And how to reckon with my own sickness?’31 These impossible questions were channelled into the development of striking images and rituals in his performances. The intimate dimensions of the crisis was also supplemented by his frustration at the loss of major cultural figures – most prominently David Wojnarowicz – and his own idiosyncratic preparation for mourning, as a rehabilitated devotee of evangelical Christianity:

27

When someone died I would always think of my own infection, my own mortality, that I’d probably never finish my body of work. And this was the real force of Martyrs & Saints, to just be shamelessly melodramatic about loss, about this hideousness, about the effect that religion had on me, and how it painted these pictures so grandly.32 He remembers being drawn to depict his friends and lovers as ‘living saints on earth [who were] being struck down’. Key among these ‘saints’ was his close friend Cliff Diller, a member of the ‘First Family of FUCK!’ and a performer in works by Reza Abdoh.33 Diller died in 1992, and is memorialized in the opening image of Martyrs & Saints, in a scene where Athey realized one of Diller’s morphineinduced hallucinations, by strapping Pigpen into a triangular wooden frame and drawing the performer’s blood with a hypodermic syringe. Pigpen’s blood is dripped ritualistically across his sewn lips, suggesting the disastrous individual cost of AIDS as a series of losses that can be commemorated but not restored. In the subsequent section of the performance, ‘The Nurse’s Penance’, this memorial function is extended to Wojnarowicz, an artist Athey did not know personally, but whose loss was monumentally important to a generation of politicallyinvested artists and audiences. Each performance in the trilogy is explicitly an attempt at community-building in a time of crisis. Martyrs & Saints also brought together key members of Athey’s performance troupe: Julie Tolentino, Stosh ‘Pigpen’ Fila, Divinity P. Fudge, Cross (aka Clayton), Alex Binnie, and the late Brian Murphy. The company would swell to 15 members in 1994.

A S H E TO L D T H E PE R FO R M A N C E A R T IS T F R A N KO B , ‘ I T ’ S A L W AY S B E E N I M P O R T A N T T O R E V E A L T H E D E S T R U C T I V E E L E M E N T S I N [ M Y ] W O R K , O T H E R W I S E I T ’ S P R O M O T I N G A N I D E A L’

Gund, unpublished interview with Ron Athey.

32

An Iranian-born theatre artist, and a key peer of Athey’s, Abdoh died of an AIDSrelated illness in 1995. Diller was a key performer in Abdoh’s Bogeyman (1991).

33

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In the final scene of Martyrs & Saints, Athey presented his iconic appropriation of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom. In Athey’s version, a mass of needles criss-cross the skin of his head, and are bound in acrylic thread to produce a brutal crown of thorns. Collaborators flog him with whips, insert arrows into the skin of his arms, legs and torsos, and bind his tortured body to a stake. The image was restored in the opening of the second part of the trilogy, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life, with Pigpen as a placeholder for Sebastian’s (and Athey’s) earlier sacrament. Released from this endurance, Pigpen is literally washed in the blood by Athey, who plays an evangelical healer in the first scene. 4 Scenes continues with a sequence called ‘Steakhouse Motherfucker’, described by Fudge as a depiction of ‘the working class joe’, including ‘after work drinks at the strip club’ – in which Catherine Opie strips for leering men in overalls and work clothes, followed by more ‘brutal objectification of women’, suggested in Fudge’s balloon dance, which culminates in a mock rape, and the branding of his ass with a lit

cigar.34 Athey takes on the role of the central ‘motherfucker’ who goes ‘back to the machine’, namely a ‘human printing press’ in which he carves stylized marks into Fudge’s back, and sends prints along pulleys through the audience. As discussed in detail elsewhere in this book, this latter vignette brought Athey to international attention, both securing yet compromising his career as a touring artist. Yet its notoriety has overwhelmed the figurative density of other scenes in the performance, including Athey’s moving ‘Suicide Bed’ sequence, in which he inserts 20 to 30 hypodermic syringes up the length of his left arm, gouges his scalp with lumbar needles, writhes in pain or ecstasy, and rises from the brink of suicide (literally, up a rope ladder), as if into the ether. Athey can disturb his critics for playing fast and loose with pathology. Athey accepts the political difficulties that accompany extremity, and refuses to settle for or contribute to what he disparagingly calls ‘a child-safe world’.35 As he told the performance artist Franko B, ‘It’s always been important to reveal the self-destructive elements in [my] work, otherwise it’s promoting an ideal’. Refusing a one-dimensional ‘agenda’, however, Athey emphasizes his commitment to an uncensored ‘reflection on valid experience’, even if this leads him to framing and embellishing aspects of life that are ‘uncomfortable, even ugly’.36 Nevertheless, his extremity has rendered him (in his words) ‘an enigma in America’, and prevented him from touring in the country after 1994.37 His marginalization was confirmed on both sides – by rightwing zealots like Senator Jesse Helms, and, problematically, by politically correct gay commentators on the liberal Left. Athey describes the latter as the LGBT movement’s ‘puritanical big brothers and sisters’;38 and as Patrick Califia notes, the gay newspaper The Advocate perhaps typified this agenda by refusing to cover Athey’s practice after 1994, stating, ‘We don’t cover Ron Athey’, in polite refusal over his perceived transgressions

Left: Rick Castro, Ron Athey and Robert Woods (from Drance) (1992), Hollywood, CA. Photo:  www.rickcastro.com. Courtesy Antebellum Gallery, Hollywood. Centre: Fredrik Nilsen, The First Family of FUCK! (1992). Courtesy Fredrik Nilsen Studio, Los Angeles. Right: Fredrik Nilsen, Ron Athey and Cliff Diller (1992). Courtesy Fredrik Nilsen Studio, Los Angeles.

34 Darryl Carlton (aka Divinity P. Fudge), correspondence with the author, 5 October 2011.

Ron Athey in conversation with the author, INIVA, London, 29 March 2012.

35

36

Athey, ‘Dissections: Franko B’, p. 59.

37

ibid. p. 58.

Ron Athey, ‘Dissections: A Tribute to Griffith Park’, Honcho (December 1997), pp. 68–71 (p. 68).

38

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(despite the publication’s own earlier radicalism in the 1970s).39 Much is at stake in such moralizations of queer sexual experience. The critical and curatorial denigration of art that embraces the unseemly side of personal experience relates closely to a long history of desire and sexual practice, and relations of solidarity and antagonism, as experienced by queer-identifying individuals and groups. Criticism should resist the intrusion of uplifting or pastoralizing agendas into art and performance, especially if the latter can be celebrated other than as a complex space of pleasure, desire or ritual. Difficult questions emerge from the ‘plague years’, and Athey’s work helps to seek answers to their provocations. What happens to acts of loving, belonging and death in the time of AIDS? How does the shift in semantics of touch, due partly to insensitive fictions about ‘contagion’, affect our interactions with the bodies of others? How does the crucial emphasis on prophylactic ‘defence’ (and the implied horror of body fluids that this entails) affect understandings of bodies, of the permeability of their boundaries? How is this fear of the fluid, and anxieties around the body’s openings, translated into symbolic terms? How do these tensions affect progressive attempts to destabilize firm boundaries between bodies and identities?

T H E T R I L O G Y I S A S TA R T L I N G B A R O M E T E R F O R T H E D E S T I T U T I O N O F T H E 19 8 0 S A N D 19 9 0 S , Y E T I T A L S O R E M I N D S U S O F H O W DISASTER CAN BIND ITS SUFFERERS IN FRIENDSHIP AND LOVE

Patrick Califia, ‘The Winking Eye of Ron Athey’, Speaking Sex to Power (San Francisco: Cleis, 2002), pp. 357–64 (p. 359).

39

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While Athey’s work does not provide simple answers to these queries, it has nevertheless demanded the defence of sexual cultures, the critique of sexual moralism in favour of ‘responsibility’, and the foregrounding of a theoretical understanding of plural cultural representation as the crucial site of political struggle. The final part of the ‘Torture Trilogy’, Deliverance, explicitly explores these themes, through scenes that involve attempts at ‘psychic surgery’ and other failed attempts at physical and psychic healing; representations of neutered sex acts; commentaries on the allure of the death drive; and the threat of HIV ‘super-infection’. Many of these themes come together in ‘Rod and Bob: A Post-AIDS boy-boy show’, a notorious (and funny) scene in which Athey and Brian Murphy are castrated using surgical staple ‘tucks’, and anally penetrate each other with a double-ended dildo, while Athey reads out a text that parodies Rod and Bob JacksonParis (a former Mr. Universe and his squeaky-clean model husband), the metaphorically neutered figureheads for what Athey has called the ‘new morality’ among frightened, sexless gay men. At the end of the scene, ‘The Icon’ (played by Divinity Fudge) decisively severs the dildo – and separates the couple – using a pair of gardening shears. The performance closes with the live burials of Athey, Murphy, and Russell McEwan under mounds of dry earth, topped by bull daggers wailing in the theatre’s decreasing light.

Athey’s work in this period might strike some audiences as steeped in tragedy and an overriding cultural and spiritual pessimism. Indeed, Athey describes the works as ‘shamelessly melodramatic’ about the sense of loss and grief that typified the moment in which they were created. 40 The trilogy is a startling barometer for the destitution of the 1980s and 1990s, yet it also reminds us of how disaster can bind its sufferers in friendship and love – as a kind of camaraderie borne in the face of death. Not least, the political difficulties Athey provokes might point to what we lack in the twenty-first century, namely the adhesive politics of the immediate post-Stonewall and early AIDS periods. In private and public conversations, listening to Athey is often to be party to breathless, witty stories, by turns joyous and tragic, and brimming with lost eccentrics and flushed with sex. While some of us came of age in a different place and time, Athey reminds us of the costs of disavowing the inevitable proximity of crisis in a time (sometimes too conveniently) conceived of as ‘post-AIDS’.

Opposite: Divinity P. Fudge in a club performance by Ron Athey and Company, ca. 1994, Los Angeles. Photo by Chelsea Iovino. Chelsea Iovino was a key early documenter of Ron Athey and Company. She toured with the company and took extensive photographs of many of Athey’s pieces in the early to mid-1990s. Above left: Ron Athey in the ‘Suicide Bed’ scene of 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994), PS122, New York. Photo by Dona Ann McAdams. Above right: Portrait of Cross (ca. 1994). Photo by Gary and Pierre Silva.

‘Post-AIDS’ Through manifestations of visceral excess, his work after around 1999 dramatizes the function of the death drive in sexual cultures in broader terms, deploying the serious play of sadomasochistic ritual, toxic beatitude, high-camp glamour, and other careful scenographic innovations. At the same time, Athey has sometimes departed from blood-based work, for example in his operatic duodrama, Judas Cradle (2004), with Juliana Snapper; and more recently in his experiment into the construction of a collective unconscious in Gifts of the Spirit: Automatic Writing (2010). Athey writes, ‘Automatic writing is the one gift I failed at as a child, and the memoir I started in 1980, Gifts of the

40

Gund, unpublished interview with Athey.

31

Spirit, has never been finished. My premise [in the performance is…] to construct a collective unconscious, and have it move this text forward,’ specifically though the techniques of automatism and group hypnosis. 41 Automatic Writing is the only work where Athey takes a backseat to the production of his own performance, via the instruction of ‘psychographists’, ‘ecstatic typists’ and other guest performers. Across these varied and challenging works, Athey responds to his experiences of a life outside or after the worst years of the AIDS epidemic.

A U TO M AT I C W R I T I N G I S T H E O N E G I F T I FA I L E D AT A S A C H I L D , A N D T H E M E M O I R I S T A R T E D I N 19 8 0 , G I F T S O F T H E S P I R I T, H A S N E V E R B E E N F I N I S H E D

Ron Athey, programme notes, Gifts of the Spirit: Automatic Writing, Great Hall, Queen Mary, University of London, 2010.

41

Johnson, ‘Perverse Martyrologies’, p. 508.

42

Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 142.

43

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In works from Solar Anus and Sebastian Suspended (both 1999) to his more recent series of Self-Obliteration solos (2008–11), Athey has developed his practice as an ecstatic theatre of wordless spectacle. Athey writes that his practice turned from a situation of embattled survival to a different set of concerns posed by being a long-term survivor of HIV: ‘a case of “Still Here” in the post-AIDS era’.42 If his ‘plague’ works elegize the generation of men and women lost to AIDS by figuring the specific horrors of the injured, sick or dying body, his ‘post-AIDS’ works extend these investments through representations of the wound as a breach in the body, and as a potential rupture in the production of meaning. The term ‘post-AIDS’ will sit uncomfortably with some readers, but it is a term Athey deploys with irreverent insistence, especially in lectures, seminars and artist talks. In fact, he has used the term since at least 1995 – before the availability of therapies that can prevent progression from HIV to AIDS. We are perhaps justified in being suspicious of the term. As Amelia Jones has noted, conservatives and progressives alike have celebrated the ‘post-’ in the turns towards ‘post-identity’, ‘post-queer’, ‘post-feminist’ and ‘post-black’ politics, even though we may lay little realistic claim to such identifications. To some critics, for example, ‘post-feminism’ means ‘the end of feminism’, Jones writes, ‘the end of a need for self-reflexive and politically developed approaches to culture and to other subjects in one’s social environment’ – despite the term’s emergence as a marker for a radical, intersectional, third-wave reinvigoration of feminist political organizing. 43 Similarly, then, affixing ‘post-‘ to ‘AIDS’ is a gesture that calls for careful negotiation. Anticipating Jones’ critique of the post-identity fallacy, Sarah Schulman has cogently decried the designation of the period after 1996 as ‘post-AIDS’, showing that identification with a ‘post-AIDS’ moment can coincide with a ‘diminished consciousness about how political and artistic change gets made’, through the commonplace forgetting of the specific political and social context of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s, and the hard-won achievements of activists, especially in the US and UK. Schulman’s work is an important reminder of the difficulties that accompany ‘the mechanism that obscured the

Scott Ewalt, untitled portrait of Ron Athey (1997). Courtesy Scott Ewalt. Ewalt made the collage to accompany Athey’s regular column in Honcho. It was published in Ron Athey, ‘Dissections: Split Personality, or So Many Men’, Honcho (January 1998), pp. 65–67. The collage appears on pp. 66-67.

reality [of AIDS] and replaced it with something false, palatable and benign’. 44 Athey is categorically exempt from Schulman’s charges of ‘diminished consciousness’. His description of the historical present as the ‘post-AIDS’ era must be defined explicitly as the next phase of the development of AIDS discourse: within and not outside the historical development of the epidemic. The prefix ‘post-’ must be qualified as signifying a subsequent period of political engagement with a disease whose terms of experience have shifted, at least in much of the West, without being ‘cured’ or overcome. These convictions are palpable in Athey’s recent works after the ‘Torture Trilogy’. For example, his subsequent ‘Incorruptible Flesh trilogy’ (1996–2007) interrogates the legacies of AIDS, and the difficulties of finding a political or spiritual compass in the ‘post-AIDS’ era. Athey retrospectively described the first part, Incorruptible Flesh (Work in Progress) (1996) as a ‘sick-boys-do-AIDS-death-trip-cabaret’, made in collaboration with his friend and mentor, the Chicago-based performance artist Lawrence Steger. 45 Steger was suffering from AIDS while making the work, and died of pneumonia on 5 February 1999, shortly after the brief European tour. The difference between the two performers’ experiences of AIDS are made palpable in the performance, not least through the disfiguring latex make-up that Steger wears on his face to accentuate his role as a kind of truth-telling queer soothsayer from beyond the grave. Matthew Goulish discusses Athey’s work with Steger in detail in his essay for this volume. In the second part of the trilogy Incorruptible Flesh (Il Luminous/Dissociative Sparkle) (2006), Athey memorialized Steger, and anthologized a history of gay male subjection to violence, disease and death, by installing himself on a

44 Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 12–14.

Ron Athey, ‘Becoming Total-Image’, Manuel Vason: Encouters, ed. by Dominic Johnson (Bristol: Arnolfini, 2007), p. 211.

45

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Opposite: Ron Athey after cutting his thigh with an ‘accursed’ arrow in Ron Athey and Dominic Johnson, Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound) (2007), Chelsea Theatre, London. Photo by Regis Hertrich.

steel structure that forced open his eyes with needles, and dilated his rectum with a baseball bat lodged firmly inside it. 46 Prostrate upon his ornate rack, Athey remains visibly awake and sensate to a history of bodily suffering. The first two parts of the ‘Incorruptible Flesh trilogy’ therefore explored the pathos that attends to the relations between peers – friendship, love and loss, and by extension a range of potential affects including sadness, betrayal, solitude, dependency and rage. As Amelia Jones suggests in her essay, the third performance, Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound) (2006–07) (made in collaboration with myself), extends beyond the filial relations explored in the previous works by interrogating the pleasures and pains of intergenerational communication. Throughout, Athey is committed to an irreverent examination of the ugly feelings that attend to positive modes of identification, as implicated in the affects that queer subjects ignore at our peril. This sensibility is a structuring force in the recent ‘anti-social turn’ in queer theory. As Tim Dean has argued, for example, we need

‘ I N C O R R U P T I B L E F L E S H T R I L O G Y ’ (19 9 6 –2 0 0 7 ) I N T E R R O G A T E S T H E L EG AC I E S O F A I DS , A N D T H E D I F F I C U LT I E S O F F I N D I N G A P O L I T I C A L O R S P I R I T UA L CO M PA S S I N T H E ‘ P OS T- A I DS’ E R A to continually de-idealize ‘the psychic difficulties that are usually so utopianly purified out of existence in explicitly gay-identified writing and criticism’. 47 Like Dean, perhaps, Athey suggests that idealism about subjectivity and its lived consolations may make art, activism and political engagement less difficult, or less likely to have practicable effects. Yet this nihilism does not foreclose moments of frailty, joy or transcendence, which Athey calls ‘dissociative sparkle’: gestures and styles that temporarily overcome the limitations of a trying, tough, or grim social reality.

Literate rapture

46 The performance was presented in two different forms; only the second version, in New York, included the baseball bat.

Tim Dean, ‘The Psychoanalysis of AIDS’, October 63 (1993), pp. 83–116 (p. 105).

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Athey is a highly literate artist, developing his works through rabid reading and meticulous research. Sometimes his references are made explicit. Most notably, Solar Anus (1999) is a complex homage to two exiles from French surrealism. The performance responds to an essay of the same name by Georges Bataille, while appropriating the aesthetics and specific features of Pierre Molinier’s self-portraiture. Seated on a steel and leather throne, after having removed an interminable string of pearls from his commandingly-tattooed asshole, Athey inserts hooks into his face, hitching them with cords to a twisted golden crown. In Molinier’s photographs, his asshole is sometimes penetrated with homemade dildos made from stuffed silk stockings, often ceremoniously attached to his high-heel shoe (a ‘love spur’), and this technique is borrowed and theatricalized to powerful effect in Solar Anus, in reverent homage to the ‘true fetishism’ Athey diagnoses

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in Molinier’s art. 48 Revisiting Bataille’s thought of the coruscating sun in torrid ‘copula’ with the Earth and its moon, Athey’s body becomes the site of a ‘scandalous eruption’ in performance (to borrow Bataille’s phrase). 49 Beyond his solo works, Athey has also curated sprawling, bacchanalian events that celebrate the twisted legacies of Bataille’s excremental philosophies.50 For example, in various manifestations of Visions of Excess, Athey has invited maverick artists (including Bruce LaBruce, Udo Kier, Kembra Pfahler, Kira O’Reilly and Slava Mogutin) to respond to the vertiginous extravagances of Bataille’s writing, touring internationally between 2003 and 2009. In Athey’s broad engagement with historical culture, he scavenges, recombines and reconstitutes a vast archive of minor, marginal and esoteric literary and artistic references – Ballard, Bataille, Wojnarowicz, as well as Jean Genet, Yukio Mishima, and many others. These

HIS CHANNELLING OF SEBASTIAN’S TORT URED BLISS H A S B E C O M E A S I G N AT U R E I M AG E I N AT H E Y ’ S W O R K , A N D H E H A S R E P E A T E D LY A F F E C T E D T H E I N F E C T I O U S P A S S I V I T Y O F T H E ‘ G AY S A I N T ’

48

Athey, ‘Dissections: 45 Minutes’, p. 71.

See Georges Bataille, ‘The Solar Anus’, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927– 1939, trans. by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 6.

49

On Athey’s homages to Bataille, see Dominic Johnson, ‘Ron Athey’s Visions of Excess: Performance after Georges Bataille’, Papers of Surrealism, 8 (2010), pp. 1–12.

50

See Nigel Spivey, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), pp. 91–92.

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are referenced in loving homage and volatile cut-ups with highly recognizable imagery from the western classical tradition, including paintings of saints and other holy scapegoats, most notably the thirdcentury Christian martyr, Saint Sebastian, and his caregiver, Irene of Rome. Indeed, his channelling of Sebastian’s tortured bliss has become a signature image in Athey’s work, and he has repeatedly affected the infectious passivity of the ‘gay saint’. In vignettes from various performances, Athey appropriates Sebastian’s classical déhanchement (the torso is convulsed into a dynamic axis by cocking a leg), the wistful upturned gaze, his ruptured flesh, and tears of bloody devotion. Riddled with the arrows of his Roman persecutors, Sebastian was recuperated back to health by Saint Irene, only to be pulverized to death by his torturers, and dumped unceremoniously in the cloaca maxima, the major Roman sewer. Sebastian is the superlative icon for Athey. Popular as a votive against bubonic plague in the fifteenth century, Sebastian has long since been perceived as a cipher for obdurate persistence and recovery in times of catastrophe. Sebastian’s spiritual resilience made him a patron saint for those threatened by illness or assault, and his statues are markers of plague in Italian cities.51 Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, Renaissance painters such as Guido Reni, Andrea Mantegna and Sandro Botticelli aestheticized Sebastian’s saintly suffering, and sexualized his body, transforming Christly transcendence into a decoy for sexual longing, and coveting his persecution as a pathos formula. As a classical visual superlative – or engram – the multiply pierced body of Sebastian is notable for its sentimental excess, and its convenience as a vehicle for gay male adoration. The novelist Yukio Mishima’s visceral response

Mouse, solo performance at Re-Visions of Excess, at the Pink Flamingo lap-dancing club, Fierce Festival, Birmingham, June 2007. Photo by Manuel Vason. Mouse is shown falling off the stage with water spurting from her backside. Her performance was the grand finale of Ron Athey and Lee Adams’ 12-hour event, Re/ Visions of Excess (2007), which also toured to Ljubljana (2004), London (2009), and Copenhagen (2009). It originated in Birmingham (as Visions of Excess) in 2003.

to Reni’s painting of Sebastian is a classic account of the ejaculatory devotion his body inspires. In a noted passage, Mishima remembers lingering over a reproduction as a child, and experiencing a rush of ‘pagan joy’ and ‘unprecedented ardour’ at the pornographic potential of Sebastian penetrated body: ‘My blood soared up; my loins swelled as though in wrath […] My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion that had never been taught’.52 Mishima’s enthusiastic description is described in his memoir Confessions of a Mask – a book that, in turn, made a powerful impression on Athey. For Mishima – and in turn for Athey – Sebastian evokes an erotic conflation of disaster and rapture, symbolizing the petite mort of orgasmic self-loss, in which ‘the inverted [or narcissistic] and the sadistic impulses are inextricably entangled’.53

Archive trouble Athey occupies a notorious position at the margins of American culture. Historians of art, performance or theatre have variously acknowledged and been affronted by Athey’s challenges to humanist-oriented criticism. While the art market has found ways of accepting the offbeat, extreme or wacky aesthetics of artists such as Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Catherine Opie, or Matthew Barney, it has in some ways struggled to assimilate Athey’s excesses. Athey’s aesthetic and political immoderations, and his refusal to produce saleable objects, have exacerbated his sidelining by critics and historians. His marginality is also consolidated by his lax attitude towards posterity, and his patchy commitment to documenting his performances in ways that might fit the corporate art market. Athey does not regularly retain or sell the physical traces of performances (for example, he discarded the blood prints made during the many

Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, trans. by Meredith Weatherby (London: Peter Owen, 1998), p. 40.

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ibid. p. 41.

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Opposite: Ron Athey as Saint Sebastian, Martyrs & Saints (1993), PS122, New York. Photo by Dona Ann McAdams.

performances of 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life). Although his performances have been variously documented over the decades, Athey has rarely editioned or sold these to collectors or museums. Athey’s resistance to collecting and archiving the traces of his performances could be read as blasé, or self-destructive. Yet his resistance to documentation was contingent on his lived experiences: from his outsider lifestyle in the early years, to a later realization that time was running out, as more pressing concerns took precedence over the urge to ensure posterity. The artist and theorist Catherine Lord

AT H E Y S U R V I V E D T H E D O O M E D D E C A D E B E F O R E T H E A D V E N T O F E F F E C T I V E A N T I - R E T R O V I R A L T H E R A P Y. B U T H I S P U N K N I H I L I S M H A S R E M A I N E D M O S T LY I N T A C T

54 Catherine Lord, ‘Their Memory is Playing Tricks on Her: Notes Toward a Calligraphy of Rage’, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. by Cornelia Butler (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 441–57 (p. 442).

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has noted that such a reticence to archiving can be understood as a rigorously marginal orientation: ‘the certainty that one’s work is worth archiving is a symptom of privilege’, she suggests, ‘generally white, generally Western, ponderously male, tediously heterosexual’.54 In the early 1980s, Athey’s archival disorientation was a by-product of half a decade given over to substance abuse, and a coterminous post-punk anti-philosophy that assumed there was ‘no future’ to speak of. Athey’s work emerged from the concrete spaces of low culture, namely the urban ferment of subcultural Los Angeles. Returning to performance several years after his HIV diagnosis in 1985, any residual archival impulse was swept aside in the rush to produce live work, and to have it seen by audiences before time ran out. Athey did, of course, survive the doomed decade or so before the advent of effective anti-retroviral therapy. But his punk nihilism has remained mostly intact, and his eschewal of cataloguing and archiving his work has probably inhibited broader scholarly attention. Athey’s peripatetic relation to archiving his work posed challenges for compiling and editing Pleading in the Blood. Photographs were salvaged from friends’ archives, rare publications, or degraded videos. Many images were new to Athey, or considered lost. Some of the gems rarely or never seen before include photographs of Athey and Rozz Williams in the early 1980s by Edward Colver and Karen Filter; images of Athey and friends (including Flanagan) at Club FUCK! and Sin-a-matic by Sheree Rose; Rick Castro’s fetish portraits for Drummer magazine; non-photographic portraits of Athey including Franko B’s stitched work, Alex Binnie’s woodcut, and Mike Diana’s cartoon; and video documentation of Athey’s notorious 1994 performance of 4 Scenes at Patrick’s Cabaret in Minneapolis, or Athey’s collaborations with Lawrence Steger and Juliana Snapper. Alongside long and short thematic analyses that account for the achievements of various performances – particularly the component performances of the ‘Torture Trilogy’, as well as others – this collection contains essays on specific works, authored by Athey’s friends, peers and collaborators.

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This page: Franko B, Portrait of Ron Athey (2012), white thread stitched onto unprimed canvas. Collection of Ron Athey. Courtesy Franko B. Opposite: Ron Athey, Trojan Whore (1996), ONA, San Francisco. Photo by Ted Soqui.

These include: Matthew Goulish on the first instalment of Incorruptible Flesh, and Adrian Heathfield on the second piece in the series; Lydia Lunch on JOYCE; Juliana Snapper on Judas Cradle; Tim Etchells on Self-Obliteration; and Bruce LaBruce on Athey’s involvement in the film Hustler White. Perched between ecstasy and oblivion, Athey urges himself and his audiences into precarious outlands, demanding new strategies for commanding our attention. His generosity must be matched by our care, as sympathetic readers of his life and art. Pleading in the blood, Athey asks for our sensitivity: to his body’s endurance, to the losses he has grieved, and to the conceptual possibilities awakened in his extremity.

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GIF TS OF THE SPIRIT R O N AT H E Y ‘You’ve been born with the Calling on your life, Ronnie Lee,’ my grandma and Aunt Vena repeatedly informed me from the time I was a baby.1 I was just becoming aware of what that prophesy meant – how being chosen for a ministry made me different from everyone else. According to this message from the holiest of holies, I was to sacrifice the playthings of the world, in order to fulfil the plans of God.

The holy woman

An earlier version of this writing was published as Ron Athey, ‘Gifts of the Spirit’, Unnatural Disasters: Recent Writings from the Golden State, ed. by Nicole Panter (Los Angeles: Incommunicado Press, 1996), pp. 70–80. It has been extensively revised for this publication.

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Through the course of my religious training, I encountered many great prophets, faith healers, mystics and savers of souls. In church I would close my eyes and absorb the rambling vibrations given off from the Gift of Tongues, mixed in with the sounds of foot-stomping, and bodies hitting the floor hard as they went out in the Spirit. I would listen intently as people testified of physical healings, the exorcism of demons and the detailed arrival of Armageddon. My childhood was spent among adults who believed that their lives read like the Book of Job. It mystified me that as a mere test of faith God unleashed hideous diseases and allowed actual demon possession. Later, the diseases could be removed, provided a powerful Reverend Minister executed the laying on of hands. The rarest and least talked about miracle was stigmata, wherein the gifted would spontaneously bleed from the same parts of the body that Christ bled. Because the only two living examples with stigmata were women, there seemed to be some indication that women were more open to receiving the gift, but I believed with all my heart it could be given to me. One day, Aunt Vena received a promotional flyer announcing ‘Sister Linda’s Miraculous Gift of Stigmata: A Three Day Visit to the Indio Area’. It described how sometimes she bled pure blood, and other times she bled a clear scented healing oil. Putting the sweetest, holiest look on my face, I expressed my interest in attending. ‘Aunt Vena, I want to see this miracle’. So my family drove into the desert to let me witness Linda bleed. That first night, after sitting through an uninspiring sermon delivered by the local Pentecostal minister, it became apparent that Linda was not going to bleed. I was disappointed, but still anxious to return.

Catherine Opie, Ron Athey and Pigpen (Portrait for Deliverance). Polaroid. 1996 © Catherine Opie. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

On the second visit, the air was so still outside, I just knew she was going to bleed. Sister Linda had dark circles under her eyes that night, and her face was shiny with sweat. She sure looked like she had the Holy Spirit rattling around inside her. I joined in the hymn singing, a chorus of twangy hillbilly voices belting out, ‘When we all get to heaven, / What a day of rejoicing that will be! / When we all see Jesus, / We’ll sing and shout with victory!’ Again, the minister tried for – but did not achieve – inspiration. Towards the end of the service, when she still had not bled, I wanted to throw a temper tantrum. I thought, ‘She’s just a big fat fake’. I couldn’t understand why everyone else was so patient with waiting for her gift to reveal itself. All she had shown us were pictures, cheap snapshots of her previous bleedings, as if that were sufficient evidence of a miracle. She also had told the congregation that impressions in blood would appear in her Bible, but I didn’t want to hear stories about psychic phenomena, I wanted her to bleed. I had gone there with a desire to be anointed in the blood seeping directly from her palms. I wondered if she’d bleed from the place where the spear had been inserted in Christ’s side. I pondered on whether or not she’d expose the hole. Would she be modest like my Aunt Vena, or was a stigmata wound different? I imagined what the blood would look like, running down her forehead, seeping through her clothes. But she hadn’t bled from anywhere on those two nights. 43

Grandiose tears During Joyce’s pregnancy with me, her 19-year-old sister Vena prophesied that I had the calling on my life, and would become a powerful minister. They said that once out of my mother’s body, I was surrounded by a crackling blue force field. So was the sign. I was raised according to the prophecy. Throughout my early childhood, many evangelists discerned this ‘Calling’. A particularly remarkable incident happened late in the fall of 1970. I was 9 years old, and eager to understand the Gifts of the Spirit. My grandfather drove the family station wagon for over an hour to take my grandmother, Aunt Vena and myself to a revival meeting that had been set up in Rubidoux, a town in the part of California known (with no little bit of irony) as the Inland Empire. When we finally arrived and parked the car, it was freezing and there was a moderate dust storm. We rushed from the car, rubbing the dirt from our eyes. The building

M Y N E R V E S S T A R T E D T O T R E M B L E I N M Y B O D Y, A N D I C O U L D F E E L M Y I N S I D E S C O N T R AC T I N G U P TO T H E B AC K O F M Y T H R OAT, T H E T I P O F M Y TO N G U E TA P P I N G AG A I N S T T H E F R O N T O F M Y PA L AT E in which the revival meeting was being held was nothing but a raggedy wood shack, really, standing alone in the middle of a totally barren landscape. But once inside, safe from the harsh weather, we took our seats. Down the centre aisle was a red carpet runner, which led to a wooden table set up as an altar. There were two floral arrangements on stands flanking a podium, the air was perfumed with the oil used to anoint the congregation, and slow inspirational music was being playing on an accordion. We soaked all this in for many minutes, and finally a male evangelist came forth and took his place in the pulpit. For a while he just stood, smiling humbly, framed by the glories of his altar, looking out over all, maybe 35 of us. This male evangelist delivered a loud and dramatic sermon, during most of which he left his place in the pulpit and walked up and down the red carpet runner, speaking directly into each face. When he had thrown down on something particularly profound, the congregation would punctuate the point by releasing a very precise ‘Hallelujah!’ back at him. After the sermon, his wife dragged her accordion and a chair onstage, and led in the singing of hymns. ‘I’m So Glad / Jesus Lifted Me’ and ‘I’ve Been Washed in the Blood of the Lamb’. The minister stood up and announced a healing service, the real driving force – even more so than salvation – of a successful revival meeting run. Folks will drive to the end of the Earth to receive a healing. As a line calmly formed down the entire length of the red runway, the minister dipped his hands in the strong oil, stored in a large urn. The first woman in line stepped forward to the minister; she was turned around and announced to the congregation: ‘I have stomach cancer’. After the laying on of oil-drenched hands by the minister 44

and his backup system – four women who were effectively a spiritual powerhouse – the sister vomited onto the carpet. The minister announced that she had thrown up the evil cancer, roots and all, and was healed. The minister’s wife flung a square of shiny light green fabric over the mess. These squares of fabric were in all the services, and in most cases they were used to cover women’s panties when their dresses rose up too high if they landed spread eagled after falling out in the Spirit. The next three healing-seekers in the line-up hit the floor after their anointing, though it wasn’t vocalized to us what healings they had come to receive. I’d seen all this before, but there was a disturbing occurrence after that. A semi-comatose, heavy-set woman was brought to the front of the line by two of her family members. The minister, the powerhouse and the family all prayed over her body, commanding a healing, anointing her, shaking her, demanding that her body be released from the disease of diabetes. But something either went wrong or was already wrong, and in the midst of their prayers she went unconscious, into a coma. A man from her family had already been trying to force grapefruit juice down her throat – to boost her blood sugar – but it was beyond a citrus intervention and didn’t take effect. She was dragged out of the church and driven to a hospital. It made the healing service seem dangerous, but real. I thought people would leave, but no one left. Instead it intensified. Members of the congregation testified to seeing visions of a consuming Holy Fire roaring up the inner walls of the old wooden storefront we were using as a church. It was after midnight, and I felt overwhelmed with the energy in the room. Tears streamed down my face. The minister came and put me in his arms, carried me up to the pulpit, and placed me on a chair. He raised my hands up towards God and stated – as my Aunt Vena had prophesied – that I was a special child, that I had the Calling on my life. I was on the verge of receiving the Gift of Tongues, my nerves started to tremble in my body, and I could feel my insides contracting up to the back of my throat, the tip of my tongue rapidly tapping against the front of my palate. I felt so close, yet all that came was more tears. The minister removed his tie and began unbuttoning his white cotton dress shirt, which he then took off and began tearing into small squares. The small rags were lifted to my face one at a time: one square, one tear. The congregation lined up and were instructed to pin this relic to the interior of their bed clothing, and pray for that miracle. After the dispensing, tears still streamed down my face like some beautiful transparent form of stigmata.

Grapes of wrath in the Inland Empire The grandparents who raised my brother and sisters had come from San Antonio, Texas. My grandmother’s family also cited Corpus Christi, but they constantly moved around during the Depression. Grandma had stories of living in a car and surviving off meat from squirrels her 45

brothers shot and cleaned. She voiced resentment that my grandpa and his mother, allegedly an Apache Indian, had lived on a small ranch via the reservation and had the ‘easy life’. They never told me how they met and married, just that they’d moved to San Jacinto, California, because my grandfather could get construction work there. They settled down in Hemet long enough to raise their two daughters, Joyce and Vena. Eventually he landed a job doing construction on the Claremont Colleges, and with a break for the Korean War, bought a house on the G.I. Bill in the city of Pomona. Neighbouring Chino, Pomona was the gateway to the Inland Empire, the furthest suburb east in LA County, a small community of farming, milk and dairy, and large state and federal prisons. When they purchased the house in 1950, Pomona was a racially mixed area. By the late 1960s, due largely to race riots and Chicano gang violence, white flight occurred, except for my family. We were the only white family within a square mile. In the isolation of being whites in a fifty-fifty black and Chicano neighbourhood, my grandmother’s racism isolated us even further. We were warned about bringing ‘coloured’ people into the house. Vena would qualify that at one point she had participated in a civil rights march or two, but her mother would interrupt and say ‘get off your soapbox Vena Mae’.

M Y M O T H E R JOYC E H A D N O P R O B L E M W I T H T H E S H O W Y G I F T S OF T H E SPI R I T [. . .] T H IS WA S R E F L EC T E D I N H E R TONGU E S, W H IC H WERE SO CLOSE IN PHONE TICS TO HER EPILEPTIC MUMBLINGS Back in Texas, my grandma and her mother had been devout Pentecostalists. My grandpa had protested that it was fanatical and seemed to take over my grandmother’s life. Her religion made him uncomfortable, so she vowed upon leaving Texas and the Pentecostal practice behind. And perhaps on her part she’d had enough of the scandals and gossip that seem to plague spirit-filled churches. Raising children and enjoying a better quality of life in the 1940s and 1950s, she was able to abide by that decision. For no reason other than it was Protestant and nearby, she attended a Lutheran church with her family, all the while complaining about its mediocrity. She was just going through the motions for the structure, teaching her daughter about the Bible, but her heart wasn’t in it. One day she and her youngest daughter Vena, a mama’s girl who was finally teenaged, saw a revival tent meeting set up. They went inside, and my grandmother recounts that she felt shame for ever abandoning the Spirit. Revivals were roadshows with more than a few ties to vaudeville, and loud miracles happened in abundance. She was reignited with the fire of the Holy Spirit, and filled with the Gifts of Tongues and Prophecy. Vena felt that this was also her future, and together they committed to the Pentecostal way. My grandfather wasn’t too happy about this, but eventually they broke him down some. He went to meetings with them and studied his Bible, but to his dying day, he was never born again. He would 46

Portrait of Ron Athey’s mother, Joyce, in 1972. Family photo in Athey’s possession.

never admit to having received Christ. Taking the half-measure route, my mother Joyce had no problem with the showy Gifts of the Spirit, or taking a blasphemous approach. This was reflected in her tongues, which were so close in phonetics to her epileptic mumblings.

Joyce I called my mother ‘Joyce’ because my mother didn’t raise me. She was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, manic-depressive, and most dramatically suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures. I wondered if these involuntary acrobatics were trying to destroy her: besides the usual tongue chewing, she often convulsed face forward into the most dangerous settings. In the worst incident I witnessed, she leapt right through the dining room window into the back garden. That particular day was the one and only time I ever remember her cooking. She was making batches of silver-dollar-sized pancakes at the stove, which we couldn’t wait to smother in butter and Karo mapleflavoured corn syrup. After making a trip from the stove to the table, she stopped functioning and stared straight ahead, mumbled noises in an increasing volume while her body stiffened, then trembled, and took off. There was a crash and she dove through the plate glass window. Joyce was lying face down in the garden, still convulsing. I remember there being blood and glass everywhere, an especially thick paste of 47

blood forming in her hair. My grandma and Aunt Vena came running out to help her, shooing us kids aside. An ambulance was called, and a wooden spoon was wedged between Joyce’s teeth. Waiting for the paramedics, I asked about the thick blood coming out of her head and was told it was strawberry jam, which I didn’t believe. I was smart enough to figure out blood was building up and coagulating inside her bouffant, and found an exit point through the top. Back to the nuthouse, Joyce never functioned as part of the household after that. This spasmodic mess contrasted the statuesque, composed woman that Joyce was outside of the epileptic fits. The only thing Joyce seemed to care about, or ever talk about, was how beautiful she was. Her glamorous good looks and style could best be described as a cross between Marlo Thomas (That Girl) and Jackie O. She spent hours poised in wool skirt suits and big hair, almost picture perfect, except for the rigid motions with which she’d take her hands – stiffened as if in salute – to smooth out the front and sides of her jacket, moving down the length of her skirt, continually fighting non-existent creasing and bunching. She was in a constant fight with her dignity, convinced her clothes were crawling up her body trying to indecently expose her.

B L O O D WA S B U I L D I N G U P A N D C OAG U L AT I N G I N S I D E H E R B O U F FA N T, A N D F O U N D A N E X I T P O I N T T H R O U G H T H E TO P Joyce’s final downfall was her acts of violence. She had raging temper tantrums, usually towards her younger sister, Vena, and later directed towards others. For no apparent reason, she would beat Vena down to the floor, or begin throwing dishes at her from across the room. She would hear my sister cursing at her though sound asleep, and pull her from the top bunk bed to the concrete floor at 3 a.m. Finally, she tried to shove Vena into the hot oven while Vena was bent over, removing an apple pie. Joyce refused to explain or apologize. For this she was sent to Camarillo, the state mental institution, and hence the schizophrenic diagnosis and heavy treatments. She spent the next years in and out of state and private care institutions, out long enough to have four children by two husbands. She was finally placed in a specialized ‘board and care’ permanently. As one father was missing and the other denied visitation rights, my grandparents and Aunt Vena were left to raise us.

The Catholic envy of Vena Mae Although Vena had only ever been involved in Protestant churches, she had an intense obsession with the Catholic Church. She found herself truly moved by stories of the lives of saints, and found immense strength in the way Catholics glorified the Virgin Mary, almost as an equal to Christ. As Vena proceeded with her exploration of ‘holy roller’ revival meetings, she found more power of interpretation, fewer rules, less structure, and an entire world of the Spirit to draw off. She had a powerful authority in being able to channel a higher being. She knew 48

Ron Athey after Resonate/Obliterate with Julie Tolentino (2011), Allen Street Studios, New York. Photo by Slava Mogutin. The performance took place on Athey’s 50th birthday (16 December 2011). Resonate/Obliterate is part of Tolentino’s project The Sky Remains The Same (2008-present), in which she ‘archives’ a work of performance by re-performing it. In Resonate/Obliterate, Athey performed Self-Obliteration I-II and Tolentino re-performed his work alongside Athey’s second cycle.

better than to bring it to her church meeting straight-out, but she justified bringing Catholic rituals and icons into her daily life. Vena may have felt cheated out of the Catholic God-given right to publicly pray to a vast array of suffering idols, but she made up for it at home. In any church she had ever been to, this form of worship was not only frowned upon, it was considered praying to false idols. She followed her conviction that she was Jesus-first, and personally, ecstatically, related to the saints. The graphic descriptions of martyrdom and the high drama rituals were spirit-state- and vision-inducing. Devout Catholics, she knew, with the help of saints, would experience spiritual ecstasy through imagining the suffering of Christ during the exact moment of crucifixion. In contrast, the altarpieces in Protestant churches, minimal stylized crosses with no body of Christ, paled beside Catholic grandiosity. She could have converted, I suppose, but all of this representation of bloody spectacle still paled next to the Pentecostal’s receiving of the Baptism in the fire of the Holy Ghost. She stood by her conviction that in her spiritual life, she could have the fire of the Holy Spirit, and guidance from the Holy Virgin and the bloody martyr saints. The 18-year-old Vena became so deeply involved in her charismatic Pentecostal spiritual practices that she began to question her lifestyle. She was engaged to an artist, and wore her hair in platinum waves à la Jayne Mansfield. She dressed ‘of the world’, in high heels and too-tight Capri pants. She realized that to become a proper church lady, it was time to develop appropriate presentation. For revival church-wear, she evolved into something quite gigantic, dressing in outlandish fashions only worn by gospel singers in poor, small Pentecostal churches. Typical was a floor-length powder blue dress with white side-panels, puffed sleeves, and a matching floor-length vest. Her hair evolved into a giant beehive in many shades of blonde, complete with curled bangs and 49

Below: Ron Athey, preparatory drawing for Gifts of the Spirit: Automatic Writing (2010).

tendrils, sometimes pumped up with wiglets or falls hitched on the back. Though it would seem an absurd addition to her Grand Ole Opry styling, on special occasions she added a black mantilla, as a noted taken from the older Chicanas in our neighbourhood, who wore them to weddings and funerals. She would carefully pin the large black lace square over her beehive, and wrap a matching black lace shawl around her shoulders. When Vena spoke in tongues, Latin flavourings would slip in. She would constantly insert ‘oh Christo, Christo’ and ‘Yaysus’ into her Babelogue of ‘she-kund-dera-mah-see-kee-yukz’, thinking she was speaking in Spanish. The Pentecostals explain the gibber-jabber tongues to be a channelled spirit language (glossolalia), which differs from the Gift of Xenolalia, the gift of speaking an actual but unlearned foreign language that missionaries were supposed to have been miraculously given in order to communicate with the natives. As I don’t recall many Spanish-speakers in our services, there was no practical

W H E N V E N A S P O K E I N TO N G U E S , L AT I N F L AVO U R I N G S W O U L D S L I P I N . S H E W O U L D C O N S T A N T LY I N S E R T ‘ O H C H R I S T O , C H R I S T O ’ A N D ‘ YAY S U S ’ I N T O H E R B A B E L O G U E O F ‘ S H E - K U N D - D E R A - M A H - S E E - K E E -Y U K Z ’ explanation for Vena’s quasi-Español, except for her never-ending obsession with details from the Catholic Church, and Chicanos being her main reference point in the Inland Empire. In the summer of 1958, according to Vena a sign came that she had personally made contact with Mary. She received a vision from the Virgin, which was to be the first in a series of divine messages. In this vision, she said that the Virgin Mary had come to her and told her she was going to have a worldwide ministry that would set up and deliver the Second Coming of Christ. But in order for this to happen, she and her family were to be tested by God. She was to break off her engagement and remain a virgin; she would be given bone cancer, but later be healed as long as she didn’t go to a doctor. It was understood that she was to be a nun of sorts, until this deliverance. Deliverance was the day our family was to be released from spiritual oppression. On that day Vena would miraculously bear the Christ-child, via Immaculate Conception. My grandmother encouraged her to pursue more of these revelations and directions from the Virgin. Shortly thereafter my grandmother prophesied, in the masculine voice of God (this was her style in prophesying), that she was called on to join her daughter in this journey. In order to become chaste as a nun, she would therefore stop having sexual relations with my grandpa Claude. They would stay up late at night, praying, and doing Holy Women activities, like fasting together. Thus I was raised by two self-appointed, self-styled Pentecostal nuns and prophetesses. To say the least, Vena and her mother had a strange relationship, but the fact that they had shared a bed since before I was born never 50

Ron Athey, Gifts of the Spirit: Automatic Writing (2011), Whitworth Hall, University of Manchester. Photo by Roshana Rubin-Mayhew.

seemed odd to me. When our lot came along, it was my brother and I and our grandpa in one room, my two sisters (and my mother when she’d be home) in the other, and the church ladies in the third. I never thought it should be a different way. What made me suspect the holiness, or even the normalcy of their relationship, was the enduring tradition they had of Betadine douches. Aunt Vena had ‘female’ problems, and for reasons that were not to be questioned, her mother needed to give her a Betadine douche once a week. Vena and her mother would go into the bathroom wearing matching but differently coloured terrycloth robes, and disappear for at least an hour. At first I thought these troubles were legitimized by the doctor, as on a rare occasion no one was home and I could get away with investigating (though I had no idea what I was looking for), I saw there was a drawer in the bedroom full of prescription vaginal medications with plastic inserters, various douching equipment, a large container of Betadine solution, vaginal suppositories, and mysterious items such as feminine deodorant spray. In the bathroom, Vena needed her mother to repeatedly rinse her out with a solution of Betadine and hot water until she was clean. Apparently it took quite a few rinses. The door was always locked, as I tried ‘innocently’ to walk in a couple times. I pressed my ear against the door but could only hear the shower running. Later, when the door finally opened, Vena would walk straight to their bedroom and lay face down on the bed hugging herself, as if to disappear. My grandmother would emerge later after tidying the equipment. She’d go to her special L-shaped couch and read her dream interpretation books while Vena ‘napped’.

Automatic writing Patiently waiting for deliverance, Aunt Vena began channelling the Virgin and random saints through one of her most prolific Gifts of the 51

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Spirit, automatic writing. She also began channelling the spirit of her dead grandmother, Audrey. Her mother’s mother was the first in the Pentecostal line, and was held in the highest regard. Vena ‘officially’ canonized Audrey, and commissioned a psychic painter to create an icon in vivid colours, which was framed and placed above the wood cabinet that was used as an automatic writing table.

Opposite: Ron Athey, Self-Obliteration I (2007), Donau Festival, Krems, Austria. Photo by Christophe Chemin.

BY T H E AG E O F 9, I S P O K E I N TO N G U E S , DA N C E D I N T H E S P I R I T, A N D WA S P R O N E TO V I S I O N S A N D E C S TAT I C C ATATO N I C S TAT E S Though the task of bestowing sainthood seemed a bit grand for a nun to decide on, Vena was prone to do anything the Spirit compelled her to, which aside from the Catholic influence seemed to involve an array of mystical tools. I found nothing strange about her channelling the dead through writing, and was especially intrigued with the crystal ball she used for scrying, which was kept wrapped in cloth and boxed in cedar. The prophecies were fantastical and the persecutions melodramatic. Vena suffered from undiagnosed bone cancer, and was healed after three years of suffering and massive weight gain, which, I was clear, was part of the illness or an independent persecution. She also developed a stomach ulcer, which took the weight off. After the cancer healing, she received word from Mother Audrey, the saint, that after she bore the Second Coming of Christ, she would be wed to Elvis Presley and bear twin sons. Then grandma and Vena received word that whenever a celebrity on TV placed their forefinger on their nose in a straight line, it was a sign that they were waiting for their Ministry to start, patiently waiting for the day when deliverance came and all this would swing into gear. By the age of 9, I spoke in tongues, danced in the Spirit, and was prone to visions and ecstatic catatonic states. A few years later, I was retold the story of St. Audrey, and it was suggested her Spirit could enter me. So I was sat in the chair at the desk beneath her portrait, where a pen a paper had been placed, and they left me to conjure. I placed the pen, and felt nothing in the room, so I started riding the vibration in my body, and still nothing. It did not translate to words or even scribbles. I prayed, I meditated, I tried jacking it up. Finally, after almost two hours, I had to concede; I failed at this gift, at least in this first session. One night my whole family was in the living room watching TV. It was the first time the movie Sybil (Daniel Petrie, 1976) was being shown, and I remember having unbearable feelings of embarrassment and shame: because my mother was schizophrenic, heard voices and bore different personalities; because my sister’s female organs were damaged; because Vena’s mother was still giving her weekly, closeddoor, Betadine douches in a red-hot, dripping, steamy bathroom. All I had known up to that point was that we were the most important family in the world, chosen by God to kick-start Armageddon.

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‘ T H E R E A R E M A N Y WAY S T O S AY H A L L E L U JA H ! ’ C AT H E R I N E (S A A L F I E L D) G U N D Boxers go into the ring alone, nearly naked, and they succeed or fail on the basis of the most elementary criteria: their ability to give and receive pain, their will to endure their own fear. Since character – the will of a person stretched to extremes – is so obviously at the center of boxing, there is an undeniable urge to know the fighters, to derive some meaning from the conflict of those characters. – David Remnick, At the Fights It is the early 1990s and I am asking: what is our shelf life? We are running on a parallel track with the lagging, disappointing, dispiriting, impossible drug approval process, and we are running out of steam. The search for treatment is taking too long. It takes way too long for so many of us, for too many of us; for any of us is too many. We are learning how to shepherd the dying, how to ease the transitions, how to cushion the debilitation, how to walk with the blind, how to caress the itchy skin that covers their skeletons. We experience an overwhelming sense of failure at most turns, as if nothing we can do is going to make a difference; we cannot keep fighting for our lives, we just have to learn how to lose them. Ron Athey survives – that is to say, he lives – by cultivating extreme responses to the situations he finds himself in. It is his life’s pattern. In the face of tragedy and obvious cruelty, he does not panic. Perhaps it is his simple, frequent and honest laughter filling the valleys between those peaks that keeps him moving forward, level and true. To confuse his laughter for nerves or anxiety would be a mistake. His courage and charisma precede him as he sashays across the floor, laughing. The laughter can be scripted or candid; in a day, a disagreement, a negotiation, a casual conversation, or as he preps to appear before an 54

Catherine (Saalfield) Gund shooting Ron Athey and Company for her documentary feature film Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance (1998). Courtesy Gund and Aubin Pictures.

audience. His courage is hard won, and its authenticity may very well be at the root of his tremendous charisma. It is no surprise then that he is in command; that he can take the bull by the balls, that he can take us all by the balls and we will follow him out the door, out of the theatre, down the road to redemption. He is not a mystic, but he plays one onstage. He is mystical, mysterious, deeply intellectual, practical and fanciful, all at once.

A T H E Y S U R V I V E S – T H A T I S T O S AY H E L I V E S – B Y C U L T I V A T I N G E X T R E M E R E S P O N S E S TO T H E S I T U AT I O N S H E F I N D S H I M S E L F I N Ron and I collaborated on a feature-length documentary film together from 1995 to 1998. The finished piece is called, Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance. When the plague of HIV is snatching so many youthful, urban, gay lives so fast, we are there and gasping for air with the ‘death cloud’ of AIDS hanging over us. At one point in the film, Ron struggles to express what motivates him, both in his own art and in our work together. He provides stammering, passionate insight into the importance of cultural work in the face of a very concrete crisis of the body, his body and the body politic. He insists on fighting this particularly brutal war with artistic and intellectual weapons: Part of this frenzy I’m in with AIDS is, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die in a few years and I have to leave my mark.’ What’s my mark? How did Ron Athey change the world? How did Ron Athey shake things up and subvert things? What did I leave behind? Was I just some stupid fag who died of AIDS? Or was I just this damaged boy who was never a minister who rebelled and lashed out at his self, so, between drugs and promiscuous sex, he contracted a disease and died. 55

Opposite: Ron Athey and Pigpen in 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994), PS122, New York. Photo by Dona Ann McAdams.

Ron’s art is an effort to mark presence in the face of absence. Of course Ron’s explorations of corporeality (theatre, masculinity, power, religion, sensuality) are much bigger than those related to HIV infection. Yet, undeniably, our work together is located in a time when there is nothing to lose but much is about to be gained. In this moment, we are poised on the cusp of total despair, (in 1994, AIDS is the leading cause of death for adults in the US aged 25–44) before the breakthrough cocktail of life-saving drugs. Ron’s is an art form that is the opposite of AIDS: it is precise and controlled performance in the face of a disease that betrays and destroys the body, takes down the body. Perhaps his is an organized response to the disorganized deck that he has been dealt. And if so, the audience gets to share in the catharsis. It is not for his heart alone. He is too generous for that, too smart, and too eager to stay alive, to keep us all here with him. So, I choose to read Ron’s work and his dramas through the prism of HIV. That is where I come from and that is what compels me. I like the way he questions meaning, and I love his willingness to challenge pain with pain.

S U D D E N LY T H E R E I S A P L A C E B E Y O N D D Y I N G , P A S T L I V I N G , S O M E P L A C E I N T H E B O D Y, T H A T I S , O U R L I N E B E T W E E N L I F E A N D D E AT H . I R E S P O N D TO R O N ’ S W O R K L I K E A M O T H TO A F L A M E It is 1996, and I am burned out on living and dying. Suddenly there is a place beyond dying, past living, someplace in the body, that is, our line between life and death. I respond to Ron’s work like a moth to a flame. My personal journey brings me to Ron from an affinity group in ACT UP/NY called DIVA TV, which charges itself with documenting the movement, the people and the passion. This is eons before YouTube, before there were video cameras on everyone’s phones and phones in everyone’s pockets. We carry our clunky Hi8 cameras around in our backpacks. We feel empowered by the ability to represent ourselves, to document our own engagements, our lives. The imagery is rich. It is something bigger, a way to extend the direct action we are involved with, the efforts we are making, the impact we are having; a way to go underneath, to open to our promise. Something has to give. I have to give in. But I don’t want to give up. In ACT UP, my closest friend Ray Navarro dies on 9 November 1990. Soon after, I find Ron. Our desperation is shared by our entire generation of outsiders – the freaks, the queers, the junkies, the sexual outlaws, the artists, the ailing. And Ron is always crossing the line. I turn to him. I turn to his passion, his sensuality, his sensationalism; his ability to make the present riper than the future, more important than the absoluteness of the end, the promise of no tomorrows. Somehow being in today with him makes life longer. He inoculates me against worry. He demands my focus and honesty. I do not have time to feel hopeless. It is like he is always shaking me. 56

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Ron Athey and Company, Martyrs & Saints (1992), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Photo by Chelsea Iovino. Opposite: Ron Athey and Gund’s baby, Sadie, in 1997. Photo by and courtesy Catherine (Saalfield) Gund.

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Ron invites me to film his marathon back-to-back performance of the first two pieces of his trilogy in a converted seventeenth-century convent called the Ex Teresa. He wants me to document what he knows will be a masterful experience given the environment and the energy of the cast and crew he is nurturing for this trip. As well, one scene from Martyrs & Saints (1992–93) will take place in a long, narrow chapel where the audience in the back could miss the fine piercing and droplets of blood staining someone’s chin. Ron asks me to get into some hospital scrubs and get up on the stage with him so I can shoot close-ups for broadcast in the back of the room. It is a success until the lights dim on the end of the scene when I trip and fall off the stage. The opening of Martyrs & Saints finds performer Stosh Fila, aka Pigpen, sitting naked on his heels in a white, wooden pyramid, his lips sewn shut. The pyramid is a memorial piece for their friend Cliff Diller, who was supposed to have performed as a nurse. Instead, he does not make it to this performance. In a Demerol haze in the hospital, he hallucinates the white pyramid just before he dies. The prominence of the blood cure is a gesture of reckoning, a carrying on by carrying with, a keeping alive of the gone. When I ask Pigpen what makes him want to perform, he says:

It’s a mixture of raw anger and grieving and wanting to have… to hold Cliff again and I need a part of Cliff. I need more of Cliff. And I know that Ron is going to do a cutting on me, and it’s my way of getting a piece of Cliff and Ron into my body and having this experience to hold forever. And it’s really good because I’m surrounded by everyone that I really care about, and love, and miss. Filming this work in Mexico is so luscious, so raw, so gorgeous, as Ron and the troupe are performing shows, performing gender, performing survival, performing a rich relationship to this life. When we get home, we tuck the footage away, not knowing what will ever become of it. I resist acquiescing; resist the pounding in my head. I hear Ron’s voice: ‘This is what I’m going to die of. This is what happens to people with HIV, they get sick and die.’ AIDS rages on. Hospitals are my second home – and Ron’s as he battles his own opportunistic infections. A year later, when my daughter Sadie Rain is born, Ron writes, ‘I didn’t quite have a handle on the passage of time until friends started having babies.’ What kind of a world have I brought her into?

T H E B LO O D C U R E IS A G E S T U R E O F R EC KO N I N G , A C A R RY I N G ON BY CARRYING WITH, A KEEPING ALIVE OF THE GONE Her birth is, as any birth must be during a war, a symbol of hope, a private and universal effort to carry on, despite and perhaps because of, the carnage. Like the need for sex when things seem bleakest; not that it always heals, but it sometimes feels like the only option to defend ourselves against the end of living. We start talking about making a film based on the Mexico City footage. The Estate Project for Artists Living with AIDS wants to round out their evolving collection of Ron’s archives with a comprehensive interview and some context from other members of the troupe. Ron asks me to film it. He tells me he wants to make our film to preserve his work, the temporal quality of performance art, and of his life itself. We reflect each other, echo, jam. We resonate. We chip off the others’ uncertainty. Innards out. We eat apricots and Ron sautés fresh veggies. We show our trailer to our prominent circle… twice. They love it. Ron e-mails me about his day-to-day. It is totally different from a filmmaking day. My day has little to do with real bodies, and an unusual relationship with time indelible to the screen. He writes, ‘Daddy’s not feeling too well, allergies and rashes and megamedication.’ I start to worry again about his real body. He has not quite reached the finish line that we know in hindsight to be the ‘cocktail’ of drugs. Anyone (in this country) who could stay alive that long, it turns out, had a good chance of being alive today. It is 1997. He writes, ‘P.S. I have the photo of Sadie on my computer at work. It brings out the baby head in me and humanizes me to people who think I’m harsh.’ Our present survival brings us together and keeps us there. ‘Bought some 59

new bed linens, Dickies overalls, and sports sandals to lift me up out of my funk and it’s sort of working.’ Ron has rarely performed in the USA since 1994 when he mounted excerpts from 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994–96) under the aegis of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. There, he performs a printmaking machine from the blood on the back of Darryl Carlton, aka Divinity Fudge. He sends some of the beautiful, delicate paper towel prints out on a laundry line over the audience. The paper towels are not dripping. No one is screaming. The violence in Ron’s work is not the violence of governmental neglect and hatred. Senator Jesse Helms is violent. In the moment of the prints being displayed, Ron is sublime. But sex and blood and queers and HIV coexisting in one place at one time, unapologetically, openly and illustriously, is too much for Mr. Helms and he rages. He rages until people pay attention to his bigotry and they make Ron a scapegoat.

I C A N N O T R E S I S T T H E I D E A O F F I L M I N G I N Z AG R E B , C R OAT I A , TO S E E R O N P E R F O R M A P I E C E – S O T O T A L LY A B S O R B E D W I T H D E A T H A N D M Y S T I C I S M , S U R V I VA L A N D T H E M E A N I N G O F L I F E – I N A WA R -TO R N CO U N T R Y So Ron travels. Among other places outside the USA, Ron is on his way to Cardiff, Dublin and Barcelona. He thinks filming in Dublin would make a great contrast to Mexico City. We consider our options. Someone else has footage from shows in Hamburg and Bordeaux. He writes: I’m starting to get very grand, like I can’t imagine traveling without two musicians, two technicians, one house mother, plus the usual and did I forget the monologue coach, the hypnotist and the filmmaker? And why not throw in a personal masseuse who gives oral sex? I cannot resist the idea of filming in Zagreb, Croatia, to see Ron perform a piece – so totally absorbed with death and mysticism, survival and the meaning of life – in a war-torn country. I leave my baby Sadie for the first time. This is where we will film the third part of his trilogy, Deliverance (1995), where, at the end, Ron and two others are buried under dirt and left there onstage while the lights go up. The gravediggers remove needles from their eyebrows and tears of blood stream down their faces. The audience leaves the theatre before we dig the bodies out. Pigpen begins to wail over the dirt mounds. Later he says: I play a psychic surgeon and I’m trying to heal these men. And it’s sad because I can’t. And I’m scrubbing Ron, and I’m making him throw up. We’re getting shit out of his ass and we’re piercing him to take him somewhere else. And in the end, it doesn’t do it. You know, it’s theatre. It’s fucking theatre. But when I’m onstage, I’m not in a theatre. I’m standing at that bed, and the fog is all around me, and there’s dirt and the lighting. I can’t see anything. And I’m waiting. 60

Ron Athey, Trojan Whore (1995). Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

I have long known that the AIDS crisis is a war and people are coming home in body bags. When I film Deliverance in Zagreb, the audience seems to recognize the desperation, the hope, the terror, the stunned fatigue we were feeling after ten years of AIDS, profound personal losses, and the continued threats of more death. The combination causes Ron’s apparently small, marginalized story to be read as a universal paradigm of loss… and luck. He says: They realize atrocity is atrocity. They’ve been through something very real and immediate. It’s predictable how they pictured a group burial. That’s their reality. Their friends are buried in group graves and communal graves. It’s very immediately heavy for them. They have this heavy black cloud over them. They were a pretty young audience and they’re just grabbing for something. Just like we are. I miss Ron while I am editing in NYC at night, exhausted from taking care of my daughter all day. I miss joking and trading book recommendations and laughing with him, but I must admit I feel like I see him and his sweet smile all day every day, in reverse and fast forward in the footage. Sometimes I am lulled into letting an uncut moment play out in front of me before remembering that I am supposed to be splicing it up. Ron never watches the rough cuts I send him, and I have to call and tell him not to watch that one because there is another one arriving the next day. I need his feedback. He gets five cycles of FedEx packages before he watches anything. I realize that I am so enmeshed in the material that I am missing the big picture of him having a big picture made about him. When he finally watches a rough cut, he is overwhelmed. He relives the pieces and they are painful, physically and 61

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emotionally. He tells me that the film is epic, monumental, that he did not expect it to be so huge, beautiful, insightful, and generous; that it is emotional blackmail. Somehow I think he was not expecting to see himself when he pressed play. Years later, Ron tells me, ‘Hallelujah! did signify the next phase of my work, but (making) it didn’t resolve the loss, the emptiness, the anger, the rage.’ When we are not together, we are missing. Missing from the conversation, missing from society, missing from the mainstream media, missing from each other. In her seventies, my mother now attends a couple of memorials every month. I did that 25 years ago when I was just a child. I live my whole adult life without Ray and my other young friends who never come home. I miss them all this time. But Ron makes it through to here, not just onstage. He is right here, among us. Ron was born under a prophecy that he will be more than a minister, that he will be a prophet. Yet he finds a different calling: the work of the incorruptible, not dismissive or destructive. He writes me, ‘I can’t know if I would have ever made more stable choices for my life if I thought I’d have one.’ With the choices he makes, that form his character, and his sharing of those parts of himself with us – individually and on the big screen – with that, he makes meaning. And for that we can all be grateful.

Opposite clockwise from top left: Ron Athey and Company, Martyrs & Saints (1995), Museo Ex Teresa, Mexico City. Photo by Monica Naranjo. Ron Athey and Company, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1995), Museo Ex Teresa, Mexico City. Photo by Monica Naranjo. Ron Athey and Company, Martyrs & Saints (1992), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Photo by Chelsea Iovino. Ron Athey and Company, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1995), Museo Ex Teresa, Mexico City. Photo by Monica Naranjo. Ron Athey and Company, Martyrs & Saints (1992), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Photo by Chelsea Iovino. Ron Athey and Company, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1995), Museo Ex Teresa, Mexico City. Photo by Monica Naranjo.

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‘ D O E S A B L O O DY T O W E L R E P R E S E N T T HE IDE A L S OF T HE A MERIC A N PEOPL E ? ’: R O N AT H E Y A N D T H E C U LT U R E WA R S DOM I N IC JOH NSON In 1994, Ron Athey became the subject of national and international controversy, after a performance became newsworthy and caught the attention of right-wing legislators in the United States. After presenting Excerpted Rites Transformation – comprising several sections from his larger ensemble production 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1993–96) – for one night in an off-site venue provided by the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Athey prompted widespread reportage, and a national scandal whose effects still reverberate. Through extensive discussions in Congress, Senator Jesse Helms (RNC) and his colleagues sought to use Athey as a scapegoat in newly reinvigorated attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the institution sanctioned to distribute federal funds to artists and cultural organizations. Casting Athey as a sexual outlaw, Helms and colleagues attacked Athey’s performance in a series of ideological manoeuvres set on blocking the support of challenging artists, and decimating the future of publicly-funded art in the US. The events of 1994 still stand as a defining episode of Athey’s career, even though his work has continued to develop formally, and tour widely, especially in Europe. What happens when a work of art exceeds the notional bounds of artistic reception, and enters the greater consciousness? What are the effects on the artist’s work, and for cultural programming in the US? What might the work and its creator come to represent, and what are the political, cultural and aesthetic consequences of these transformations? As I show below, Athey’s performance was a spur to Helms and fellow conservative lobbyists’ attempts to hobble the NEA, and police its peer-review procedures; to limit the availability of funds for challenging art; and also revive and extend the persecution of sexual minorities, which had reached a zenith in the preceding decade. The full story of Athey’s embroilment in the NEA controversies demands a detailed telling. 64

Ron Athey and Company, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994). Flyer incorporating a photograph of Athey by Elyse Regehr.

The term ‘culture wars’ has been used variously throughout the twentieth century to discuss crises in the ownership of, and access to, culture. In the 1960s, it referred to academic Marxist challenges to the hegemonic assumption that ‘culture’ represented a restricted set of elite practices, typified by the ‘Two Cultures controversy’. After The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), a Rede Lecture by C. P. Snow, F. R. Leavis publicly denounced his Cambridge colleague in the Spectator magazine in 1962, prompting debates about divisions between literary and scientific education, and the functions of intellectuals.1 The term was resurrected in the 1980s to describe arguments about the disbursement of federal funds (raised partly by taxation) to support art that the public might find objectionable. Alan Howard Levy shows that the NEA has always encountered threats to its existence, its reputation marred by broad ideological

See C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures: And a Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 58.

1

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disagreement in Congress.2 The NEA was established in 1965 (as the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities) and the fifty-year history of American federal arts funding has been studded by controversy. In the early 1960s, the idea of a federal endowment emerged from the humanistic principle that art perpetuates and enlivens civil participation – a well-meaning tenet that would in fact return to trouble the very existence of the NEA. Between 1989 and the mid-1990s, battles over the public funding of obscene art brought new political challenges to the survival of the NEA. On 5 March 1994, Athey participated in the ‘Fifth Annual Minneapolis LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender] Film Festival’. Athey trimmed 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (the full-length performance) into a series of key vignettes, with a reduced cast including himself, Julie Tolentino, Pigpen and Divinity P. Fudge. Due to the lack of a functioning performance space at the Walker, Excerpted Rites Transformation was staged in a 100-seat fringe venue, Patrick’s Cabaret, a renovated storefront in south Minneapolis, owned and run by the dancer Patrick Scully. Media outrage focused on a short scene called ‘The Human Printing Press’, after the Minnesota Star Tribune published a front-page article by newspaper staff journalist Mary Abbe, three weeks after the event on 24 March. Reports quickly spread in the syndicated press, and led to heated discussions in Congress. The

A T H E Y M A D E 12 C U T S O N F U D G E ’ S B A C K W I T H A S C A L P E L : T H R E E C R I S P S E T S O F PA R A L L E L L I N E S , A N D A B R OA D T R I A N G L E . W I T H E AC H C U T, F U D G E ’ S B O D Y H E A V E S S L I G H T LY U N D E R I T S P R E S S U R E

2 Alan Howard Levy, Government and the Arts: Debates over Federal Support of the Arts in America from George Washington to Jesse Helms (Lanham: University Press of America, 1997), pp. 105–06.

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discussions established Athey as one of the last targets of conservative enmity in the ‘culture wars’: the years of heightened political censure of challenging artists between 1989 and 1996. Surprisingly, Athey’s involvement in the culture wars has never been discussed in any detail; moreover I seek to look beyond the myths and probe the specific ways his reception prompted a backlash against artistic freedom and federal funding. Its provocations are also overshadowed by the amount of ink that has been spilled over fellow targets in the culture wars, including Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe. The event’s relative marginality in art history reflects its resistance to recuperation in simply formal terms, and its refusal of liberal humanism platitudes about the ways that art can or should contribute towards a superficially defined social good. Athey’s archive contains video documentation of the full performance – lasting around 50 minutes – and a post-show discussion. After a brief, warm introduction by John Killacky, Athey takes to the stage dressed in dark overalls and a red baseball cap, and smoking a cigar. In the first scene, Divinity Fudge enters in high heels, a bouffant wig and a dress of multi-coloured balloons. After bursting

Ron Athey cuts the back of Divinity Fudge during a performance of 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994) at The Faultline, Los Angeles. Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

each balloon with his cigar, Athey plants its burning tip into Fudge’s buttock. After throwing Fudge to the floor, assistants strip his pink bikini and evening gloves, and install his voluptuous body on a bench that faces away from the audience. In ‘The Human Printing Press’ vignette in Minneapolis, Athey made 12 cuts on Fudge’s back, using a scalpel: three crisp sets of parallel triple lines, and a broad triangle. With each deep cut of Athey’s blade, Fudge’s body heaves slightly under its pressure. Each gash reveals a bank of white fat, highlighted by the shining brown of skin; the white pockets slowly brim with blood, which streams down the centre of Fudge’s back. Athey works quickly, blotting the wounds with absorbent square towels. Using butterfly clips, Pigpen and Tolentino attach the prints to a series of taut lines that pass through the audience. After the tenth or so, the prints sharpen, showing a more precise print of the 12 wounds in their four geometric formations, a repeated blunt logo of Fudge’s mute endurance, passing from the factory floor of Athey’s dutiful exertions. The full action lasts four minutes, pressured into a quick tempo by the meter of Drance’s industrial soundtrack. After a blackout, the performance continues with Athey’s ‘Suicide Bed’ scene, in which Athey recounts (in voice-over) his overcoming of drug dependency, spurred on by a dream of transcendence through tattooing. ‘Previous to that dream,’ Athey recounts, ‘I had dwelled in blood obsession’: religious stigmata, the burden of prophecy, the gift of tongues, a crowns of thorns. He manifests the latter using crisscrossed needles and acrylic thread, reclaiming the image now that ‘the martyr’s crown is rightly mine’, as a body overcome by plague. His shoulder and chest show fresh tattoos: the solid black shine of 67

punctured, healing skin echo his narrative of salvation and selfactualization through recourse to ‘modern primitive’ ritual. Twinned with his ‘surgical stigmata’, the traces of his secular devotion testify to the ceremonial grandeur of his survival. The section includes incisive images: a mass of 30 hypodermic needles inserted geometrically up the length of his outstretched arm, metaphorizing the immensity of months and years given over to addiction; Athey gouges his scalp with a spinal needle, mopping the rivulets of blood in white sheets in a staging of the drama of withdrawal. In the third scene, removing the needles to induce stigmata, Athey is confirmed in his sainthood. Blood courses down his face. Fudge rubs it over the penitent’s face and scalp, a mask and wig of blood washed cleaned again by Fudge, as witness to Athey’s ordeal. In the final scene, Athey presides over a queer wedding ritual, wearing a conservative suit and spectacles as an attempt at conservative drag obscured by the hint of Athey’s perversity: the facial tattoos and a dribble of sparkling blood on the forehead of the illustrated sermonizer. ‘There are so many ways to say “Hallelujah!”,’ Athey preaches from his pulpit. The central action of the final scene is the joining in unholy matrimony of Pigpen and Tolentino, two androgynous ‘daggers’ wrapped in miles of white tulle, ‘coming together in your presence’. ‘Where are queers to draw their traditions from,’ Athey’s preacher asks, ‘Eastern body rituals? Paganism? Wicca? Or should we continue aping straight people in America?’ Athey strips naked and unbinds the bridal gauze from Pigpen and Tolentino, revealing bells stitched into their skin. He ritualizes their marriage by forcing metal spears through their cheeks. Holding hands, they dance and swing their bells to Athey and Fudge’s ritual drumming. The company joins them in erotic, ecstatic transcendence. The performance comes to a close. There is no commotion, no outrage, just the claps, whoops and whistles of appreciation and gratitude from the company’s audience.

‘ W H E R E A R E Q U E E R S TO D R AW T H E I R T R A D I T I O N S F R O M ,’ AT H E Y ’ S P R E AC H E R A S K S , ‘ E A S T E R N B O DY R I T UA L S ? PAG A N I S M ? W I CC A? OR SHOULD WE CONTINUE APING STR AIGHT PEOPLE IN AMERICA?’ Although 4 Scenes was potentially controversial, the audience was well informed, and Killacky chaired a 20-minute post-performance discussion, which around 80 audience members attended. The video documentation shows Athey and company responding with short but generous responses to a steady volley of calm questions and comments. Queries from the audience concerned: the technical aspects of cutting and piercing, scarring and healing; the playing out of power dynamics in the performance; pain thresholds; race; the use of non-western rituals; the transition from private practices to public performance; and the possibility of catharsis. There are no provocations from audience members, and Athey greets all questions with his familiar 68

Sketchbook drawing by Ron Athey (ca. 1993). Preparatory sketches for 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life. Overleaf: Ron Athey and Company, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994), Patrick’s Cabaret, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Video recording by Lawrence Steger. These images document the legendary performance at Patrick’s Cabaret under the aegis of the Walker Arts Centre. The only recording is on degraded Hi8 video, from which we were able to create stills. The stills published here retain the quality of the original recording. Photographs from this performance have never been published before.

smiles and friendly laughter. The sense of a community gathering that emerges from watching the documentation is absent from the heated discussions that would ensue in the press and in Congress.

A scandal in the making Local journalist Mary Abbe did not attend the performance in Minneapolis, but wrote in response to a single letter to state health officials, sent by an audience member, Jim Berenson. Abbe reported that an ‘informal complaint expressed a concern that people in the theatre could have contracted the AIDS virus if blood had dripped on them’.3 ‘The knife-wielding performer, Ron Athey of Los Angeles, is known to be HIV-positive,’ she added, with more than a touch of sensationalism. A spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Health stated shortly after Abbe’s article was published: We were contacted after the fact. Had we been called in prior to the performance to evaluate the methods and procedure, we would not have been in a position to endorse the performance. The bottom line is that [the performance] did have towels with blood on them, and applying public health guidelines, you would not use items like that as props in a theatrical performance. If for some reason a towel fell, or something went wrong, it could be troublesome. 4

Mary Abbe, ‘Bloody Performance Draws Criticism’, Minneapolis Star Tribune (24 March 1994), p. 1A. I invited Abbe to reflect on the debacle with the benefit of hindsight, but she politely declined.

3

Cited in Congressional Record 140.98 S [Senate] (25 July 1994). From the Congressional Record Online via the Government Printing Office, http://www. gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1994-07-25/ html/CREC-1994-07-25-pt1-PgS17. htm [accessed 29/12/11]. Subsequent references to this record are included in parentheses as (CR 140.98B).

4

Such anxieties were misplaced: the towels were securely fastened, and blood did not drip from the highly absorbent fabric. Moreover, the blood in question was Carlton’s, who was HIV-negative. Although Abbe reported that Killacky, perhaps reasonably, ‘did not know the

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HIV status of Darryl Carlton’, a health official from an HIV/AIDS epidemiology unit confirmed it was unlikely that audience members were endangered, and the performance was retrospectively deemed ‘low risk’. Abbe reproduced a statement by an audience member who alleged falsely that people ‘knocked over the chairs to get out from under the clotheslines’ (the video documentation shows no commotion in this or any other part of the performance). Moreover, in the post-show discussion, audience members did not offer questions or comments about this particular vignette. Cited by Abbe, the Walker’s Director, Kathy Halbreich, described the single complaint as lacking in ‘dignity’; and Killacky noted that the complainant typified an ‘extremely homophobic but also extremely AIDS-phobic’ historical moment, to which Athey’s work was clearly a critical response.5 Killacky thus highlighted two interrelated anxieties – about homosexuality and AIDS – as manifestations of a greater cultural tendency towards suspicions about sex, which conditioned Athey’s reception in 1994, in much newspaper coverage and in Congress.

R I G H T - W I N G A C T I V I S T S S P R AY- P A I N T E D R E D G R A F F I T I O N T H E G L A S S D O O R S O F T H E WA L K E R , A N D P H O N E D I N H AT E M E S S AG E S A N D D E AT H T H R E AT S AG A I N S T I T S C U R ATO R

5

ibid.

John R. Killacky, ‘Called to Serve’, Leading Creatively: A Closer Look, ed. by Daniel Dewey Schott (San Francisco: National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, 2010), pp. 10–21 (p. 14). I thank Killacky for sending me this article.

6

Carrie Sandahl, ‘Performing Metaphors: AIDS, Disability, and Technology’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 11.3 (2001), pp. 49–60 (p. 58).

7

William Grimes, ‘For Endowment, One Performer Means Trouble’, New York Times (7 July 1994), http://query.nytimes.com/ gst/fullpage.html?res=9402E1DC163FF9 34A35754C0A962958260&pagewanted= all [accessed 01/01/11]. See also Killacky, ‘Called to Serve’, p. 14.

8

Cliff Stearns in Congressional Record 140.81 H [House] (23 June 1994). Congressional Record Online via the Government Printing Office, http://www. gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1994-06-23/ html/CREC-1994-06-23-pt1-PgH29. htm [accessed 30/12/11]. Subsequent references to this record are included in parentheses as (CR 140.81).

9

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The Associated Press picked up Abbe’s report, and articles appeared in major national newspapers including the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and the New York Times. Between March and July, a number of conservative religious groups – including the Christian Action Network (CAN), the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council – reported the event to its members. After the first congressional debates about Athey in June 1994, rightwing activists spray-painted red graffiti on the glass doors of the Walker, and phoned in hate messages and death threats against its curator.6 Pat Robertson attacked Athey and the Walker on The 700 Club, an influential television programme aired live on the Christian Broadcasting Network, and commissioned posters of Athey depicted as the Antichrist, which were disseminated across the Southern states.7 As part of its campaigns, CAN and the American Family Association (AFA) sent out a ‘declaration of war’ that included a letter template for its members to send to Washington. In June 1994, these letters brought Athey’s performance to the attention of state representatives, who passed the information to the Republican Senator for North Carolina, Jesse Helms.8 In June and July 1994, politicians would frequently demean 4 Scenes in Congress as an artless action, a tactic typified in deceptive references to the ‘slopping around of AIDS-infected blood’.9 Of course, many works, including canonical ones, can be rendered facile and opportunistic through inaccurate or superficial descriptions. Performance art is especially prone to such distortions because it

frequently dispenses with conventional skills and minimizes the display of practical training, laying such works bare to strategic acts of censure and ridicule, such as those that Senator Jesse Helms and his colleagues deployed. It is therefore useful and important to reveal the distortions conservative politicians enacted in their vilifications of Athey and his work – and indeed of other artists in the preceding years of the culture wars, as I discuss in some detail later. Despite the small amount of funding given to Athey by the Walker – $150 towards travel expenses (from the Walker’s receipt of $104,500 in matched grants in 1993) – the NEA Chairperson Jane Alexander was called upon by Congress to defend the NEA’s annual $170.2 million budget from extensive cuts. Tabled by Robert Byrd, the Republican Senator for West Virginia, the initial proposed cuts were decidedly disproportionate, involving a reduction in the NEA’s budgets for theatre and visual arts by a massive 42%. The proposal was defeated, and replaced with a new suggested cut of 5% ($8.5 million in cash terms), which would have brought the annual endowment to a figure lower than the funding it received a decade earlier in 1984. After strenuous debate in June and July 1994, Congress reduced the NEA’s overall budget by 2% ($3.4 million in cash terms).10 Helms’ attacks on Athey in July 1994 extended his earlier attacks on sexual minorities. Under his influence, right-wing legislators commanded extensive public support for their campaigns against expressions of freedom of speech by artists in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1994, Helms still had some authority on account of previous pronouncements on arts funding, but he did not hold an official congressional role with regards to federal disbursements. He had maintained pressure on the NEA since 1989, not least by ‘routinely requesting copies of numerous NEA grant applications in order to oversee its funding’, his biographer notes.11 In January 1994, Helms revived his homophobic lobbying by attempting to strip the United Nations of $119 million in US funds, for its support of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA).12 However, defences from leftist and liberal voices in Congress and the press attempted to balance Helms’ lobby. Senator Howard Metzenbaum noted the explicit centrality of Athey’s performance to the debates over cuts in the NEA budget, bemoaning the imbalance in the proceedings as ‘a cheap, cynical hit’, which would hobble the NEA ‘in response to a performance that cost $150 – and was not even approved on [Alexander’s] watch’ (CR 140.98A).13 Christopher J. Dodd (D-CI) listed a range of uncontroversial venues for art and theatre, and argued that ‘these institutions and others like them could lose nearly half their Federal funding, all because of a controversy involving a single performance, and $150 in Federal dollars, in one theater in the Midwest’. For Dodd, the attack on the NEA was ‘disproportionate to the incident that has created so much controversy’, namely Athey’s performance (CR 140.98B). The curator who invited Athey to the

10 Congressional Record 140.98 H (25 July 1994). From the Congressional Record Online via the Government Printing Office, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/ CREC-1994-07-25/html/CREC-1994-0725-pt1-PgS18.htm [accessed 29/12/11]. Subsequent references to this record are included in parentheses as (CR 140.98A) 11 William A. Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), p. 361. 12

ibid. p. 413.

President Bill Clinton appointed Jane Alexander as Director of the NEA in 1993, replacing John Frohnmayer. Alexander stepped down in 1997.

13

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Walker, John Killacky, noted that the $150 Athey received was amply covered by ticket sales, such that money did not come from the centre’s NEA disbursement.14 This argument, which could have usefully derailed the Right’s tirade, was not noted in Congress. The offending vignette had been shown previously, without controversy, as part of longer ensemble pieces in the preceding months in early 1994. Previous outings included three nights at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, a further night at Los Angeles Theatre Center, and three club events. Co-performer Darryl Carlton (Divinity P. Fudge) remembers these earlier showings as defined by ‘[l]ots of raised eyebrows and lots of healing, and the feeling that something big was about to happen’.15 The work was not

I N S C H O L A R LY W R I T I N G O N T H E C U L T U R E W A R S , H A L F - T R U T H S I N I T I A L LY D I S S E M I N A T E D I N T H E P R E S S H AV E B E E N R E P R O D U C E D A N D M AG N I F I E D an opportunistic attempt to achieve public notoriety; rather, the work allowed Athey to explore a series of political and aesthetic concerns, with a group of collaborators he had worked with for some time, including in his previous ensemble performance, Martyrs & Saints (1992–93). Carlton recalls the experience of the performance, and the surprise of its eruption into a political cause célèbre. Recounting his memories of the Minneapolis performance itself, Carlton remembers: The feeling of accomplishment and rite of passage, the passion we all had for getting this message out, that life is truly harsh and not sugar coated. The reality of being allowed to work with the brilliance of Ron Athey. The many nights of feeling and looking like raw meat. The healing process. The beauty of all the individuals associated with this piece. The memory of watching audience members’ faces as they watched this performance.16

Kristin Tillotson, ‘Athey Pushes Taboo Envelope’, Minnesota Star Tribune (1 November 1994), p. A4.

14

15 Darryl Carlton, correspondence with the author, 5 October 2011. 16

ibid.

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Athey and his co-performers did not anticipate a scandal. Carlton testifies to the intensity of Athey and his company’s commitment to producing a series of lasting images, and recalls the positive effect the work had on the performers and some audience members. The latter was evidenced in a post-performance discussion at the Walker, for which around 80 audience members stayed to engage in a ‘vigorous dialog’ with Athey, according to a sympathetic account by the Senator David Durenberger (CR 140.98A). However, the political fallout that ensued compromised these effects. The series of attacks on Athey between March and July 1994 – and their repercussions – testify to the unsettling potential of his art. The congressional debacle and its aftershocks have become central to Athey’s iconic status, and had an overdetermining effect on his critical reception. Athey was a catalyst for the American context of censorship

Ron Athey and Company, untitled performance for ACT UP fundraising benefit, at The Firehouse, Los Angeles, 1992. Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

and moral panics in late twentieth-century art, and his notoriety in this regard has urged comparisons with earlier targets of Republican outrage. As discussed below, these included Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, David Wojnarowicz, Joel-Peter Witkin and the ‘NEA Four’ (Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller and John Fleck). As such, Athey was a noted target for the proponents of the culture wars – as the period between 1989 and 1996 in which art came under heightened scrutiny as a barometer for the apparent ascendancy of conservative assaults on moral self-determination. Moreover, in scholarly writing on the culture wars, some of the half-truths that were initially disseminated in the press have been reproduced and magnified. In a striking example (in an otherwise excellent essay), Carl Stychin misreports the performance in Minneapolis, stating that ‘Athey carved symbols on the backs of audience members’, furthering the misinformation and hyperbole that have often plagued Athey’s public reception.17 Such well-meaning misreadings have contributed to Athey’s lasting notoriety as an enfant terrible of contemporary art and performance.

Helms’ war on culture From his early days as a journalist in the late 1960s, and throughout his service in the Senate (from 1971 to his retirement in 2002), Jesse Helms was a vociferous opponent of the perceived moral bankruptcy of modern America. Helms opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and defended the constitutional rights of Klansmen to march against racial desegregation;18 moreover, he resisted the sexual revolution, frowned upon feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, and was a spokesperson for a whole range of unpleasant political stances.

17 Carl F. Stychin, ‘Promoting a Sexuality: Law and Lesbian and Gay Visual Culture in America’, Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, ed. by Peter Horne and Reina Lewis (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 147–58 (p. 152).

Link, Righteous Warrior, p. 104 and passim.

18

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Opposite: Ron Athey and Company, untitled performance for ACT UP fundraising benefit, at The Firehouse, Los Angeles, 1992. Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

Disturbingly, Helms was not viewed as a buffoon, but garnered intense support during the rise of ‘modern’ American conservatism. His most energetic period was between the early 1970s and the end of his fourth term in the Senate in 1997, when Helms was an outspoken moral crusader against freedom of speech, public arts funding, racial equality, HIV/AIDS research, and the rights of sexual minorities to participation in cultural life. He garners comparisons to other aggressive antagonists of American civil liberties, such as Roy Cohn, Patrick Buchanan and Jerry Falwell. Helms was particularly outspoken in his opposition to lesbian and gay rights, and his views took on added vitriol in debates over art, morality and AIDS. He introduced legislation and amendments to restrict the support of ‘sodomy and the homosexual lifestyle as an acceptable alternative in America’: ‘We’ve got to call a spade a spade,’ he argued, ‘and a perverted human being a perverted human being’.19 In Congress in 1989, the year of his attacks on Serrano and Mapplethorpe, Helms warned of the dangers of ‘pander[ing] to the whims of the militant homosexual minority’. Lesbians and gay men

HEL MS WAS A N OU TSPOK EN MOR A L CRUSA DER AG A INST FREEDOM OF SPEECH, PUBLIC ARTS FUNDING, R ACIAL E Q U A L I T Y, H I V / A I D S R E S E A R C H , A N D T H E R I G H T S O F S E X U A L M I N O R I T I E S TO PA R T I C I PAT I O N I N C U LT U R A L L I F E

19

Helms cited in ibid. p. 349.

20

ibid. p. 353.

See my Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture (Manchester and London: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 95–97.

21

22

Levy, Government and the Arts, p. 118.

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were, he said, ‘in a battle against American values’, with the aim of forcing the silent majority to ‘accept the proposition that their perverted “lifestyle” is as worthy of protection as race, creed, and religion’. ‘I don’t buy that,’ he added.20 As in the early 1960s, when anti-pornography groups such as Citizens for Decent Literature emphasized that liberal attitudes to censorship indicated governmental inaction against decaying family values,21 Helms and other moral crusaders deployed their own personal distaste as a means of confirming the authority of right-wing politics. However, as Levy argues, in reality, ‘polemics over the arts here involve[d] a conflict of narcissisms and their cynical exploitation by politicians and journalists’.22 The religious pundit (and two-times-failed presidential candidate) Pat Buchanan articulated the militaristic aspects of the culture wars in an attack on Serrano published in the Washington Times in May 1989, where he wrote that conservatives and the ‘religious community’ should seek to ‘capture the culture’, beginning with the NEA. ‘A nation absorbs its values through its art,’ he states; ‘[a] corrupt culture will produce a corrupt people, and vice versa’. Despite the paradoxical causality suggested in this relationship between a people and its cultural production, he refuses any nuance in the statement that a people must be measured by the art it tolerates, for ‘the correlation is absolute’. Buchanan frames the culture wars as the last gasp of American civilization in decline, under attack from anti-religious

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Ron Athey and Company, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994). Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

Patrick Buchanan, ‘Losing the War for America’s Culture?’, Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, ed. by Richard Bolton (New York: New Press, 1992), pp. 31–33 (p. 33).

23

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zealots: ‘The hour is late; America needs a cultural revolution in the ’90s as sweeping as its political revolution in the ’80s’, suggesting the coming culture wars as a resurgence of the success of neo-liberalism in the cultural domain.23 ‘Speaking of depravity,’ Helms proclaimed on 25 July 1994, ‘this past March brought reports of yet another NEA-subsidized performance by one of these “artists”’. Pausing before ‘artists’, he lends the word a mocking emphasis that presents Athey as an impostor. He emphasizes this strategy, with snide references to Athey’s ‘so-called’ art, and ‘his great moment of artistry in a performance subsidized by the National Endowment for the Arts’ (CR 140.98B). Helms made his presentation to Congress standing beside a life-sized black-andwhite portrait of Athey. The image showed him as an AIDS-era Saint Sebastian, bound by his hands to a column, and covered in rivulets of blood (the photograph documented an excerpt from Martyrs & Saints, Los Angeles Contemporary Enterprises, 1992). ‘That is his picture,’ he said, gesturing to Athey in effigy; ‘a very handsome man, if you like that kind of man’. The choice of words gestures quite pointedly to Athey’s homosexuality, by deploying the familiar euphemistic mockery in which gay men are often simply ‘that kind of man’, perhaps condensing his multiple ‘depravity’ as a homosexual, charlatan and masochist. Helms proceeds with a description of Athey’s performance in

Minneapolis, including long recitations from an article Athey published in the LA Weekly (which he worked for as a staff writer at the time). Helms repeatedly emphasized Athey’s homosexuality and his incriminating commitment to sexual politics. He notes that the bloody triangles on Carlton’s back signify, in Athey’s words, ‘The Symbol of Queerness’ – the pink triangle, the icon of homosexual suffering in the Nazi Holocaust, appropriated and upended as the logo of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) (CR 140.98B). Athey was a prime candidate for Helms’ animosity: prone to caricature as a blasphemous pervert, Athey’s artwork might turn the stomachs of the congressional audience. Jonathan Katz notes that for Helms, ‘the mere sight of same-sex sexuality was assumed to be sufficiently repugnant to catalyze opposition without need for rational argumentation’.24 Helms emphasized Athey’s use of religious iconography, using a description from the Washington Blade (a gay newspaper): Athey ‘stands immobile while [co-performers] weave spinal tap needles through the skin of his shaved head and then wind them with wire to create a “crown of thorns”’. Helms argues that something is ‘seriously amiss’ when such work is funded by the NEA, and thus implicitly rewarded as, according to Alexander’s pledge, ‘the best art America has to offer’ (CR 140.98B).

AT H E Y WA S A P R I M E C A N D I DAT E F O R H E L M S’ A N I M O S I T Y: P R O N E TO C A R I C AT U R E A S A B L A S P H E M O U S P E R V E R T, AT H E Y ’ S A R T W O R K MIGHT T URN THE STOMACHS OF THE CONGRESSIONAL AUDIENCE Helms emphasizes the stronger reactions of some members of the audiences, including walk-outs and fainting, as though the difficulty of watching Athey’s work were irrefutable evidence of its shortfalls as art. Athey’s collisions between sexuality and religiosity enraged Helms, not least by recalling the fallout over Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), a controversial photograph of a plastic Christ figurine submerged in a vat of the artist’s urine. Katz notes that congressional and popular discussions of Serrano’s photograph enabled a series of ‘uneasy conflations’ between art, homosexuality and AIDS, especially after Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato tore up a reproduction of Piss Christ on the Senate floor (in the catalogue for a NEA-funded exhibition).25 Like Serrano, Athey intensified the ‘stunning series of elisions’ that uneasy conflations can yield in the conservative imagination. Piss Christ did not directly figure sex or sexuality – homosexual or otherwise – but provoked anxious conflations between bodily processes (urination), body parts (a fantasmatic penis) and religiosity. Conscripting Athey’s work into a long-standing ideological attack on homosexuals, Helms intensified his war against culture. Helms achieved this by reanimating political anxieties about ‘decadence’, the age-old fantasy that conservative morality concocts as the prime foe of the (similarly fictive) ‘great silent majority’:

24 Jonathan D. Katz, ‘“The Senators were Revolted”: Homophobia and the Culture Wars’, A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, ed. by Amelia Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 231–48 (p. 240).

Katz, ‘The Senators were Revolted’, p. 238.

25

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In a larger sense, the pending amendment reaches beyond the work of Mr. Athey and his admirers […]. The broader issue, if any, is the sober realization that for the past two decades, an unmistakable decadence has saturated American society. A furious assault on the traditional sensibilities of the American people has taken its toll. So many have become afraid to stand up and declare the difference between right and wrong, what is ugly and what is destructive and what is noble and what is degrading. No wonder – no wonder – Mr. President, there has been a cultural breakdown. Is it not time for millions of Americans, the people more than one President has referred to as the great silent majority, to go on the offensive to regain control of their social and cultural institutions? (CR 140.98B)

A T H E Y ’ S W O R K W A S D O U B LY V U L N E R A B L E F O R M A R R Y I N G T H E P O L I T I C S O F A I D S A N D O F A R T: T W O S O U R C E S O F D E E P S U S P I C I O N F O R T H E A U T H O R I TA R I A N I M AG I N AT I O N I N T H E P E R I O D

26 Paula A. Treichler, ‘AIDS, Homophobia and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification’, AIDS: Cultural Activism / Cultural Analysis, ed. by Douglas Crimp (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 31–70 (p. 31). 27 See ‘Helms Calls for AIDS Quarantine on Positive Tests’, Chicago Tribune (16 June 1987), http://articles.chicagotribune. com/1987-06-16/news/8702140384_1_ aids-virus-sen-lowell-weicker-prisoninmates [accessed 10/04/12].

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Colliding irreconcilable themes, such as desire, pain, loss and agency, 4 Scenes staged AIDS as an ‘epidemic of signification’, to use Paula Treichler’s memorable phrase – less a definable object than a web of signs that unsettles the norms by which conservative politics seeks to order social reality. The congressional hearings fixated on the blood-soaked towels created in the performance, which politicians mistook for objective manifestations of the threat of contagion. In the 1980s and 1990s, gay men were overdetermined in their role as stand-ins for a network of alarming but abstract signifiers, including perversion, contagion, disease and death, as culture struggled, Treichler writes, ‘to achieve some fort of understanding of AIDS, a reality that is frightening, widely publicized, and yet neither directly nor fully knowable’.26 Athey’s work was doubly vulnerable for marrying the politics of AIDS and of art: two sources of deep suspicion for the authoritarian imagination in the period. Politicians, including Helms, had previously suggested inhumane tactics for containing HIV, including quarantine and compulsory tattooing of people with HIV/AIDS.27 The fallacious ‘AIDS-infected blood’ (in Robert Dornan’s words) that the performance seemed to capture manifested AIDS as a thing to be manipulated and controlled, through a set of punitive actions available in the aesthetic realm (CR 140.81). The bloody fabrics strung on clotheslines distilled the unmanageable potentialities of AIDS into a fetish; an object that could be articulated, punished, demeaned and controlled (albeit through fantasy).

Precedents for the war on challenging art Helms became a spokesperson for right-wing anxieties about the ways lesbian and gay art threatened to engulf a compromised system of national values. The SM elements of Athey’s practice were sure to provoke Helms, not least because similar imagery in Mapplethorpe’s

Ron Athey and Company, Deliverance (1995), Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (part of Rapture season). Photo by Nicholas Sinclair.

photography fuelled Helms’ first major attack on the funding system five years earlier, when he prompted the cancellation of Mapplethorpe’s ‘The Perfect Moment’, a posthumous exhibition at the Corcoran in 1989. Passed on 7 October 1989, the notorious Helms Amendment (No. 991) ensured: None of the funds authorized to be appropriated pursuant to this Act may be used to promote, disseminate, or produce materials that are obscene or that depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual or excretory activities or organs, including but not limited to obscene depictions of sadomasochism, homo-eroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sexual intercourse.28 Prompted in part by Helms’ disgust at a photograph of Mapplethorpe with a leather bullwhip inserted into his rectum, the Helms Amendment was clearly designed to prohibit the production of similar works. Mapplethorpe’s Self-Portrait (1978) potently suggested

Helms Amendment No. 991, Congressional Record 101.28 S [Senate] (7 October 1989), Library of Congress, http:// thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?r101:28:./ temp/~r101wgaAJ4 [accessed 31/12/11].

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the figure of the ‘folk devil’; as Wendy Steiner observes, the bullwhip emerges like a demonic tail from Mapplethorpe’s anus, and the collision between mischief and sexual pleasure ‘obviously causes certain parts of the population extreme anxiety’ by ‘warrant[ing] my right to enjoy my own deviltries’, as consumer or admirer of the work.29 Both Mapplethorpe and Athey suggest that modern anxieties about the corrupting, demonic potential of culture can frequently be traced to the fear of homosexuality. Even though, as Steiner notes, such works may prompt pleasure, the aesthetic complexity of difficult art is lost on conservatives, who not only overwrite the work as antithetical to art, but also commandeer the sole claim to define and police the limits of the aesthetic. The Helms Amendment of 1989 was defeated in 1990, and replaced by a provision ensuring the NEA Chair defended ‘general standards of decency’. However, Athey’s performance in 1994 energized the fundamentalist crusade, when Helms revived his ploy to police the disbursement of funds to artists. In his deposition in 1994, he inserts Athey into a modern pantheon of terroristic artists:

B O T H M A P P L E T H O R P E A N D AT H E Y S U G G E S T T H AT MODERN ANXIE TIES ABOUT THE CORRUPTING, D E M O N I C P O T E N T I A L O F C U L T U R E C A N F R E Q U E N T LY BE TR ACED TO THE FE AR OF HOMOSE XUALIT Y Federal funds […] should not be spent on such things as photographs of a naked homosexual with a bull whip protruding from his rear end, or a naked woman on a stage, her body covered with chocolate, or photos of mutilated human corpses, or blood soaked towels dispatched on a pulley over the heads of an unsuspecting audience terrorized by such a surprising development. (CR 140.98B) He conflates very different works – by Mapplethorpe, Finley, Witkin and Athey – comparable in terms of the affront he deems them to pose to his moral sensibility, and to the American public by extension. It was Helms’ antipathy for the NEA itself that fomented the Democrat opposition to the new Helms Amendment, as several senators mobilized to defeat the proposal. A crucial opponent to the amendment was Claiborne Pell (D-RI). Elaborating what would become a key argument for government investment in the arts, Pell argued:

Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 44 & 57.

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The arts fostered by the [NEA] encourage national and international tourism, attract and maintain business in our communities, stimulate real estate development, and contribute to the tax base. Studies have shown that for every dollar the endowment invests in the arts, it has created literally a tenfold return in jobs, services and contracts. (CR 140.98A)

It is perhaps striking that politicians rarely defended Athey directly, nor did they protect the principle of free speech as a matter of course. Rather, senators argued for the economic stability that the cultural sector can support, or pondered the adverse effect that an amendment might have upon major national institutions.

Athey and the new funding crisis In 1994, Helms engaged in a protracted effort to establish the depravity of Athey’s work, as a contrivance to further defund the NEA. This required theorizations of art and art’s work, often relying on truisms and moral convictions that had been rehearsed in his earlier attacks on Mapplethorpe, Serrano and the NEA Four. In the preamble to his attack on Athey, Helms tries to separate proper recipients of arts funding from ‘perverse, filthy and revolting garbage’: [E]xperts pretend that even if the art is gross and even if it is vulgar and offensive, it is art, and it ought to be financed and subsidized by the American taxpayer. Every time I hear that, I think of Abraham Lincoln, who was asked one time: ‘Mr. Lincoln, if you count a cow’s tail as a leg, how many legs does a cow have?’ And Mr. Lincoln replied: ‘The cow has four legs, because calling a cow’s tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.’ And calling this art […] does not make it art. […] It is still filth; it is still perverse – and it is still unworthy of being subsidized with the American taxpayers’ money. (CR 140.98B) The tail metaphor acts as an unconscious play on the devilish appendage in Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait. Moreover, Helms’ statement is perhaps an unusually subtle commentary on the photograph’s supposed imposture as art, as opposed to pornography or obscenity. Helms suggested that artists, the media and the political Left were engaged in a conspiracy to defraud the public, by producing and celebrating pornography while masquerading it as art. Art is represented by the Right as a domain of volatile purity that must be defended from attacks from its producers as well as its celebrants. Artists are defamed as cunning perverts and wily criminals, paradoxically intent on destroying the age-old sanctity of art. Helms learnt of Athey’s performance after a heated discussion in the House of Representatives, led by Spencer Bachus (R-NC). On 23 June 1994, Bachus proposed to decimate the NEA’s federal allocation, cutting its annual provision from $142,950,000 to $49,293,100 (CR 140.98B). The crippling reduction of 53 per cent in cash terms would strip the NEA of its programme grants and administration costs, preserving only the monies each state disbursed at its own discretion. Bachus argued that the NEA had demonstrated its inability to administrate individual programme grants, adding ‘what happened in Minneapolis is evidence of that’.

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Following suit, Robert Dornan (Republican representative for California) launched into a broad and vitriolic attack on peer-reviewed recipients of NEA funds: [L]ook where we do find allocations of our tax dollars […]. Porno jerk Tim Miller got almost $15,000. Holly Hughes, porno female jerk, she got $9,375. Kitchen Theater, porno scum, $20,000; Frameline, porno slime, got almost $20,000; Marlon Riggs, $50,000 […] produce[d] the pornographic, profanity-filled, prohomosexual documentary titled, Tongues Untied, absolute gutter garbage. (CR 140.81) Yet the onus of his attack fell squarely on Athey’s shoulders. Demeaning respected artists as mere pornographers and ‘jerk scum’ (his later description of Karen Finley), Dornan also disdainfully cited Jane Alexander’s defence of Athey’s performance as ‘a study exploring modern-day martyrdom as it relates to AIDS’. After a slanderous and puerile tirade, Dornan stated: Athey, of course, is HIV positive, and we will read in a little blip one day, ‘Great artiste, Ron Athey, dies of AIDS.’ The whole thing, Mr. Chairman, is nuts […]. Most people here are terrified of the homosexual lobby, but some of us are not. He uses the sarcastic word ‘artiste’ as a slur upon Athey’s integrity (in American parlance, the term is often used to suggest precocity or pretention). Dornan’s reference to Athey’s illness bolsters the fantasy of a powerful gay conspiracy – the mythic ‘homosexual lobby’ – tying this fiction to the supposed betrayals of public morality fostered by the NEA. The callous joke about Athey’s imagined death, as merely a ‘blip’ in the rolling news, suggested Dornan’s disregard for people with AIDS as human subjects. The retort reached Athey himself, and caused him distress, after journalist Bob Chatelle cited Dornan in an article criticizing the recent attacks on the NEA.30 During the first day of substantial discussion of Athey’s work in Congress, Senator Cliff Stearns (R-FL) articulated the challenges posed by Athey’s work in reductive terms, by contrasting his work to humanist platitudes about the transcendental effects of good art:

Bob Chatelle, ‘Artists Must Organize for their Own Sake, not the NEA’s’, Boston Tab (31 January – 7 February 1995), p. 30. See http://users.rcn.com/kyp/neatab.html [accessed 30/12/11].

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Mr. Chairman, we have all talked about what happened with Ron Athey, an HIV-positive artist, in the scarification on another individual’s back, and how he used the blood soaked rags on a clothesline. […] I think what we see here is almost tortured art, and this art is not something we want to endorse. Art should provide us with a whiff of greatness, provide optimism, and instill a feeling of individuality. It should cultivate good taste and elevate the human spirit. It should not turn toward pessimism and negation, and be sponsored by the Federal Government. Mr. Chairman, the simple

question is, does a bloody towel represent the ideals of the American people? (CR 140.81) Stearns charges Athey’s work with failing to ‘ennoble’ its viewer, by refusing the pleasures of the ‘decent, hard-working American’. ‘There should be a renewed spirit’ in federally funded art, he opines, ‘and a strong commitment to traditional values’, or else funding for the NEA should be terminated. This attack on Athey enabled the successful introduction of the Stearns Amendment, which reduced the annual endowment for the arts by 5 per cent (a reduction in cash terms of $8.6m for the fiscal year 1995). Stearns’ speeches in Congress drew upon the sometimes wellintentioned cliché that art must be solely a force for social good. Jonathan Dollimore has persuasively critiqued the ‘stupefied reverence’ that naturalizes respectability and wholesomeness as the purported truth of art. ‘Lovers of art,’ Dollimore argues, ‘tell us that great art and the high culture it serves can only enhance the lives of those who truly appreciate it’, but this ideology ‘not only fails to take art seriously enough, but rests on a prior process of pro-art censorship more effective than anti-art state censorship’.31 Dollimore suggests that humanistic defences of art’s essential constitution as a force of social cohesion can be as damaging as explicitly iconoclastic attacks.

Ron Athey and Pigpen (with Brian Murphy in the background), untitled club performance, 1995. Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

31 Jonathan Dollimore, Sex, Literature and Censorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. xi.

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32

ibid. p. 47.

Grimes, ‘For Endowment, One Performer Means Trouble’.

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34

ibid.

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Moreover, ‘the active incitement of disgust can be an effective strategy of satirical critique and political opposition: a confronting of culture with its constitutive repressions, a provocative violation of cultural boundaries and bodily proprieties’.32 The oppositional potential of Athey’s work was registered most keenly by government officials, and policed as though it signified the violent force of a return of the repressed. After lengthy debate and several revisions to the reduction in the NEA’s allocation, Bachus’ amendment was defeated in the House. Yet two days later, prompted by the challenges posed by Bachus and Dornan, Helms returned to his invective against the NEA by seizing on the recent provocations. He attempted to revive his defeated amendment of 1989 by attacking Witkin and Athey in the Senate, defaming them as ‘human cockroaches who have repeatedly bullied their way into the pocketbooks of American taxpayers’. His cruelwitted characterization of difficult artists as ‘cockroaches’ was part of a long speech, rich in hyperbole, in which he states, ‘I asked NEA Chairman Jane Alexander if just one cockroach in a pot of soup would be enough, too many, or not enough’. He adds, ‘one cockroach in one soup is one cockroach too many. I feel the same way about the National Endowment for the Arts’ (CR 140.98B). The repeated reference to cockroaches allowed Helms to retaliate against evidence given in the House of Representatives that in only around ‘10 instances out of 100,000 grants’ have questions been raised about the appropriateness of specific grant allocations (CR 140.98A). Helms responded with his cockroach analogy, suggesting that although a small amount of funds were allocated to ‘problem’ artists, even a solitary ‘problematic’ recipient would constitute a scandal. Other politicians publicly concurred in their vilification of Athey: Oklahoma’s Don Nickles called 4 Scenes ‘grossly improper’, and Dornan added, ‘We are going to revisit this debate every year because of that less than 1 per cent that is utterly offensive and blasphemous’.33 Moreover, Helms hypothesized that ‘if a poll could be taken, I suspect that the vast majority of America’s taxpayers would be totally opposed to subsidizing that figurative human cockroach masquerading as an artist’ (CR 140.98B). The New York Times reported Helms was to follow up on his harassment of Athey, by requesting detailed information from the NEA on 70 different grants in June 1994, the month before his amendment was tabled.34 Through lengthy proclamations on culture in the 1980s and 1990s, Helms acted upon an unrelenting conviction that politicians retained the authority to act upon simplistic definitions of art, defending the public – and art itself – from liberal threats. These drew on proclamations in the House, where other congressmen ventured their own theoretical arguments about contemporary aesthetics. Helms and his colleagues seized upon Athey as a scapegoat, perhaps because they assumed his work could be framed quite easily in terms that would

suggest the degradation or corruption of artistic practice, specifically through the use of wounding and sexually explicit imagery. James Traficant, the Democrat representative for Ohio, offered perhaps the most strategic distortion of aesthetic logic: I think it is time to ask, is an AIDS-tainted bloody towel strung out over a theater audience a work […] of art? Is a crucifix submerged in a vial filled with urine a work of art? Is a broomstick literally placed up the rectum of an individual captured on film a work of art? If so, Congress, then I say there is no art, there is no distinction from the type of art that our cultural roots compel us to fund. (CR 140.81) Traficant caricatures Athey’s 4 Scenes and Serrano’s Piss Christ, and describes an imagined or distorted performance – perhaps misremembering Mapplethorpe’s Self-Portrait, by recasting the photo as a film and the bullwhip as a broomstick. If the NEA funds exceptional art, and if Serrano, Athey and Mapplethorpe were funded by the NEA, then these artists must qualify as exceptional artists; Traficant understands the three as pornographers, rather than artists, which leads him to conclude that ‘there is no art’. According to his reasoning, if artists are pornographers, and art no longer exists, there can be no need for federal support; therefore the NEA should be eliminated. Such cockeyed logics were common features of congressional hearings on art amid the culture wars.

Athey and the new Helms Amendment As I have shown, Athey’s performance in Minneapolis was deployed to reduce the NEA’s federal endowment. Moreover, in the wake of the defeat of the Helms Amendment in 1990, Athey was also deployed as a tool to introduce new and virulent policing strategies, when Helms advanced a new amendment to the Bill dictating the uses of NEA funds: Notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds made available under this Act to the National Endowment for the Arts may be used by the Endowment, or by any other recipient of such funds, to support, reward, or award financial assistance to any activity or work involving: (a) human mutilation or invasive bodily procedures on human beings, dead or alive; or (b) the drawing or letting of blood. (CR 140.98B) The addition of a prohibition against the artistic use of corpses was a specific response to the work of Joel-Peter Witkin, a photographer who had, in Helms’ misleading description, ‘a 20-year track record of mutilating, dissecting, and dismembering human corpses and then photographing them’. The offending photograph was seemingly Still Life, Marseilles (1990), which Helms does not name but describes to the 87

President. Witkin’s photograph shows a severed head, quartered and emptied to house a spray of white flowers. The human vase sits on a partially fabric-covered table by an array of still life objects. Witkin writes: When people see my work, there is no ‘gray area’ of response. What they experience is either love or hate. People who hate what I make hate me, too […] Those who understand what I do appreciate the determination, love, and courage it takes to find wonder and beauty in people who are considered by society to be damaged, unclean, dysfunctional, or wretched.35 Helms was somewhat suggestive in his comparison of Witkin and Athey, as both artists are noted for their attraction to the marginal and socially excluded as ciphers of unforeseen beauty, and both seek mystical grandeur in situations of physical horror. However, the material conditions of production for the two artists were wildly different; while Witkin had received $20,000 from the NEA in 1993, Athey received a paltry amount through indirect funding. This difference between Witkin’s and Athey’s access to resources was elided in the sensationalist rhetoric of Helms’ offensive. While many buoyed Helms’ vitriol, there were also voices of dissent in Congress. A sympathetic senator opposed Helms’ amendment by suggesting the similarities between Athey’s work and representations in classical arts and literature. Dodd noted that challenging contemporary aesthetics were not isolated from the history of canonical art, but rather displayed common traits. For Dodd, Athey’s work – and the strategies forbidden in Helms’ amendment – was reminiscent of paintings and other representations in the United States Capitol: There are countless examples in […] this very building which involve human mutilation or invasive bodily procedures – people being shot, people being knifed, the Battle of Lexington, the Battle of Concord, Daniel Boone, and the Indians […]. The crucifixion of Christ, done in even the simplest of ways, is the mutilation of a human being in an invasive procedure. (CR 140.98B)

Germano Celant, Joel-Peter Witkin (Zurich: Scalo, 1995), p. 249.

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Dodd allies Athey’s work with the centrality of representations of suffering, mutilation and death in heroic and ecclesiastical painting. Under the proposed amendment, a ‘representation of the nailing of Jesus Christ to a cross would be prohibited […] from receiving funds from the National Endowment for the Arts’, as would a portrayal of the stoning of Mary Magdalene, the decapitation of John the Baptist, and – usefully citing a central image in Athey’s visual lexicon – the torture of Saint Sebastian. Dodd suggests that such costs are incidental to Helms’ objective, despite the latter’s devout religiosity, because ‘[w]hat he wants to accomplish is the elimination of any funding for the National Endowment for the Arts’, by taking a ‘broadax’ to the organization.

‘Regardless of how one feels about the National Endowment, particular artists or particular performance art,’ Dodd argued, ‘this amendment ought to be soundly rejected’. While the production of wounds was central to the ‘Human Printing Press’ vignette, it was sensationalized through the work’s inordinate reception, obscuring the aesthetic imperatives of Athey and his coperformers. Dodd is well meaning in his comparison of Athey to classical imagery, but abstracts the historical and cultural specificity of his representations of injury, hardship and ordeal. Dodd’s reading

A S Y M PAT H E T I C S E N ATO R O P P O S E D H E L M S’ A M E N D M E N T BY S U G G E S T I N G T H E S I M I L A R I T I E S B E T W E E N AT H E Y ’ S W O R K A N D R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S I N C L A S S I C A L A R T S A N D L I T E R AT U R E universalizes Athey’s work in the service of a humanistic comparison to historical imagery. Nevertheless, the strategy was effective, and Helms’ proposed Amendment No. 2396 was defeated (by 49 votes to 42).36 Nevertheless, the centrality of Athey’s performance to the latter proceedings of the culture wars has had far-reaching implications – both positive and negative – for the artist’s reputation in the US, and farther afield.

Press involvement The discussions in Congress and in the broadcast media sought readings and ramifications that may seem unprovoked by the actual work. This was partly owing to the fact that none of the key voices in the congressional debates – including Helms, Halbreich, Alexander and Abbe – were in attendance at Athey’s performance. Yet 4 Scenes became the incendiary spark for a series of newly reanimated arguments over federal funds for the arts. Athey’s newfound notoriety was largely due to the increased coverage that his Minneapolis performance garnered in the syndicated press, after the Associated Press received and distributed Mary Abbe’s report in a local newspaper. Other strategic mystifications, anxious confusions and uneasy conflations further contributed to the debacle. The tenor and content of the original article, and the homophobic and otherwise sensationalist agendas of the broadcast media, in many ways spawned and sustained the furore. Under fire from Republican senators, Jane Alexander described Mary Abbe’s original newspaper article as ‘erroneously reported’, suggesting that her emphases on the potential for dripping blood, the risk of contagion and the apparently panicked response of the audience constituted ‘inaccurate coverage’ and ‘trivialization’ of an important event.37 Abbe retorted with her own critique of Alexander’s allegations, arguing in a letter to Congress that Athey’s performance necessitated that the Walker ‘defend its decision to stage a performance involving human blood-letting and mutilation – or “ritual scarification” and “erotic torture” as the [programme] describes it’. Nevertheless, others

36 Congressional Record 140.98 D [Daily Digest] (25 July 1994). From the Congressional Record Online via the Government Printing Office, http://www. gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1994-07-25/ html/CREC-1994-07-25-pt1-PgD.htm [accessed 10/01/12].

Mary Abbe, letter to Jane Alexander, 21 June 1994. Reprinted in full in (CR 140.98A).

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Ron Athey and Pigpen, backstage preparation for 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994). Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

Cited in Mary Abbe, ‘Walker Survives Dispute, Remains on NEA Grant List’, Minneapolis Star Tribune (25 July 1994). Reproduced in CR 140.98.

38

Cited in Congressional Record 140.86 S [Senate] (30 June 1994), Congressional Record Online via the Government Printing Office, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/ CREC-1994-07-25/html/CREC-1994-0725-pt1-PgS18.htm [accessed 29/12/11].

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noted the sensationalism of Abbe’s and other journalists’ reporting of Athey’s performance. In the House of Representatives, Senator Durenberger noted that ‘this particular performance has received great attention, not so much by the event itself – which was attended by only 100 people – but by highly inflammatory reporting of the event in Minnesota’s largest daily newspaper some 3 weeks after the performance’ (CR 140.98A). In contrast to Athey’s victimization in Congress, and despite the initial press coverage, journalistic responses to Athey’s work were markedly mixed. Some reporters fuelled the sensationalist rhetoric – a Boston Globe reporter called the performance ‘an abomination’38 – while others, such as New York Times columnist Frank Rich, accused the Right of inciting ‘homophobic panic’ by misrepresenting the threat of contagion in 4 Scenes.39 The calypso singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte also sprang to Athey’s defence, publishing a moving article in the Washington Post. Belafonte argued that the NEA’s duties as a supporter of national arts and culture was being obscured by a marginal debate over the question ‘Should the federal government support only “decent” art’? Of the Senate Appropriations Committee, headed by Robert Byrd, Belafonte argued:

[It] has allowed the enemies of the NEA to trot out their most recent example of art that strains or offends mainstream sensibilities [namely Athey’s] and to use the miniscule financial role the NEA played in its presentation as a litmus test for support of the entire agency. That performer and his performance are not the issue here. 40 Belafonte compared Athey and Anna Deavere Smith, and urged his readers not to follow ‘officials [who] have swallowed the hook baited by Sen. Jesse Helms’. Many artists fell by the wayside in the course of assaults by senators and pundits on the NEA’s viability. Athey suffered greatly during the debacle in 1994, and was essentially blacklisted after the Walker Arts Center came under attack (he has rarely been afforded major venues for his performance in the US, but has been curated extensively in the UK and Europe). Despite the effects of the congressional debates, Kathy Halbreich – Director of the Walker – publicly defended Athey’s 4 Scenes as ‘consistent with the Walker Arts Center’s mission to examine the issues that shape, inspire, and challenge us as individuals, cultures, and communities’. 41 Indeed, Athey’s piece was one of many potentially controversial events – predominantly performance and films – programmed in Minneapolis. Between 1990 and 1994, John Killacky programmed performances by three of the NEA Four – Karen Finley’s We Keep Our Victims Ready (1990), Tim Miller’s My Queer Body (1992) and a reading by Holly Hughes. Crucially, he presented key works about sexual politics, illness and AIDS, such as Ron Vawter’s Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (1992), Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains (1992), Bill T. Jones’ Still/Here (1994) and Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993). 42 Athey’s excerpt from 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life complemented a moment in which artists responded vividly to the contemporary horror of AIDS. The inordinate responses by press and politicians might have signalled a breaking point in the public willingness to tolerate artistic responses to crisis – specifically, to AIDS. This lessens the force of another reading: namely that Athey’s performance had itself transgressed an unwritten set of standards beyond which art should not venture. While the proposed Helms amendment did attempt to fix limits to artistic decency, this was characteristic of Helms’ own unwillingness to consider artistic representations within a greater social and aesthetic content – beyond, that is, his own iconoclastic rage.

Aftermaths After the discussions in Congress in June and July 1994, Athey’s work would be repeatedly referred to in political discussions as a kind of limit-case of perceived problems with federal arts funding in the United States. In 1996, Congressman Walter B. Jones of North Carolina raised the spectre of 4 Scenes in order to demean the work of Cheryl Dunye, a lesbian artist of colour, who received a completion grant of $31,000 from the NEA towards her feature film Watermelon

Harry Belafonte, ‘Don’t Cut the Arts Fund – Government Help Opened a New World For Me – and Many Others’, Washington Post (15 July 1994). Reprinted in full in CR 140.98.

40

41 Kathy Halbreich, letter to Senator Paul Wellstone, 21 June 1994. Reprinted in full in CR 140.98. 42

Killacky, ‘Called to Serve’, p. 13.

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Woman. Without having viewed the film, Jones states, ‘I believe that in the opinion of most Americans, Watermelon Woman has absolutely no serious artistic, or political value’. 43 The statement seeks to lambast the obscenity of Dunye’s creative documentary, which includes a sex scene between Dunye and Guinevere Turner, while assuming ‘most Americans’ do not require first-hand knowledge of a work to condone its censorship. On the back of his comparison of Dunye and Athey, Jones revived the objective of his fellow congressmen Helms, Byrd and Dornan, adding, ‘NEA chairwoman Jane Alexander has again shown us that both she and the taxpayer funded NEA, must go’, on account of ‘attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of taxpaying Americans by marketing this sexually explicit film as black history’. This allegation is bitterly ironic: Dunye’s film invents a fictional historical figure to talk

‘ P E O P L E A R E A F R A I D O F T H E B O D Y, T H E Y ’ R E A F R A I D O F D I S E A S E S , T H E Y ’ R E A F R A I D O F M O R T I F I C AT I O N O F T H E F L E S H . T H E Y ’ R E A F R A I D O F B R E A K I N G TA B O O S’ to the absence of a robust black lesbian history. In the film, a closing title states, ‘Sometimes you have to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is a fiction’. In order to confirm Dunye’s excesses, Jones states, ‘One should not forget the March 1994 performance of Ron Athey, at the Minneapolis Walker Art Center’, which ‘many in Congress denounced as an obscenity’, misrepresenting the performance as an ‘NEA-funded’ event. Deploying a familiar rhetorical device, the figural child, Jones states, ‘I call on President Clinton to find the moral courage within himself to protect the children of America from these obscenities’, tying a tenuous but suggestive thread between Athey’s and Dunye’s divergent practices, and other potent artworks in the recent history of the culture wars. Athey is philosophical about his implication within the debates around funding and, more generally, civil liberties. Recalling the furore and its fallout, Athey does not demur from reinforcing the destabilizing potential of his art. Indeed it is this disruptive power that gives his art part of its emotional and political charge. Athey has been consistently sensitive in his responses to the Right’s stigmatization of his work: [Are] Christians the only Americans? I pay taxes, and I don’t like my money going towards war. Some people draw a moral line and decide not to feel compassion for those on the other side of that line. That’s an easy way to live life. I try not to do that. 44 Congressional Record 142.90 H [House] (18 June 1996), p. H6484. From the Congressional Record Online via the Government Printing Office, http://www. gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1996-06-18/ pdf/CREC-1996-06-18-pt1-PgH6484.pdf [accessed 30/12/11].

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44 Cited in Kristin Tillotson, ‘Rituals are Essence of Artist’s Performance’, Minnesota Star Tribune (1 November 1994), p. A4.

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In an unpublished interview conducted in 1997, he told the film-maker Catherine Gund he had become ‘a pawn’: for the Left – including for the Walker, who coached him to defend himself and the Walker from journalists; and for the religious Right, who scapegoated him in their attacks on the NEA:

I became a poster-boy for evil on one side, and for freedom of expression and the rights of artists on the other. But these rights had never been offered to me. This money had never been offered to me. The support had never and would never have been offered to me. And suddenly it was my responsibility to defend it.45 Athey did take on this responsibility, he adds, in defence of the principle of federal funding for the arts. He suggests that public funding is an imperfect system, not least because the funding was not, in Athey’s eyes, available to him in any substantial manner at the time. Similarly, despite the vast coverage of Athey and his works, the debacle did not have any practical advantages for Athey: ‘I was a household name for a couple weeks. You’d think I had something to sell, or I did a lot of shows, but it was very counterproductive’.46 The panic eventually subsided, and Athey found ways to present his work in less volatile contexts. While Athey has been pursued by subsequent scandals, his experiences have sharpened his understanding of the politics of performance, especially around sex, wounding and illness. 4 Scenes in particular was the subject of, or spur to, a series of legal problems in the years immediately following the Walker furore.47 Such highs and lows have instructed Athey in the unexpected challenges of what he calls the ‘minefield’ of cultural politics: ‘this is the nature of the work,’ he told Gund. ‘People are afraid of the body, they’re afraid of diseases, they’re afraid of mortification of the flesh. They’re afraid of breaking taboos’. 48 In this sense, both Athey and Helms held true to their own equivalent (though morally divergent) convictions that a work of art can be a force for social change, primarily through disruption. While Helms feared change, Athey continues to plunge headlong into the promise of social transformation, as a secular calling of sorts. As such, Athey’s work provokes him and his publics into loaded realizations, and tests assumptions about the power of representation, the viability of cultural freedom in a volatile present, and the power of governments to restrict access to art. Despite the ‘wars’ it has endured, culture is rendered thrillingly unsafe on account of Ron Athey’s provocations.

Catherine Gund, unpublished interview with Ron Athey, Los Angeles, May 1997. The interview was conducted for Gund’s featurelength documentary Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance (Aubin Pictures, 1998). I thank Gund and Aubin Pictures for providing the unabridged transcripts.

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46

ibid.

4 Scenes was subsequently censored on its tour to London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, in November 1994. See Dominic Johnson, ‘Intimacy and Risk in Live Art’, Histories and Practices of Live Art, ed. by Deirdre Heddon and Jennie Klein (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 122–48. 47

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Gund, unpublished interview with Athey.

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B O M B S A WAY I N F R O N T- L I N E S U B U R B I A HOMI K. BHABHA

1 This article was first published in The Guardian (8 July 1995), p. 31. © Guardian News & Media Ltd. Reproduced with permission.

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When we first moved to Hyde Park in Chicago, the streets were plastered with posters that screamed out at you: ‘Bomb the Suburbs’.1 The graffitistyle lettering of this call to arms made me think it was publicity for a new rock or rap group, definitely something in the music business. Leah, my 7-year-old, took a more apocalyptic view: she was quietly convinced that there was a war raging on the outskirts of the city, and whenever the suburbs were mentioned she looked up wanly to ask what things were like on the battlefront, was the bombing really bad? Some time later I discovered that ‘Bomb the Suburbs’ was in fact the title of a rambling manifesto, written by the son of a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. The author, William ‘Upski’ Wimsatt, had identified himself with the counter-culture of the ‘Black’ southside of the city: rap music, hip hop, and above all, the convoluted calligraphic art of graffiti that emblazon subway stations and freight trains, sending coded messages to other underground artists down the line. Something of a streetwise philosopher himself, Upski has declared total war on the suburbs, which he describes as ‘an unfortunate geographical location, [an] unfortunate state of mind. It’s the American state of mind, founded on fear, conformity, shallowness of morals, and dullness of character’. Without quite knowing it, my daughter Leah was right. There is a culture war going on that seeks to ‘suburbanize’ the soul of America. Its agenda is traditional and conservative; its buzzwords are predictable:

‘family values’, opportunity society, individual responsibility, freemarketeering, the work ethic. But the crusading spirit of the campaign is most powerfully conveyed through its negative rhetoric: anti-socialwelfare, anti-intellectuals, anti-universities, anti-public funding for the arts and humanities, anti-minorities. Upping the ante, as the phrase has it, in this heated national debate is Newt Gingrich, the Leader of the House, who succinctly defines his role in what he describes as ‘this genuine revolution’: ‘I am a cultural not a political figure. I don’t care about the politics. I try to change the culture’. Gingrich tries to change the culture by playing with the future – the press frequently refers to him as a ‘futurist’ politician. For instance, his belief in the economics of space-travel once led him to suggest that the building of a lunar colony, complete with Hilton and Marriott hotels, would make possible $15,000 honeymoons on the moon using third-generation space shuttles. More

T H E C O N S E R VAT I V E S U B U R B A N AT T I T U D E I S F O U N D E D ON THE FEAR OF DIFFERENCE, AND A NARROWM I N D E D A P P E A L TO C U LT U R A L H O M O G E N E I T Y recently, Gingrich hinted at tax breaks that would allow the poor to buy laptop computers, and speculated on a $500 bonus for children with precocious reading skills. Even for someone named after an amphibian, Newt seems remarkably wet behind the ears. Those of us who experienced the Granny of Grantham’s snatch at the soul of Britain in the 1980s know only too well the problem with politicians who have a blind faith in their own visions. The public spectacle of heroic struggle for a nation’s spirit – with lofty rhetorical appeals to ‘tradition’ and ‘civilization’ – is often no more than a party political ploy aimed at ascendancy in moments of social crisis. In the Age of Newt, the New Right campaign ‘to renew American civilization’ is more like a return to the state of nature, where, in the words of his own majority whip, ‘Newt’s as big a barracuda as they come’. What has all this fearsome animal imagery, this jungle fever, got to do with the much publicized Republican ‘contract with America’? This is where our Hyde Park hip hop graffiti sage Upski has a point: the conservative suburban attitude is founded on the fear of difference, and a narrowminded appeal to cultural homogeneity. It is a kind of national paranoia that draws the boundary between what is acceptable and unacceptable ever more tightly around the norm of the ‘known’ – for which the Chicago suburbs provide an appropriate metaphor. The homes may vary from the gorgeous seafront mansions of Evanston to the more modest bungalows of Beverly; from the exotic boutique malls of Glencoe to the ‘brand name’ plazas of Skokie. But each suburb is carefully banded by class, race and ethnic community. The irony lies in the fact that the current conservative revival is increasingly founded on one of the oldest conformist arguments in the annals of America’s cultural history – the link between puritanism and philistinism; the association of anti95

American guilt and punishment with anything that smacks of sex, pleasure, desire, experimentation or creativity – whether in art, or in life. To grasp this suburban culture of paranoia we have to move from the newfangled Newts – cloning at an alarming rate – to the more traditional bloodhounds of the conservative establishment, such as the baleful presidential hopeful Bob Dole, who is obsessed with ‘family values’. What are family values? If they represent a concern with fidelity within marriage, as ex-Vice President Dan Quayle’s wife Marilyn once glossed the term, then family values are doing quite well. According to a nationwide sex survey conducted by a team at Chicago University in 1994, between 70–80 per cent of married men and women are faithful within their marriages; marriage remains the great leveller – so what’s the problem? Well, if family values are modelled on

T A X P AY E R S P R O V I D E O N LY 1 / 10 T H O F 1 P E R C E N T O F T H E A R T S B U D G E T – A S M A L L P R I C E F O R A N A T I O N T O P AY F O R W H AT I T G E T S I N R E T U R N O N A N I N T E R N AT I O N A L S C A L E a legally married heterosexual couples cohabiting in the same house with children under 18, then only a quarter of American households follow this pattern. And, if that’s the case, then maybe the very norm of the American family is changing. For instance, a recent AT&T phonesell campaign has already changed its perspective on the all-American family. The advertisement is narrated from the point of view of divorced or estranged couples, living in different cities, who need the phone to communicate on issues concerning joint parenting: ‘Be a good parent… Install an extra phoneline’ may be the new slogan, as bedtime stories go cellular, and goodnight kisses come curling out of the fax machine. If that’s the reality of family life, then what in the world do family values actually stand for? Very little, except that they stand against abortion rights, gay rights, and all forms of affirmative action – a term that covers the great unwashed, migrants, minorities and the poor. We are back with Upski’s notion of suburbanite fear and loathing turning into a national state of mind. But why, you may ask with some concern, do issues concerning minority rights in the public sphere have to be ‘domesticated’, turned into a matter of family values? Well, Barbara Bush, the former First Lady, had the answer to this: ‘When we speak of families we include extended families, we mean the neighbours, even the community itself’. But, as a journalist on the New York Times pointed out mischievously, the Bush family values were certainly underscored when at the Houston Republican Convention, the entire Bush clan gathered for the cameras and the music accompanying this image of familial solidarity and marital bliss just happened to be ‘The Best of Tunes’ from the classic gay musical La Cage aux Folles. It is precisely in the arts – in the offoff-off-off Broadway equivalents of La Cage aux Folles, or artists whose work offends the pieties of American everyday life – that the suburban 96

spirit finds its bêtes noires. Politicians play the populist card in their arguments against government sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities (NEA). Echoing the late Tory Party MP Geoffrey Dickens, who once suggested cutting the Covent Garden subsidy because it represented a whole lot of incomprehensible Italians poncing around, Newt grabbed the headlines when he suggested that arts patronage should be stopped ‘because it is funding for avant-garde people who are explicitly not accepted by most of the taxpayers’. But for anyone who wants to play the populist suburban scourge, the fiscal argument is weak and disingenuous. Taxpayers provide only 1/10th of 1 per cent of the arts budget – a small price for a nation to pay for what it gets in return on an international scale. America is, and has been, the world’s crucible for artistic innovation and experimentation. The great revolutionary Latin American muralists did their best work here; Chagall’s mystic blue landscapes reached a new pitch here; more recently, Andy Warhol gave post-war America its historic icons in his great portraits of Chairman Mao and Marilyn Monroe right here, while providing the disposable commodity culture with more Brillo boxes than it could handle. And none of these works that America now proudly displays in its national museums and claims as its cultural heritage comes out of the suburban sense of ‘family values’. Which is not to say that public taste is not offended and churchgoers are not insulted when art displays its cutting edge. One of the most

Ron Athey and Divinity P. Fudge in the ‘Human Printing Press’ scene of 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994), PS122, New York. Photo by Dona Ann McAdams. David Bowie appropriated this image for his digital art piece published in Q Magazine in 1995, prompting McAdams to sue Bowie for un-credited usage of her work. See the discussion on p. 17.

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Ron Athey pierces the cheeks of three company members in the ‘Dagger Wedding’ scene of 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994), PS122, New York. Photo by Dona Ann McAdams.

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controversial recent causes célèbres concerned the HIV-positive gay performance artist Ron Athey, whose ritual enactments include bodycutting, scarification and skin penetration with acupuncture needles. His successful performance at the prestigious Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis caused a furore in Congress, although only $150 of its endowment grant went towards the performance. There were renewed calls for the dismantling of the NEA – a strong possibility even as we speak, a good year after the Athey show. Quite coincidentally, I saw a video of Athey’s work in London, as a member of the advisory board of the ICA. My own reactions were complex. I entered the auditorium with a measure of fear, though without the virulent loathing associated with ‘family values’. The intensity of the performance allowed me to empathize with Athey’s quest to come to terms with a body and a mind that had been violated by a violent family, lacerating lovers, and unforgiving, oblivion-seeking syringes. Seen in this context, Athey’s ritual of self-controlled bodily scarification seemed like a retributive and healing act, and I found myself no more fearful or offended than I am when Oedipus tears out his eyes at the end of that Greek tragedy. Still, how do you deal with issues that clearly offend ‘family values’ but engage your sympathy and admiration? The conservatives have a derogatory phrase – they call it being ‘politically correct’. It is an ill-defined term loosely used

to finger subversive, left-leaning liberals or radicals who, it is claimed, show excessive concern for the rights of disadvantaged minorities. For instance, to argue as I have done in favour of Athey’s attempts to come to terms with his past as an abused gay person would immediately be labelled ‘politically correct’. I would be accused of straying so far from everyday suburban norms, from the concerns of most heterosexual couples and their children in the supposedly workaday world, that my empathy for Athey would be deeply suspect. Political correctness is now fading as a term of common use and abuse; it is yielding to the rhetoric of ‘family values’. But as it slips away, could one perhaps link the two terms and ask, judged by their own standards, how politically correct are the crusaders for American civilization?

AT H E Y ’ S R I T U A L O F S E L F - C O N T R O L L E D S C A R I F I C AT I O N SE E M E D L I K E A R E T R I B U T I V E AC T. S T I L L , H O W DO YO U D E A L W I T H I S S U E S T H A T C L E A R LY O F F E N D ‘ F A M I LY V A L U E S ’ B U T E N G AG E YO U R S Y M PAT H Y A N D A D M I R AT I O N ? Recent press stories linking slimy Newt and baleful Bob are much to the point. Dole recently attacked Hollywood movie-makers for using too much violence and sex, for ignoring the time-worn American respect for wholesome family entertainment – the ball game, gradeschool romances in the suburbs, great neighbourly acts of friendship, that sort of thing. Then somebody revealed that Senator Dole regarded Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie True Lies (James Cameron, 1994) as family fun. ‘Family what?’ asked an op-ed piece in the New York Times, observing that ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger slaughters whole battalions of [Arabs] to keep America laughing’. Bob Dole is not laughing; he naturally denies having ever said anything about True Lies. But that’s not the last laugh. Here’s one about Newt’s new steamy suspense thriller 1945, which was recently sent to a Hollywood scriptwriter for consideration. The scriptwriter happened to be Hollywood’s most famous and expensive scribe, Joe Eszterhas. He wrote the script for Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), where, you may remember, Sharon Stone opens and closes her knickerless legs once too often, once too long. Well, Eszterhas has turned down the script. In a letter to Dole he explains that the opening scene, which describes the President’s chief of staff as ‘a pouting sex kitten sitting athwart his chest’, is far too un-American for him to script. Would Bob please persuade Newt to mend his non-familial, deviant imagination? ‘Calls to Gingrich’s office weren’t returned,’ the Chicago Tribune reports. Shhh… don’t disturb him, Newt’s got the American revolution on his mind. Or, perhaps, could it just be that another flimsily clad bit of fiction is riding the barracuda? He who laughs last… laughs best!

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DEL I V ER A NCE : T HE ‘ TOR T URE T RILOGY ’ IN RE TROSPEC T R O N AT H E Y

An earlier version of this writing was published as Ron Athey, ‘Deliverance: Introduction, Foreword, Description and Selected Text’, Acting on AIDS: Sex, Drugs & Politics, ed. by Joshua Oppenheimer and Helena Reckitt (London and New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), pp. 430–39. It has been extensively revised for this publication.

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Nothing stays pure.1 Bloating up to the moment of redemption, it selfdestructs, decomposes, or becomes a God-awful parody. I’m talking about the desperation for healing in the time of AIDS. In this weary but philosophical state of mind, I found myself writing a piece called Deliverance (1995). ‘Deliverance’ is the fulfilment of epiphany. It’s the day spoken of by prophets, Moses’ promised land, the day of freedom from suffering for that sorry-ass son of a bitch, Job. Or it’s an eagerly awaited day, like the Second Coming. There’s also the movie Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), where, while snaggle-toothed hillbillies rape a straight man (Ned Beatty), they tell him to ‘squeal like a pig’. He is ‘saved’, or at least vindicated, by the arrow of either Burt Reynolds or Jon Voight, but that’s beside the point. The point is that the violation of the asshole itself – sodomy – is the root of so many fears. In my Deliverance, this fear is overcome with beauty and humour. The asshole produces hidden treasures that wrap around the three-tier set. It receives and expels enemas into glass jars full of glitter stars swirling in the muck, disco-style. It takes a double-headed dildo ride with a friend while reading a story about reinfection. This live ‘sex’ isn’t very sexy. It’s fighting the polarity that is so sharp, of what my friend the late Corey Roberts-Auli (co-editor of the zine Infected Faggot Perspectives) called ‘the good girls vs. the nasty girls’. In my performance material, I am guilty of enhancing my history, situation and surroundings into a perfectly depicted apocalypse, or at

Ron Athey speaking during Deliverance (1995), Museo Ex Teresa, Mexico City. Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

least a more visual atrocity. I do this out of disappointment for there not really being hellfire and brimstone, for my Aunt Vena not really bearing the Second Coming of Christ, as was prophesied. I have a messianic/ martyr complex. It’s a stretch to call the delusions of fanatical religion glamorous. Not to say that living most of my adult life through a time of AIDS has been disappointing as far as high drama goes: it’s taken very little work for me to parallel my experiences with the bejewelled doomsday prophecies from the Book of Revelations. Sometimes I question the meaning of my performance work. I’m not sure what the reasons are to keep doing it. I know I am testifying, still through the same lens, but with a different message. Why the fucking bloodbath? The shit? The vomit? All performed on a well-lit stage so that, while stylized, no details will be missed. I want a public to bear witness. Perhaps they judge me as damaged, but who isn’t? I want it to be heard: that I was raised in the realm of God, channelled spirits in an un-Christian-like manner, and walked away daring to be a mystical atheist. In my destruction, I barely survived drug addiction, then recovered and became ‘innocent’, like an injured child. And then with finesse, aggressively present.

I A M G U I L T Y O F E N H A N C I N G M Y H I S T O R Y, S I T U A T I O N A N D S U R R O U N D S I N T O A P E R F E C T LY- D E P I C T E D A P O C A LY P S E , O R AT L E A S T A M O R E V I S U A L AT R O C I T Y My schooling after the Armageddon of childhood was in the punk scene, drug experimentation (and addiction), death rock, and the psycho/neuro revelations of industrial culture. As a teen, literature saved my life. I read Genet and Smith and Gide and Sartre and Camus and Burroughs. Later, I read Wojnarowicz and Cooper and Jarman. I adored Pasolini and Fassbinder. I was trying to find something worthy to believe in, to see a precedent, or at least to educate myself into an 101

Opposite: Ron Athey and Company, Deliverance (1995), Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (part of Rapture season). Photo by Nicholas Sinclair.

acceptable reality. It was not going to be pretty, but it was already laid out for me. I had to know this history and feel it. It finally came down to finding living people I could relate to, and new obsessions. Body piercing became my kink. Tattoos saved my life. Modern primitives became a new religion, which quickly turned into a clown show. Deliverance premiered in December 1995, and was the third major performance piece I made. It completed what I came to call the ‘Torture Trilogy’. The first two performances in the trilogy, Martyrs & Saints (1992–93) and 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1993–96) were very different, but they overlapped in theme and structure.

I WA S PA R A N O I D T H AT U S I N G C H R I S T I A N I M AG E S WOULD SEEM TOO OBVIOUS, BU T THE Y WERE THE IMAGES I’D BEEN AFFEC TED BY THROUGHOU T M Y L IFE Martyrs & Saints is a meditation fuelled by the rage and grief I felt in the early 1990s, tackling the dark ambiance created by the AIDS catastrophe, and tying it into my inheritance – a grandiose martyr complex (which was all my Jesus-freak family could afford to leave me with). It was compiled of short vignettes. My reaction over the death of David Wojnarowicz inspired the first scene, ‘Nurse’s Penance’; the death of my beloved Okie drag queen Cliff Diller, who was like a best girlfriend and a son to me, offered not only the meditative pre-set, ‘A New Blood Cure’, but supplied the set with his memorial pyramid. It was a structure he hallucinated himself inside on his last morphine drip. My childhood religious training is there, fleshing out the rest of the piece with ‘Surgical Stigmata’ and ‘The Casting Out’. I was paranoid that using Christian images would seem too obvious, but they were the images I’d been affected by throughout my life. I studied writings and paintings on the lives of the saints to enrich the iconography for the piece, as us poor protestants only have streamlined crosses that serve an anti-golden false idolatry function. I was already involved in technical kink (procedures that are used and carefully taught in proper sadomasochist groups), which I borrowed for the first scene, where three nurses simultaneously perform invasive genital procedures on three patients. The piece unfolded like Stations of the Cross, each scene fluctuating between chaotic action and contrived set-up. The set was lit with stark bare bulbs, contrasted in the next scene by sepia and amber gels (to give the effect of old religious paintings), and of course precise specials. Martyrs & Saints ended with myself – a shameless drama queen – as Saint Sebastian martyred in a Zen garden. Yukio Mishima inspired the image, and I learnt that devotees would often pray to Sebastian in times of plague. 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life is a contemporary situation, still focused on AIDS, with generous pathologies, and a lot of modern primitivisms: scarification, piercing, not to mention ending in a tribal dance piece inspired by one of Fakir Musafar’s rituals. Where Martyrs & Saints may 102

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Clockwise from top left: Ron Athey creates a ‘hatchet pussy’ on Brian Murphy backstage before Deliverance (1995), Museo Ex Teresa, Mexico City. Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

Ron Athey and Company, Deliverance (1995). Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

Ron Athey and Company, Deliverance (1995). Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

Ron Athey and Company, Deliverance (1995). Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

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Ron Athey and Company, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994). Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

Opposite: Pigpen in Ron Athey and Company, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994). Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

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Ron Athey and Julie Tolentino in Ron Athey and Company, Deliverance (1995). Photo by Don Lewis.

have been shrill at points, in 4 Scenes I take a wider swipe, looking at working-class sexism, drug addiction, suicide attempts, prophetic dream images, Pentecostal evangelism, leather daddy/boy role-playing and, for a finale, a non-traditional lesbian three-way white wedding. In a sick way, I viewed all these states, habits or obsessions as personal mantras, or as one’s spirit pulse. They can be judged as destructive, perverse, addictions, tragic, violent, silly or ecstatic – that’s the point: chasing the dragon. Underneath the judgment is the essence: the reason why a man spends days in a strip bar; the reason a woman channels the voice of God and travels the world performing; the miracle of dreaming my tattoos were finished and I was levitating, which led me to continue to complete the tattooing of my body; the need for a grown man to be another man’s little baby bear. These scenarios lent themselves for perfect tableaux vivants, each one requiring a change of set, cast and costume. I located the pulse in each scene. In attempting this I found the answer I’d been looking for to explain my childhood: the arrogance of being chosen by God, and the pain of being unloved, and of active self-destruction. In making Deliverance, I started at a difficult point; I was conflicted with my belief system and not sure I could still call myself an atheist. After nine years of HIV sero-positivity, I was still mortified by the idea of dying from an ugly, AIDS-related illness, adding to the pile. Even today, I remain aloof but weary, and can hear the clock ticking. I’m hyper-aware that I’m dying; it doesn’t help that ‘no one gets out alive’. And worse, I run on guilt. Guilty: because I don’t take care of my health. Frantic: because I haven’t realized all of my goals and find myself getting further and further away from being able to accept love in my life. In my frenzy to be alive and heard, I’m afraid I may not really be experiencing my life. It is not my intention to find God through Deliverance, or by any other means. It started as both a challenge and a search for mythological context to the darkness. In Deliverance, Divinity Fudge’s character 106

and the actions follow trickster mythologies, and there is a continual polarization of filth and glitz. Exact movements in the dirt. Strings of pearls and shit. Cleansing rinses and smelly herbs. Santeria queens and penitents. Ambiguities: castrated sinner or holy eunuch? Reinfection or sexual freedom? Does anything present as what it means? Krishna orange becomes fake-tanned muscle Marys. Death, autopsy and burial. Deliverance was also the first piece developed, rehearsed and performed using a hypnotist to instruct the company in learning text, to create a spacing, and to move in an unnatural dream-walker pace. Deliverance – more so than 4 Scenes – is about AIDS, and beyond that, the impulse to experience the miraculous. Our ability to bend perception takes place on a psychic plane, namely the stage. Deliverance has taken the Apocalypse by the reins, and is riding it into the ground. If I’m wrong, and Deliverance is a crime against nature, I hope it means I have to appear before God wearing a cheap costume-jewellery crown upon my head, and with half a double-headed dildo hanging out of my ass.

Overleaf: Ron Athey in 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994), Los Angeles Theater Center, Los Angeles. Photo by Elyse Regehr. Ron Athey, four pages of a sketchbook with photographs and texts describing the structure and content of Martyrs & Saints (1992). The sketchbook was made for Julie Tolentino in New York, using photographs from the performance at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 1992. The sketches were sent ahead of his performance of Martyrs & Saints at PS122 in 1993.

Divinity: Verily, verily, I say unto thee,2 Let not the eunuch say: I am a dry tree For thus sayeth the Lord to the eunuchs: I will give them an everlasting name, which shall never perish. Ron:

I have trespassed I have dealt treacherously I have robbed I have spoken slander I have acted perversely And I have wrought wickedness I have been presumptuous I have done violence I have framed lies I have counselled evil And I have spoken falsely I have scoffed I have revolted I have proved I have rebelled I have committed iniquity And I have transgressed. I have oppressed I have been obstinate I have done wickedly I have corrupted I have committed abomination I have gone astray And I have led others astray.

This final text is adapted from Isaiah and a Yom Kippur prayer

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T HE IRREPL ACE A BL E BODIE S: R E S I S TA N C E T H R O U G H F E R O C I O U S F R A G I L I T Y JUL IE TOL EN T INO What is the point? What is the point? What is the point? What is the Point? [...] You. You are the point. – Patti Smith, The Coral Sea, Performance II, Part Six

Opposite: Ron Athey, in ‘The Nurse’s Penance’ scene from Martyrs & Saints, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (1992). Photo by Michael Matson.

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We are of another time. I, like Larry, fell in love with Ron through his writing. I feel like I am writing in this space with (the late) Larry Steger. This should be his page, his stage. Across our three-city triage – NYC-ChiLA – we forged a distance-bound ‘we’ formed by our combinations of duos, driven by unveiling queer underworlds, articulating survival tactics, producing, performing and supporting each other from and within our own well-treaded undergrounds: our early acts of be(com) ing political together. Each one of us on a verge. Larry tuned the seductive, the literary and philosophical; Ron thrust an autobiographical survivorship wracked with desire from his core; and I wielded the complicated ephemeralities of movement, endurance, intimacy and production. After Larry died from AIDS, I discovered a Xeroxed chapter he had sent Ron, who in turn had sent it to me, entitled: ‘Death is for the Living’. Larry’s mastery raised everyone’s bar. Ron’s writing is visceral. Before meeting in person (in the early 1990s), we breathed letters – inhaled/exhaled back and forth between us; exchanging care, philosophies, questions outlined in evocative images, scenes, and musings hand-scrawled, pen-drawn

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Opposite clockwise from top left: Ron Athey and Company, Martyrs & Saints (1995), Museo Ex Teresa, Mexico City. Photo by Monica Naranjo. Ron Athey and Company, Martyrs & Saints (1992). Photo by Chelsea Iovino. Ron Athey, Bradley J. Pickelsimer and Lauren Pine preparing for Martyrs & Saints (1993), PS122, New York. Ron Athey and Company, Martyrs & Saints (1995). Photo by Chelsea Iovino. Ron Athey and Company, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1995), Museo Ex Teresa, Mexico City. Photo by Monica Naranjo. Ron Athey and Company, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1995), Museo Ex Teresa, Mexico City. Photo by Monica Naranjo.

and typewritten – recorded on the camphor-stinking celluloid of disappearing fax ink. Ron wrote to a bald-and-becoming-inked me – already adorned with images inspired by dead young men – knowing full well what Alistair, my lover of that time and nearly-twin to Pigpen, tattooed on the precious fingers of young-me’s idol, Diamanda Galás: ‘We are all HIV+’. Ron’s words burst from his wild and trap-like memory, from dreams, writing for Honcho and LA Weekly, running in Griffith Park, Genetinspired, Molinier-influenced. Mine, snapshots of the East Village 1990s: daily dance class/rehearsal, demos, Fire Island, Astanga, caring for the Roberts, Clit Club East/West, Tattooed Love Child, Dagger, hosting performance, fundraising, surgeries, memorials. Professional modern dancer. Collaborator on first safer sex handbook for women. Early solos devised in fag bars – at Pork, The Altar, The Cock, Meat. Dyke-visible/all-body in Safe Sex Is Hot Sex, Gran Fury’s Kissing Doesn’t Kill; cover of Outweek, OUT, DIVA; Madonna’s Sex book. Loved: Aldo Hernandez, Art Positive, House of Color, David Rousseve, Greg ‘Squirrl’ Hubbard, Lola, Cat, Jet, Nan Goldin, Sharon Niesp, Sheree Rose. Loved and lost: Ray Navarro, David Wojnarowicz, Don Boyle, Damien Aquavella, Cookie Mueller, Bob Flanagan, Robert, Brandy, Warren, Debby Tae, Loren, the Roberts. Impossible to complete lists. After a year of writing, I joined Ron in Los Angeles, and we fell into each other, performing a naked, blood-bearing outdoor bell dance at the LA Art Institute for ‘A Day Without Art’ – a kind of poetic bare life opening outward. Awkward and outrageously close. Constantly being a love and a loved one to each other, I offered myself as performer, tour manager, producer, choreographer and wrangler. Building on a bond of beloveds and confidantes, we grew into collaborators, co-conspirators, co-directors.

OUR LIVES WERE COBBLED FROM SOMEWHERE BE T WEEN P U N K R O C K A N D D E E P S O U L , Y O U T H / G AY / S E X U A L A N A R C H Y, P O V E R T Y, D I S C I P L I N E , S O B R I E T Y A N D H I V We ached and revolted on both coasts alongside the (our) epidemic with the disappearance of you-were/are-here-and-we-know-your-namesnever-forgotten friends. Our lives were cobbled from somewhere between punk rock and deep soul, youth/gay/sexual anarchy, poverty, discipline, sobriety and HIV. It became apparent in the way we returned our every earning into our art, and challenged our bodies to the dark crevasses of kink, sex, language, sobriety, non-monogamy, and other uncharted points in space towards freedom and non-sovereignty. With John Killacky (Walker Art Center) and Mark Russell (PS122), I created a bridge. They offered us a larger, institutionally supported platform and partnership, and we were able to deliver the work on a larger scale. We reimagined the burgeoning early works within the frame of risk and the formality of avant-garde theatre, armed with and 112

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cohabitating with the chaos and freedoms of Club FUCK!, Tattooed Love Child with Ron’s first show at LACE gallery – Martyrs & Saints (1992–93) – memorializing Cliff Diller. Ron Athey & Co was gifted with the forces and expertise of Lori E. Seid, Darrel Mahoney, Steve Curtis, Justin O’Shaunessy, Alex Binnie; the foresight of Lois Keidan and Catherine Ugwu; and the dedication of photographers Peter Ross and the late Elyse Regehr, and so many others. Where did this instinct come from? How did we know to trust and contribute so wholly? Close friend Alessandro Codagnone (of artistic team Lovett/Codagnone, and a fellow activist) reminds me: ‘Hitting 30 was never a consideration. Our bodies were on the line’. As in AIDS activism, we were inspired, learning and indebted to one another.

Opposite: Catherine Opie, Ron Athey and Pigpen (Portrait for Deliverance). Polaroid. 1996 © Catherine Opie. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

R O N F O R C E D T H E H A N D O F A I D S , A D D I C T I O N , S E L F - L OAT H I N G , I S O L AT I O N A N D PA I N . H E TO L D T H E S E S TO R I E S W I T H H I S I N D E L I B L E P R E S E N C E F R O M T H E I N S I D E O U T, W I T H O U R B O D I E S Creativity unfolded artistic certainties fuelled by a refusal of the future’s empty pocket. Martyrs & Saints, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994–96) and Deliverance (1995) offered an instantaneous, strictly devised dual-feedback stream: kink-and-destruction meets pomp-andsubstance, splaying open bodies and lives – Ron’s story, fuelled by the eerie resonance of lost lives amongst the living. Ron forced the hand of AIDS, addiction, self-loathing, isolation and pain. He told these stories with his indelible presence from the inside out, with our bodies. His club show title spoke to me, of me, about all of us it seemed: My Body is a Temple of God – I Hate Myself. Activism starts with something known: a bodily experience (a combined knowing and sensing). We were attached to AIDS, by AIDS, and in Ron’s work we dominated its hold on bodies by confronting it with ‘Athey Trilogy Realness’, played out inimitably by the classed, colored, tattooed, mutilated and gender-queer sexed-up players and self-described freaks: Ronald ‘Ronnie Lee’ Athey, Brian ‘Baby Brian’ Murphy, Stosh Fila (aka Pigpen), Clayton (aka Cross), Darryl Carlton (aka Divinity P. Fudge), Julie Fowells (violinist) and me, Julie ‘Tinytino’. On tour, we offered our regal, primeval bodies, idiosyncratic laughter and rarefied language. Everyone’s kink and willingness was on the table. There were layers, but very few limits. Pigpen, the other devastating-to-behold Saint Sebastian, played multiple roles while proving to be everyone’s muse. My warm-ups consisted of pep talks, one-to-one body-rolling on each other, ‘punk-rock yoga’ replete with breaks for endless coffee, cigarettes and X-ray-eye rehearsal notes. We went into and beyond our external bodies: listening, excavating, resisting, redefining – physically drawing each other out with savage care, while linking into our own extant chronicles. The ‘Torture Trilogy’ was unleashed in Mexico City at the Ex Teresa – three cavernous spaces, a courtyard, yet still nearly not large enough 115

to house the work’s monumental grandiosity, including the coordinated technicalities of getting it to the stage. Some of the core group had never been abroad, nor performed in a theatre before. We embraced each other’s support and willingness like a good-for-you drug. We hosted performers in every new city. We were growing exponentially. Ron expanded into Hallelujah!, Catherine Gund’s documentary film, as another venue and a wider platform. For the group, it allowed us to see, hear and represent each other as a force. Our stage direction integrated ethics with the intense visualities of Ron’s autobiography, and merging unique bodies into a field governed by theatre time, care and logistics – combined with nerves and stage fright. Built in were the necessities of changing gloves and costumes; surgically stapling testicles for the perfect eunuch pouch; or administering Sebastian’s arrows; sewing on bells and limes; and piercing something on someone, bleeding, expelling, in efforts to create the imagery that propelled us in the dances of ecstatic transformation, or merely to expose a glorious yet raw reality. We all faced a broad flank of disapproval, ranging from anti-queer rhetoric, to the technical scrutiny of SM socialites (and the general wariness of good gays and lesbians who just want to get along), to the fear of body and disease that fuelled the rise of the Christian Right. The ‘Trilogy’ ran in defiant parallel to these gruesome realities, while also bringing receptive audiences to their own limits: limits welcomed, returned to, and exceeded, even after fainting. Fragility, like barebacking, offers what we can live with, what risk is, what protection feels like. These were the economies that illuminate our AIDS. Still.

W E P L O U G H E D S T E A D I LY T H R O U G H N E A R LY 5 0 P E R F O R M A N C E S . T H E O R I G I N A L R O N AT H E Y & C O, S E X Y A N D TO U G H I N O U R C A M A R A DE R I E , T H E N E N DE D, R E L E A SI NG E V E RYO N E I N TO N E X T S Our losses led us into its fearsomeness and taught us to fear. This on-the-ground identification by blood pierced a hole in the reality of the human brutalities of living with AIDS and self-preservation, illuminated in Ron’s astute scene, or in ‘The Nurse’s Penance’, which pinpoints shrill-faced, matter-of-fact, overextended nurses with sewn-shut lips, who tend immobile, suffering bodies. All of us in nurse drag, including Ron, were rendered silent but still ferocious. Pissed off. More able. Harsh and ultimately too exposed, panic-stricken, hideous, forgiven. AIDS in its rude wake could turn us to stone, leaving the frozen in place (forever even) while our bodies carried on and learned how to become more useful, useable, adaptable, erudite, articulate. It was as if we already knew it while learning more of its hideous nature. We used words like ‘plague’, ‘massacre’, ‘shame’. We would spend the rest of our lives reacting to and unveiling its global and localized wrath. Ron, his work, and the tender and willing bodies of his own army of lovers grew up within this radicality. We were methodical, maniacal, precise. We made 116

ridiculous mistakes. We were tested. Sometimes we failed each other. Sometimes miserably. When we were good, I add: we were remarkable. ‘One does not always stay intact,’ Judith Butler writes.1 A few weeks ago, at this writing in mid-2012, we lost our Brian Murphy. We remembered his solo during a marathon performance series like this: Baby Brian, it wouldn’t stop, your ass, the glittering fountain. You, our centrepiece. Ron and I parading around the Hamburg stage in grand costume as your glorious solo took on its unbelievableness. Mumbling under our breath, we were gagging over your outstanding talent, raising singular eyebrows, pursing lips, applauding like two queens. Proud from the gut, like two old, twin-performance, art daddy cronies – even then, in our early days – touching the ache of the radical ‘ungraspable-ness’ of our love. Along the deep cord of our irreplaceable bodies, we reckon with the faint imprint of memory, (scarcity) of photographs. Each person moving forward with/in us: impressions and nods held deep. Back then, together the group ploughed steadily through nearly 50 performances in several countries. The original Ron Athey & Co, sexy and tough in our camaraderie, then ended, releasing everyone into nexts. Like fragile delicate glass, we encountered ourselves through reflective pieces of each other. If Ron’s body at the age of 50 is a living corpse, then his ‘Trilogy’ acted, and acts still, as our eternal flame. We walk through this perpetual fire tending the wilderness of age now: the barely intact deliverance of our unheard stories, our love’s longing, brutality and tenderness. Our saturated bodies serve individually as perfectly-inadequate living archives worthy of a leather-daddy boot shine, a perfect reunion-byslow-dance in a mirrored ballroom, or maybe just a messy blow job. Small momentary acts to make us perfect – never fully repeatable. The undeniable iconic centre was crowded with beautiful, fearless instigators. Our decaying bodies, which bear the traces of our (forever and absent) comrades, along with Ron’s emblematic and indelible marks on our culture and our private lives, prove that we all need time – and take time to be made. A toast to our molten glass lives: thin and forever hosting our great potential to break.

Judith Butler, ‘Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy’, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 19–39 (p. 19).

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AT H E Y- I S M , C O L L A B O R AT I O N , AND HUSTLER WHITE BRUCE L ABRUCE

Opposite: Ron Athey in drag as ‘Wynonna’ character. Production still for Bruce LaBruce and Rick Castro’s Hustler White (1996). Photo by Bruce LaBruce.

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Full disclosure: I’m a Ron Athey-ist. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in God, necessarily, but it does mean I believe in Ron Athey. Like a number of other artists I know who are said to perpetrate extreme and controversial work (for example Kembra Pfahler, Richard Kern or Franko B), Ron is as sweet as pie in everyday life, although it must be noted that he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Some may be intimidated by his neck and face tattoos – a signification generally reserved for hardened criminals, gangsters or sideshow freaks (all categories which Ron himself would be the first to profess a certain kinship with) – but if he takes a liking to you, he’s one of the most warm and inviting people you’ll ever meet. I still didn’t know Ron too well when Rick Castro and I cast him in our collaborative movie Hustler White, shot in 1995. Designed as a treatise on the dwindling male prostitution scene on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, Mr. Castro and I decided primarily to cast friends and acquaintances in the movie, partly to lend the movie an air of authenticity, even a documentary feel, and partly so that we could entice them to let us use their homes and apartments as free locations. We only had a budget of $50,000 for the entire project, including post-production, so we literally had to beg, borrow and steal to get it made. Our mantra, suitable to any LA hustler worth his salt, was ‘whatever it takes’. Fortunately, Ron’s house, perched on a steep incline in the heart of the Silver Lake Hills, was not only a free location, but also one that looked as if it had already been art directed to perfection. Nothing had to be altered. With its ornate mirrors, art deco artefacts, and framed pictures of various saints and martyrs, it was the perfect setting for his character, Seymour Kasabian, the strange john and professional

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mortician who picks up several of the hustlers in Hustler White, and, memorably, dismembers one. (The name Kasabian was cribbed from one of Charles Manson’s main girls, Linda Kasabian, just to give Ron’s character an even creepier edge.) Ron hadn’t really done any conventional acting before, which suited me fine: I find the stilted and awkward quality of ‘non-actors’ much more real and compelling than the phony emotive masturbation that passes for good acting in contemporary Hollywood. Ron took to his role like a hustler takes to the colour white, and he perfectly embodied the fetishistic perversions of the twilight world of homosexuality that sometimes lead to the odd accidental execution-style murder. (His character was partly inspired by Andrew Crispo, the New York art dealer featured in the book Bag of Toys, who allegedly killed model Eigel Vesti in an SM sex torture session; Eigel Vesti is the name of the amputee character in Hustler White whom Seymour Kasabian kills in a similar scenario.) Ron didn’t need any direction to play the psycho sex killer, because he knew as well as we did that there’s a thin line between the gay, leather sex lifestyle and serial killing. Anyone who’s ever been bound and gagged in a sling can tell you that. The first scene we shot with Ron as Seymour took place in the Hollywood Cemetery in the heart of the hustler strip on Santa Monica Boulevard. (Subsequently it has been renamed the chintzy-sounding Hollywood Forever Cemetery.) We tried to get permission beforehand to shoot at this location, but we were informed that they charge $500 an hour. We hadn’t paid for any other location so far, so we weren’t about to start then, especially for that exorbitant rate. It would have to be a guerrilla shoot, like everything else that summer. Looking about as conspicuous as you could possibly get (two skinheads, one of whom was an amputee, a bald-headed Ron Athey in a white shirt and tie as a creepy mortician, and a ragtag crew of Eves), we piled into two cars – one of them Ron’s own white Barracuda, also known as The Atheymobile – and headed for the cemetery. We shot the first scene – Piglet walking into the bone orchard eating a hamburger – without incident, but that was merely shot from outside on the Boulevard. For the other scene, in which Piglet sits on a bench while Seymour stops in his car and tries to pick him up, we had to sneak past the reception booth and shoot surreptitiously on the actual grounds of the cemetery. As we shot, Piglet started to complain because the spurting water from a nearby sprinkler was getting him soaking wet, but we sadistically forced him to sit there and take it for the sake of art. (As a devout masochist, I trust he enjoyed it.) Ron did his two takes (that was what we averaged) like a true professional, unfazed by the high-pressure situation. The cops had almost shut us down a few days earlier at nearby Plummer Park, so everyone was a bit on edge. After finishing the scene, we all jumped into the two vehicles and took off like several Bonnies and a number of Clydes after a bank robbery. A woman in a tight yellow pencil skirt who worked at the

Opposite: Rick Castro, Tattoo Love God and Slave (1992), Hollywood, CA. Photo: www.rickcastro.com. Courtesy Antebellum Gallery, Hollywood. The photograph shows Ron Athey and Piglet (Ivar Johnson) after Athey hand-picked a tattoo of the word ‘PIG’ in Piglet’s lower lip (see the tattoo in progress on p. 236). As LaBruce explains, Piglet was also co-starred in Hustler White alongside Athey.

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Opposite: Ron Athey, Incorruptible Flesh (Work In Progress) (1997), in collaboration with Lawrence Steger, Cankarjev Dom, Slovenia, Ljubljana. Backstage. Photo by Franko B.

Hollywood Cemetery chased after us, yelling for us to stop or she’d sue, but we didn’t. We couldn’t afford it. Hustler White also gave Ron the opportunity to document one of his rare drag characters, Wynonna, on film. As it turns out, Seymour Kasabian has some pretty kinky kinks, preferring to dress up in full leather Wynonna Judd regalia while mummifying his victims with silver gaffer tape or otherwise ensnaring them in bondage gear. When Ron emerged as Wynonna on set in her black, tight-waisted corset, garish make-up and huge red fright wig, the crew audibly gasped in horror and delight, such was the stark contrast between his buttondowned mortician character and his SM anima. As if possessed by the spirit of all three Judd sisters rolled into one, Ron laughed his evil laugh and proceeded to serve up a delicious dual performance. And that’s how Ron became immortalized on celluloid in Hustler White.

W H E N RON E M E RG E D A S W Y NON N A I N H E R BL AC K , T IG H TWA I S T E D C O R S E T, G A R I S H M A K E - U P A N D H U G E R E D F R I G H T W I G , T H E C R E W A U D I B LY G A S P E D I N H O R R O R A N D D E L I G H T However, my Athey-ism extends far beyond our collaboration on Hustler White. As anyone who knows the man can attest to, Ron Athey is a true force of nature. Diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s, Ron has created a series of performative works over the years involving blood and body modification that externalize the internal (I remember vividly Ron in the early 1990s hanging blood-soaked fabric on a clothes line over an audience, which supposedly recoiled in terror at the prospect of coming in contact with ‘tainted’ blood), and internalize the external (Ron routinely fills his anal cavity with extraneous objects as part of his performances, then has them rematerialize like a magician pulling reams of knotted scarves out of his sleeve). His ‘blood work’ has been essential to the social process of coming to terms with HIV/AIDS, confronting head on the fears, prejudices and hostility directed towards those infected with the unimaginably hyper-signified disease that has become the very embodiment of homosexual panic, hysteria and homophobia embedded in the dominant culture. In his shamanistic, highly ritualistic and campy performances (camp, of course, in the most valiant sense of the word), Ron has almost single-handedly mediated these irrational fears, either by wielding them as a weapon, or by embodying the virus in a noble and rational, as well as spiritual, dimension. His overtly and adamantly sexy style and grace in these endeavours have elevated him to the status of goddess in my books, alongside the voluptuous horror of Kembra Pfahler and a handful of others of our generation. Yes, I am a proud Athey-ist, and count myself lucky and blessed to be able to call him a dear friend.

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SE X WITH RON J E N N I F E R D OY L E Sex is everywhere in Ron Athey’s reception history. Conversations about sex and art, art and pornography, obscenity and the law, loop around him. Sex is all over his archive: erotic photographs of him appear in gay magazine articles on the tattoo scene, modern primitives, bondage. Then there are the newspaper and magazine interviews that wander from art to politics, to religion, to sexual cultures and practices. Sex is everywhere in Ron’s work. Reviews of his performances in gay publications are frank and explicit. Take the following account of a performance of excerpts from Deliverance in 1996 in San Francisco: Ron’s next act involved himself with another performer wearing nothing but body painting. Oddly enough, they didn’t appear to have cocks. Having mastered the art of tucking, both men had their gear twisted up inside their bodies with the surrounding skin stapled shut. This impressive illusion had even us doing double takes. Ron and friend [Brian Murphy] then moved to their hands and knees. The star began reading poetry while his lovely assistant shoved a double headed dildo up his butt. Soon they were cheek to cheek sharing the tow between them. The performance ended with Ron throwing the slippery toy into the audience. This was one of the most spectacular shows we’ve witnessed since we were in Europe.1 Opposite: Ron Athey in a production still for HotMen CoolBoyz (2000), a porn movie directed by Knud Vesterkov. Courtesy Nicolas Barbano. The film was co-produced by Lars Von Trier for his Dogme film company Zentropa (under its adult arm, PuzzyPower HotMale). Athey was nominated for ‘Best Solo Performance’ at the GayVN Awards, the gay porn industry’s annual awards. Airick Heater, review of post-Folsom Street Fair performance at DNA Lounge, H Magazine 1996, n.p.

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If a double-headed dildo is used and then thrown into the crowd, a gay rag will tell you all about it. And usually in just this tone: light, funny, frank and gossipy. The idea is to make you feel some of the audience’s pleasure. To feel that those who were there were happy that they were, to make you wish that you had been. Sex in queer spaces isn’t a punch line or a surprise in and of itself. It doesn’t appear as an incursion, or a disruption of protocol (which is usually how sex ‘happens’ in the art world). In a club, it is what folks are looking for. It’s what the space promises. Artists who work in and from these spaces take sex as a given. The above review lets you know not that sex was there, but how.

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Ron Athey with Larry Flynt and Rob Halford at the Tom of Finland Foundation Awards 2001. Photo courtesy S. R. Sharp, Tom of Finland Foundation. Porn baron and publisher of Hustler magazine, Larry Flynt received a Lifetime Achievement from the Tom of Finland Foundation. Rob Halford (of Judas Priest) received the Cultural Icon award. Athey was present as an Honorary Board Member.

Sex is a base note in much of Ron’s work. You can see this in his writing: ‘Ron’s Dissections’, his 1990s column for the porn magazine Honcho, chronicled his art adventures and offered all sorts of wisdom regarding the practice of a sexual life. One storyline flows organically into the other. ‘Handballing’, for example, ruminates on fisting and being fisted. He meditates on a lunchtime trick (‘the pig’) whose collapsed anus had him thinking about the man’s ‘cunt’ and how close he came to ‘massaging his heart.’ He mulls over the fact that in his performances he’s made his own asshole ‘the star of the show’.2 At the moment he wrote that article, however, he was, in his life, more preoccupied by the assholes of others. Because sex is everywhere around him, Ron has been asked often to comment on the ‘art vs. porn’ question. In the Honcho column, he explains:

Ron Athey, ‘Dissections: Handballing’, Honcho (March 1997), pp. 70–72 (p. 70).

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Ron Athey, ‘Dissections: Sex Work: A Breakdown’, Honcho (April 1997), pp. 70–72 (p. 71). 3

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I generally describe pornography as a media created to sexually excite and hopefully inspire people to have more interesting sex. In my performances, sex acts are used to make statements about politics, identity and physical boundaries. They can be intentionally repulsive. They can be ironically humorous. Or both. In the ‘Post-AIDS BoyBoy Show’ [in Deliverance] Brian Murphy and I wear layers of opaque, orangey-colored suntan makeup, and I read a story about muscle queens and HIV re-infection while we ride a double-headed dildo in every imaginable position. It usually makes a mixed/art crowd slightly uncomfortable. 20 walked out in Amsterdam last July.3 Porn can expand and focus one’s sex life. It is a part of one’s sex life – the porn consumer consumes her object sexually. The pornographic

text dissolves in sex. It has a practical, local aim. At some point, the reader drops the book. And at that moment, the pornographic aim migrates from the text to the body. That moment is totally unpredictable. This is to say that pornography isn’t a stable thing. It isn’t inherent to a text. It’s a reading and viewing practice, a way of seeing things, a method. Porn inspires people to have more interesting sex. But it also shapes the nature of interest and inspiration. It inspires people to have more interesting reading and viewing practices. It’s an aim, a direction. Sex, with Ron, is more a means than an end. The point of sex as it happens in Ron’s work is not to meet the spectator’s desire. Nor is the point to frustrate or shock. It is, in fact, totally unhelpful to think about Ron’s work through the art/porn axis. Or sex/not sex. Sex is a part of his work in the same way that sexuality is, namely as something that shapes the space of transgression. ‘Transgression,’ Michel Foucault writes, ‘is an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin: it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses’. He is writing here of Georges Bataille, and the way Bataille wraps eroticism in knowledge of the death of God. Transgression here does not ‘oppose one thing to another’. Transgression ‘contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being – affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time’. It ‘opens onto a scintillating and constantly affirmed world, a world without shadow or twilight, without that serpentine “no” that bites into fruits and lodges their contradictions at their core’. 4

THE POINT OF SEX AS IT HAPPENS IN RON’S W O R K I S N O T TO M E E T T H E S P E C TATO R ’ S D E S I R E . N O R I S T H E P O I N T TO F R U S T R AT E O R S H O C K The sexual noise of Ron’s work – its way of engaging with sex without quite being sex – or what sex is ‘supposed’ to be – that’s what feels obscene to some. His work hovers over practices a lot of people don’t understand. But even in not understanding, they feel its transgression; they feel it in just the idea of it – as a note of fear, a whisper of desire, a hint of the outer edges of their own appetites. Some very famous artists have reframed sex as art. Robert Mapplethorpe (his photographs of black men, or his SM portraits, of the 1970s and 1980s); Andy Warhol (films like Blow Job [1964] and Blue Movie [1969]); Vito Acconci (Seedbed [1971]): all produced sexually explicit works that circulate in art historical scholarship as important interventions. When you spend time with this kind of work, you can find yourself approaching art as a disciplining system – and sex as a form of interference, a disruption, an intrusion of not-art into the space of art. Although that’s a pretty dry take on Warhol’s Blow Job, or Mapplethorpe’s

Michel Foucault, ‘Preface to Transgression’, Language, CounterMemory, Practice (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 33–37.

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Ron Athey flogs a tethered slave, at Pork at The Lure, New York, early 1990s. Photo by Efrain Gonzalez.

SM portraits (because surely what makes them interesting isn’t just their relationship to art), it’s also not the whole picture. But that approach to Ron’s work would be wrong. You can spot this difference in Ron’s origin stories. In one essay on his relationship to his tattoos, he credits Annie Sprinkle’s LOVE magazine with turning him out in 1980: ‘In it, there were pregnant women in bondage, essays on sex and avant garde, and most important to my life and development, a huge spread on Fakir Musafar’.5 In another interview, Ron tells the late ‘Alien Comic’ Tom Murrin that he was turned out by a performance of Johanna Went’s at about the same time. Went’s performances certainly were hardcore. Noisy, and involving lots of props and costumes, they could be manic, as Went screamed and preached and threw buckets of (fake) blood or four-foot-long bloody tampons out onto her audiences. ‘Went,’ Ron explains, ‘was pulling the world out of herself’.6 Feminist sex-worker, performance-art punks showed him how to pull the world out of himself.

THE SEXUAL IS, FOR SOME ARTISTS, MORE A MEDIUM THAN THE M E S S A G E . O R , T H E S E X U A L I S A W AY O F B U I L D I N G T H E M E S S A G E I N T O T H E M E DI U M , B R I NG I NG T H E T WO SO C LOSE TO E AC H OT H E R YOU C A N ’ T T E L L T H E F O R M F R O M T H E C O N T E N T, T H E C O N T E N T F R O M T H E F O R M

Ron Athey, ‘Under My Skin’, Strategic Sex, ed. by D. Travers Scott (London: Haworth Press, 1999), pp. 23–28 (p. 25).

5

Cited in Tom Murrin, ‘Healing Tortures: Ron Athey’s Transgressive Theatrics’, Paper (November 1998), p. 123.

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The sexual is, for some artists, more a medium than the message. Or, the sexual is a way of building the message into the medium, bringing the two so close to each other you can’t tell the form from the content, the content from the form. Where to start with that if not with the body – your container, your form, your content. The form and the content of the body is something that ‘sexual repulsives’ (as Ron and Vaginal Davis sometimes dub the tribe) know well. Whether you’ve needed to get an abortion, or been the country’s most visible sodomite,

Ron Athey, Solar Anus (1998). Still from a performance for video. Video by Cyril Kuhn.

you know the body isn’t beyond the word, beyond the law’s reach. The word and the law manifest themselves on it and in it. In another Honcho column, Ron reviews his muses – things, people, images that inspire him. One in particular speaks to the way sex is written onto and into the body. He writes: I keep this photograph of Mark’s back on the top of the bookshelf in my office. When I first laid eyes on this image, I had met Mark a few times, but I had never seen his back. He was so straightacting/straight-appearing, I would never have suspected he had the word SODOMITE tattooed on his back. SODOMITE, the condition, engraved in granite. Here kneels a butt-fucking macho man with rough, scarred-up skin, proudly wearing a scandalous banner dressed up in fancy lettering. His broad, naturally muscular back (a body earned from hard labor), the texture of the skin (from physical abuse, or skin condition), and the boldness of the lettering (prison gang-style), each contribute volumes to the story. It has to go beyond queer, not just subversive but downright abject, a man’s man wearing his identity – his personal sin – across his back. Now I was lyrical: there is something not new, but archetypal, my brain makes the picture twist on mythology. After the butt-fucker finishes his rampage, he can’t resist the urge to look back, but for [a] last glance, on the spoils of Sodom.7 It’s a worthy image – the twist, the turn back to look at sodomy’s scene – to sex plugged into the world like an electrical cord plugged into a socket. Ron Athey, ‘Dissections: The Abject Muse Perplexed’, Honcho (June 1998), pp. 59–61 (pp. 59-60). 7

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T H E M A N A N D H I S TAT T O O S (BY T H E M A N W HO DID T H EM) ALEX BINNIE

Opposite: Portrait of Ron Athey (2011). Photo by Núria Rius. 1 See Modern Primitives: Investigations of Contemporary Adornment Rituals, ed. by V. Vale and Andrea Juno (San Francisco: Re/ Search Publications, 1997).

For Athey’s own thoughts on his tattoos, see Ron Athey, ‘Under My Skin’, Strategic Sex, ed. by D. Travers Scott (London: Haworth Press, 1999), pp. 23–28.

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I remember the first time I saw Ron Athey in the flesh so clearly (I’d seen him in print a number of times before). Around 1990, I was in LA for the first time, to meet and get tattooed by my tribal tattoo hero Leo Zulueta, and generally to suck up the scene that I had read about in London. The first night I was there, I went to the famed Club FUCK!, and there was Ron, naked apart from knee-high boots, a jockstrap, an Afro wig, and his already extensive tattoos. What a combination! Tattooed and in drag, sweaty and hard, he was dancing his ass off. I’d been tattooing only a short while, but had been getting tattooed and thinking about it for quite a few years. I’d been around in some of the 1980s clubs in London – Kinky Gerlinky and the like. I’d done my time in Torture Garden; I’d performed naked rolling in paint and blood for my art school degree show, so I wasn’t totally naïve. But I was searching for the right people. I’d seen them in Tattootime (the seminal tattoo magazine published by Ed Hardy) and the book Modern Primitives,1 but here, right in front of me, was the perfect representation of what I’d been looking for: an alternative way to be tattooed, not piece by piece, but as a whole; not as a man with some tattoos, but as a tattooed man. Ron particularly encapsulated that LA scene.2 He was, and remains, the perfect ideal of that time and place. It was a time when tattooing was still considered dangerous, when it was for criminals or outlaws, either literally on the lam from the law, or placing oneself quite deliberately and permanently outside of what was acceptable in polite society. For artists like ourselves, it seemed like the ultimate challenge.

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Ron Athey giving Alex Binnie a ‘hatchet pussy’ at Torture Garden, London, ca. 1995. Nicola Bowery is in the background. Photo by Jeremy Chaplin (www.jeremychaplin.com) Torture Garden has run monthly since 1991, and is the longestrunning fetish club in the world. Athey performed at Torture Garden three times between 1994-96, and once at its offshoot art event Body Probe. Opposite: Mike Diana, Ron Athey’s Far Right Fashions (1997). © Mike Diana. Courtesy the artist.

I had arrived, fresh, young and keen on the LA scene, and Ron and his compatriots were ripe for fresh influences and visions themselves. An added complication was Ron’s HIV status, as some of the more established LA tattooists were scared and unwilling to penetrate his tainted flesh. My previous flirtations in the messier side of performance art, coupled with my brief stint as a medical illustrator,

Mike Diana’s cartoon narrates the development of Athey’s personal style, specifically his decision to cover up the Hindu swastika tattoo on the back of his neck. The cartoon was commissioned for Ron Athey, ‘Dissections: Flirting with the Far Right’, Honcho (June 1997), pp. 77–79. The cartoon appears on p. 79. Diana is renowned as the first visual artist to receive a criminal conviction in the United States, after publishing his graphic novel Sourball Prodigy (1992).

AS FELLOW ARTISTS LOOK ING FOR FRESH NE W TERRITORIES, R O N A N D I H I T I T O F F I M M E D I A T E LY. W E S E A L E D O U R F R I E N D S H I P P A C T W H E N I C A R R I E D O U T A N I M P R E S S I V E LY L A R G E B O R N E O -S T Y L E P I E C E O N R O N ’ S T H R OAT made this an irrelevance to me (I knew the score, and hepatitis C has been around longer and is far more contagious). Those were the days when HIV status pretty much amounted to a death sentence, certainly in the popular imagination anyway. We had both watched friends die. Those with AIDS and those willing to hang around with such people were considered half-dead already, so it was an environment when anything was possible and permitted, for what had one to lose? On the run myself from my British middle-class background and a London that bored me, I found myself hooked. As fellow artists looking for fresh new territories, Ron and I hit it off immediately. We sealed our friendship pact when I carried out an impressively large Borneo-style piece on Ron’s throat, followed up with my first major back-piece on his former lover and collaborator, the late Brian Murphy. My entry into the LA tattoo scene of the time was assured. Ron’s tattooing totally changed the goalposts. His arms by Leo Zulueta are the perfect collaboration: between the ability of the artist to carry out the work, and the vision of the wearer to push the boundaries of what has been seen before. It’s still rarely achieved, and it takes a 133

Opposite: Alex Binnie, Ron Athey (2011), woodcut portrait. Courtesy Alex Binnie.

rare combination to make it happen. It’s hard now to truly appreciate how ground-breaking Ron’s tattooing was at the time. The tribal style being pioneered in the 1980s and early 1990s was the ‘punk rock’ of tattooing; a reaction to the overblown, highly detailed, slick fantasystyle tattooing that was prevalent at the time (there are those who think the time is ripe for a revival, but that’s another story). To my eyes, tribal work seems truer to the medium of the tattoo, not trying to be something else. It’s raw, dramatic and visceral, and looks like what it is: like the skin has been punctured – like it hurts; unlike some of the slicker work, which resembles a computer graphic or a skin illustration.

R O N ’ S T A T T O O S A R E O N D I S P L AY A L L T H E T I M E , S O H E I S ‘ W O R K I N G’ A S H E WA L K S D O W N T H E S T R E E T, M A K I N G P E O P L E T H I N K , C H A L L E N G I N G T H E I R E X P E C TAT I O N S Ron undoubtedly used tattooing as part of his work. He was well aware of the effect it had on the people around him, and as a punk rock performance artist, living in the underbelly of the LA scene at the time, tattooing was definitely one of the tools available. But looking at Ron, at his work, the stark drama of it, he definitely took it one stage further than just ‘getting a tattoo’. He’s good-looking, and well aware of it, and he has an imposing physical presence – charismatic and powerful. He’s definitely the sort of man who turns heads, and probably did so from a young age. The decision to get heavily tattooed, including on the face (the first tattoo Bob Roberts did when he first moved back to LA from New York), took this a step further. He has caused (and delights in) controversy, and his tattooing has definitely played a part in that. All art tries to move forward and better itself. The question is, how? As humans, we may try to be happy, or rich, or famous, or wise. As artists, we can struggle to perfect our work, to move forward, to find its essence, its purest form. For Ron, his body and how it looks has played a role in this: how he appears, his physical presence, the effect he has on the people around him is central. Whether we like it or not, the way we look influences everything around us. It’s always been that way. It’s the human way. Ron has taken that, worked with it, and forced it down our throats in a dramatic and very beautiful way. Ron’s tattoos are on display all the time, so he is ‘working’ as he walks down the street, making people think, challenging their expectations. As the man that made some of his more visible tattoos, I’m proud to play a part in that. Ron Athey, I salute you.

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T H E M I L K FA C T O R Y O N W I N C H E S T E R M AT T H E W G O U L I S H

Thanks to Quimby’s Bookstore. Particular thanks go to Paige K. Johnston, Manager of Special Collections, and Doro Boehme, Special Collections Library, for enabling access to the Randolph Street Gallery Archive in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Flaxman Library. Thanks always to Laura Dame and Douglas Grew.

1

Bill Stamets reviewed Martyrs & Saints in the September 1993 for the New Art Examiner, and quoted the ‘queer really meaning queer’ press release. Achy Obejas reviewed the performance for The Chicago Reader on 3 June 1993. Ken Thompson reviewed the responses, in P-Form 30 (1993): ‘Many people rejected this work without experiencing it […]. Many members of the press (including the gay press) discredited it after seeing the work on the grounds of “unprofessionalism” and “sensationalism” (i.e. they couldn’t see past the surface)’.

2

Steve Lafreniere, ‘Visions of Excess: Interview with Lawrence Steger’, Babble, 24 (15 – 21 June 1994).

3

‘Lawrence Steger Interviews Ron Athey’, Dialogue (Akron: Akron Art Institute, Sept/ Oct 1994). Lawrence had published an earlier interview with Ron in Babble in advance of the 1993 Martyrs & Saints performances. Babble was published every Wednesday by Propago Publishing in Chicago.

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‘Queer not meaning straight, gay, or lesbian, but queer really meaning queer,’ wrote Lawrence Steger for a press release, stating the attitude of ‘In Through the Out Door’, the annual series of queer performance and video he curated from 1989 through 1994 at Randolph Street Gallery, 756 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago.1 In the second week of this four-week series, 28 and 29 May 1993 featured two evenings of Martyrs & Saints, Ron Athey’s first showings of this performance outside of Los Angeles.2 An interview titled ‘Visions of Excess’ by Steve Lafreniere for Babble in June 1994 introduced Lawrence as ‘One of this town’s most compelling, original performance artists […] Though toiling full time as administrator for The School of the Art Institute’s Gallery 2’.3 Lawrence elaborated on ‘queer really meaning queer’ and on, as Jack Smith might have said, the ‘pasty’ reception local critics had given Athey’s 1993 performance: [T]hinking of performance art as a different approach to the norm, the way queer is a different approach to the norm of homosexuality. […] There was an issue about what we were presenting in terms of it being more of a ritualistic kind of performance. Then you throw in queers, you throw in leather, you throw in piercing, you throw in HIV, and you get this boiling cauldron of what people expect artists to be doing with that kind of information – treating it gently. And Ron is pretty bombastic, in full force, of what those things represent to him. So somebody who’s not accustomed to any of those things, and feels edgy around HIV, is going to feel real edgy around the needle points that were going through his skin [laughs]. 4 The interview, although published in June, appears to predate the turmoil that followed the performance of 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1993–96) in Minneapolis in March 1994. By the September/October 1994 issue of Dialogue, Lawrence had organized an interview with Ron to counter the wave of post-Minneapolis hysteria. Two years

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Previous page: Ron Athey and Lawrence Steger, Incorruptible Flesh (Work In Progress) (1997), Cankarjev Dom, Slovenia, Ljubljana. Stills from video documentation. The only extant documentation is a low quality video recording, from which we created stills. The stills retain the quality of the original recording. Photographs from this performance have never been published before.

later, they would revisit another ‘boiling cauldron of expectation’, this one literal, as they initiated a collaborative work commissioned by Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, a piece they would build around the scholarship of Piero Camporesi, borrowing the title of his book for their piece, Incorruptible Flesh.5 Camporesi’s exhaustive catalogue of medieval and Counter-Reformation Catholic rituals and folk beliefs – his gruesome imagery of mortification, exorcism, the doctrinal transfigurations of the devout, the belief in ‘the extraordinary thaumaturgical and curative powers of saints’ bodies, after death’, and in the body’s return to its perfect state in paradise ‘to imbibe “sweet plenitude and divine intoxication”’ – must have provided a potent meeting place for Ron, the former Pentecostal from the West, and Larry, the Midwestern lapsed Catholic altar boy. The piece begins with a section titled ‘Paradise’: LS enters as The Eunuch upstage center and seems to come out of the void. Fog hugs the ground as light slowly reveals LS in semitransparent priest cassock. The head and hands of LS are old, decrepit, and infected. Beneath the priest cassock, his body remains un-aged, lean, and his penis is tucked. He comes downstage seeming to float rather than walk. [He] speaks to the audience, distinctly addressing them. His voice, low, steady and determined. As he walks, he uncoils the length of gold rope. The gold rope will haul in Ron on a wheeled plinth, majestic, pierced and transformed, but only after Lawrence has completed the theatrical metaphor that frames the piece. He delivers a speech crafted from a text extract found in Camporesi’s volume, of the Jesuit Cesar Bottalini’s 1738 reading of the attributes of God in corporeal terms: In my mind, the task at hand (or what we are to do in a very small amount of time) is to build another paradise; a mirror image of the real and the historical worlds. The task is to build an image in which the human condition is totally recast and the quality of life is brought to a plateau of complete and total perfection.

5 Incorruptible Flesh was performed at the CCA in 1996, and in 1997 at Cankarjev Dom in Ljubljana, Slovenia and the Eurokaz Festival in Zagreb, Croatia. Francis McKee may have suggested Camporesi to Lawrence and Ron. McKee was a research consultant facilitated by CCA’s live art programmer at the time, Mark Waddell. Correspondence files in the Randolph Street Gallery archive include detailed proposals for Chicago performances of Incorruptible Flesh that never materialized, although on 25 and 26 April 1996, Lawrence performed an excerpt from the piece at RSG in a program of short works to benefit The Swans.

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This is an upside-down world where illness is banished, hunger is forgotten, the corruptibility of the flesh is abolished, and sweet scents are inhaled instead of the stench rising from the corpses of those who’ve tried before us. (Ironically) Some task. It is my belief that you would like to immerse yourselves in sensuous delight and in sensuous delights immerse yourselves you will, but not yet. ‘You must have patience, and all of your promises will be fulfilled’ – which is as much to say that a body possessing this

impassability has more lasting value than any standing stone, has an agility faster than any sunrise, has a transparency more penetrating than any flame, has a light more luminous than any sun. It is a body that can boast of all the joys of every age: the candor of childhood, the charm of youth, the strength of maturity, the decorum of old age. It is a body that will enjoy, as it never has before, all that it craves after: unimaginable beauties for the eye, melodies for the ear, tastes that make the mouth moist, perfumes for the nostrils, delights for the insatiable tactile sense. It is a body which is unlike a body.

Ron Athey in Trojan Whore (1995). Photo by Chelsea Iovino. Trojan Whore was devised as a memorial to late Leigh Bowery, and first performed at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York (July 1995) after Bowery’s AIDS-related death on 31 December 1994. Images in the piece were developed towards Incorruptible Flesh (Work In Progress) (1996).

It is paradise.6 Back in the spring of 1994, Lawrence facilitated an evening of performance in a former milk factory, now a garage, on North Winchester Avenue at the intersection of Iowa Street, in Chicago. With only word-of-mouth for publicity, he organized what seems to have been an underground version of ‘In Through the Out Door’, with three performances, including Ron’s 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life. Lawrence would tour as videographer with that fateful production. Douglas Grew, who would play the actor Josef Kainz in Lawrence’s magnum opus The Swans, wrote me: Yes there are some really great vivid memories of this period. Ron’s RSG show and mainly the apartment performance! I ran the sound

Speech by Lawrence Steger, based on Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). The source for Lawrence’s speech appears on pp. 32–33.

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Lawrence Steger applies latex make-up in preparation for Incorruptible Flesh (Work In Progress) (1997), in collaboration with Ron Athey, Cankarjev Dom, Slovenia, Ljubljana. Backstage. Photo by Franko B.

and lights. Plus moved all the chairs we borrowed from Gallery 2. It was a warm-up or practice performance before Ron and Larry went north for the famous show that got the headline of ‘AIDS infected blood dripping on the audience’ in Minneapolis. The garage belonged to an apartment shared by Laura Dame and Steve Lafreniere. Laura would play Gilles de Rais in The Swans, and Steve, who had interviewed Lawrence for Babble, designed the poster image. Steve also edited a queer zine called The Gentlewomen of California. Printed Matter’s 2008 anthology collected extracts from this rarity. A description of the zine encapsulates the aesthetic of the moment and the place – the sincere allure of secret knowledge, always ready to embrace the scale-tip into camp: The Gentlewomen of California is an esoteric zine composed primarily of long literary passages. The covers bear a cryptic icon – a goblet, a belt with the word ‘LIAR’ on the buckle – whose decoding recalls the initiation rites of early twentieth century queer sensibility, and the tradition of the quasi-secret homophile society. The ‘Liar/T.Rex’ Issue contains excerpts from a book Lafreniere was writing, which he calls ‘representative of the project.’ Todd Haynes claimed it inspired him to make a film about ‘glitter kids,’ which ultimately became Velvet Goldmine. The ‘Help Others’ Issue includes a second cover with young men baring their anuses. Women with bob haircuts are a significant motif. The ‘Goblet’ Issue (6) takes a decidedly fantastic turn, and includes various metaphors comparing the asshole to the woodlands, and one suggestive and repulsive likening of the cock to a sea anemone. It also holds a Platonic dialogue about the materiality of God and 140

The Milk Factory, Chicago. Photo by Matthew Goulish.

the justification of the reverence of shit; a photograph of rugged fisherman Robert Horton; and a psychedelic illustration of the nerve endings that populate the anus.7 Lawrence’s theatre work The Swans imagined a production of the life of Joan of Arc’s sadistic general Gilles de Rais, staged for an audience of one: King Ludwig of Bavaria. In the 1998 production, Lawrence played Ludwig as an alter ego, as ‘semi-transparent’ as his cassock in Incorruptible Flesh. Audience members found themselves engrossed in vertiginous layers of metaphor, by turns horrific, hilarious or poignant. The production experienced delays as Lawrence’s health grew unstable. Lawrence would not live long enough to realize other productions, including one with Ron Athey as Gilles de Rais. I walked the five blocks from my house to the corner of Winchester and Iowa, to photograph the garage with ‘POLONIA DAIRY CO’ etched into its stone lintel. I wrote to Laura Dame, now in Vermont, to inquire about the evening of performances in 1994, and she replied: Yes, I remember that evening well. Steve and I lived in a former milk factory, with a large garage. The performance was there. I ‘hosted’ – though I remember distinctly being intimidated by Ron Athey’s ‘greatness’, and I was a nervous wreck. Fred Sodima and Iris Moore also performed. Fred performed as King Ludwig, as he was the one who first performed in that role as we developed The Swans. Iris ended up hanging from a harness – quite a beautiful sight. I remember seeing Ron Athey get ‘warmed up’ by having someone stuff and then pull a long strand of pearls from his ass. This happened on my bedroom floor.

Alex Gartenfeld, zine descriptions in Queer Zines, ed. by A. A. Bronson and Philip Aarons (New York: Printed Matter, 2008), pp. 104–07.

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That was a special time indeed. 141

F L A S H : O N P H O T O G R A P H I N G R O N AT H E Y C AT H E R I N E O P I E Through the completely darkened room in one second a scene is lit up: a fist up the ass on a bright red background. It is day one of a twoday shoot in New York at Moby Studios, where I am working with the largest Polaroid camera in the world. I am making a series of 13 photographs for the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS in honour of Ron Athey’s performance work. The year is 1999. Ron and I have been friends since the late 1980s, the days of a different Los Angeles, and its vigorous politics around identity and the queer body. Ron’s body is the site of politics: in the nightclubs, in private and public; using the right to fuck and be HIV-positive, the right to bleed in public, the right to be agitated and brilliant in a time of fragility with deep inner strength. It is now 2011 and Ron and I are both 50, for him a milestone in which a decade ago we mourned our losses, as we bear witness to our community and friends who died from AIDS. We both grew up by finding our voice in a time of identity politics, through blood, and with a shared belief in the importance of the personal in politics and art. The first time I saw a performance by Ron Athey was at LACE. I remember sitting cross-legged in the front row on the floor, watching my friends in the cast go through the carefully choreographed moves of a body politic onstage. Blood, needles, shitting. Fucked-up nurse uniforms move around on the stage. A pyramid from a dream, built for Cliff Diller. Pigpen bleeding. Ron with his decisive, deep voice proclaiming to all that he had the right to bleed in public. The audience sits in silence. I weep silently with tears streaming down my baby dyke cheeks. 142

Flash. I instruct Ron that he has to stay completely still without moving, and Cyril Kuhn has to keep his hand in Ron’s ass until we check the Polaroid image. It is like a performance: there are three camera operators, a group of people in chairs who have come to watch the shoot, and my two assistants. Ron stays still on the aluminium stool with his ass hugging a straight man’s hand past the wrist. It takes a total of five minutes until we know if the 10 Polaroid – measuring 10 feet by 40 inches – worked or not. The lens is mounted to the wall, and there is no focus for the lens. The camera is like a giant camera obscura, and I move the bodies in and out to find the sharpest point of focus. All the lights have to be out so as not to expose the Polaroid film before the shot; a lens cap is removed for a multiple flash of strobe heads, lighting up a scene in the dark. Everyone is silent in the folding chairs in the studio. In order for the photographs to work, a stage has been built, with risers. The camera is a room. Ron and I are, in my mind, a symbiotic entity in which we feed on our love of the perverse – a perversity that is not hidden behind dungeon doors. We giggle and laugh as we discuss what fucked-up things we want to do to people. I wonder if skin can be braided. Ron wants to push bodies to the brink, not only those of the people who perform with him, but more importantly to test his control over his own body. Some people faint, some stare like they’ve seen a bad car accident, others wonder why. The ‘why’ has its own place within the discourse; I am more interested in the purity of his vision than why he must make the work. As an artist, Ron has the purity of vision to follow through on his thoughts and perform the images that come into his mind’s eye. I get to photograph and capture that vision. There is a beautiful aesthetic harmony at work between us. I personally think Ron has survived because of his public-ness with bleeding. Flash. In the ‘hatchet pussy’ scene, a crown sits on the head of the king/ queen. Ron makes a pussy for himself without cutting off his cock, stapling it inside his scrotum. Hooks pull back his skin for a temporary messed-up facelift. Needles, hooks and staples are all props in the performance. I stand him in front of red satin curtains with oversized rope ties found in the finest estates. It is kitsch, a symbol, and Ron’s performance ideas percolate in a single image. The 13 images in the series work as a journey through the ideas, actions and personas in his performances, little vignettes from larger parts of Ron’s work. The shoot is choreographed in relationship to the blood that will fall. The whole cast is not there, but the relationship with Divinity Fudge (Darryl Carlton), who has performed with Ron for the past decade, is represented. There are images that I make in 143

the series that have nothing to do with the performances, but act as pauses, offstage for a moment. Ron drapes Leigh Bowery’s cloak over a single chair against a blue background. It is a moment of silence – for Leigh, for all. It is a stand-in for a moment of memorial. There is Darryl’s back with all the history of marks from ‘The Human Printing Press’ performances; marks of a history together, black body on a black background, another pause. Flash. Scaffolding is put in place for Ron to hang on. It is day two and the second-to-last image in the body of work. Large Polaroids lay drying. Colours of pink, blue, red, golden fabrics are strewn throughout the large studio, on man-made beds built for the perspective to be right. A blizzard has blown through New York, laying a silent blanket of white snow. The outside world matches the purity of what has taken place inside the studio. We are working on the ‘crown of thorns’ scene, in which we know the needles will come out of his head, covering his body with blood for Saint Sebastian. The team ties Ron in place hanging on the scaffold, and we place needles and large arrows through his skin. The background of green paper sweeps perfectly down. The focus has to be dead on, and the crew moves the scaffolding in and out by small increments until I find the focus on the wall behind the lens. A ghostly image appears upside down on the wall, and with a loop I check the sharpness. I yell, lock it down. For the next 23 minutes Ron needs to hang without moving whilst we remove the needles from his head. Blood streams down his body. His balls are enlarged and transformed by filling them with saline solution. The studio looks like a hospital gone awry, with carefully bagged and marked hazardous material and sharps containers filled with needles off to the side. Latex-covered hands remove the needles and blood pours down his body. The room goes dark and I talk to Ron, allowed to be the co-director just this once, to preserve a history of our time, of his and our mutual love for the work. In the darkness it is silent except for the dripping of blood and Ron’s rhythmic breathing. Flash. The scene appears as if conjured in a dream.

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Catherine Opie Ron Athey/Crown of Thorns wearing Leigh Bowery’s gown (from Martyrs & Saints) 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

Catherine Opie Untitled [Leigh Bowery’s Cape] 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

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Catherine Opie Ron Athey/Solar Anus (from The Solar Anus) 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

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Catherine Opie Fisting 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

Catherine Opie Ron Athey/Darryl Carlton as the Icon (from Deliverance) 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

Catherine Opie Ron Athey/Human Printing Press w/ Darryl Carlton (from 4 Scenes) 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

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Catherine Opie Darryl Carlton/Back 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

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Catherine Opie Ron Athey/The Sick Man (from Deliverance) 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

Catherine Opie Ron Athey/Pearl Necklace (from Trojan Whore) 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

Catherine Opie Ron Athey/Hatchet Pussy or Trojan Whore (from Trojan Whore) 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

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Catherine Opie Ron Athey/Suicide Bed (from 4 Scenes) 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

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Catherine Opie Ron Athey/Sebastian (from Martyrs & Saints) 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

Catherine Opie Ron Athey seated smoking 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie.

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H O W R O N AT H E Y M A K E S M E F E E L : THE POLITICAL POTENTIAL OF UPSE T TING ART A M E L I A JON E S [T]he fact that [Athey’s] work confronts us with our limits regarding things like blood and fear of contamination is not incidental to either its poetics or its meaning [...]. I suspect the enduring difficulty of Athey’s work is tied to the way that it mixes pleasure and pain – and does so in complex spectacles that speak to larger social experiences of belonging and alienation, care and abandonment, hope and despair. – Jennifer Doyle1

Jennifer Doyle, ‘Blood Work & “Art Criminals”’, Art: 21 blog (10 December 2008), http://blog.art21.org/ page/10/?s=gugg [accessed 13/09/11].

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Ron Athey’s work can be emotionally upsetting. Watching Athey perform or looking at a photograph of Athey’s bleeding, penetrated body, spectators may well find themselves upset by conflicted feelings of anger (‘that’s not art!’), empathy (‘ouch! That reminds me of my own suffering’), love (‘he is in pain and is offering himself to me… oh Ron!’), or revulsion (‘why is he forcing me to look at this?’) – or by some or all of these emotions at once. But Athey’s practice also upsets structures of art – systems of judgment by which we discuss, organize, curate, and otherwise make sense of the special domain of objects or performances we deem aesthetic. Athey’s work also upsets more recently elaborated models for understanding live or performance art, which often privilege the supposed presence or authenticity of the live while failing to accommodate specific emotions, reactions or modes of relational exchange. This essay focuses on the feelings Athey’s work expresses and elicits – the fact that his work in this way addresses feelings, but also the potential content and force of these feelings – in order to explore how it opens up circuits of intersubjective identification and desire that are fundamentally social and thus potentially political. My focus here is on how and why watching Athey’s work makes me feel so much, and on what these feelings feel like. Correlatively, I’m interested in what these feelings seem to open up in my (or possibly any spectator’s) relationship to Athey’s suffering body, suffering bodies in general, and thus potentially to political considerations of how we are in the world, and what we can do about suffering here, where we may be, and elsewhere.

I write this, it is important to say, as a scholar with ‘tools’ of analysis at my disposal, but also as a friend of Athey. As the former, I feel inadequate to Athey’s extremity and his brilliance; he writes like a star-crossed, pissed-off angel, like Antonin Artaud on a bender; and he performs like a cross between a madman (terrifying in his intensity) and a most desired lover (gentle, generous to an extreme). As a friend, there is nothing I can say to sum up what it means to know Ron personally (along with his deeply lived feminist and queer politics – which I admire, and aspire to in my own work – we share a birth year; somehow this, along with our mutual feelings of fear, hope and worry for the world, has cemented our friendship). Ron is tender and fierce as an artist and as a friend. Still, I will write this essay largely as an art historian, with a contrivance of some kind of ‘distance’ from Athey’s work, even though I experience each performance as if it is being done ‘just for me’. The critical distance is admittedly wilfully constructed. Simply emoting, getting over-involved in my feelings about and for Ron, would not be very interesting for readers, nor would it contribute anything greater to the understanding of why Athey’s work has created so much controversy, why so many fear or misunderstand it, and why, in short, it is so upsetting.

HE PERFORMS LIKE A CROSS BET WEEN A MADMAN (TERRIF YING IN HIS INTENSIT Y) AND A MOST DESIRED L O V E R (G E N T L E , G E N E R O U S TO A N E X T R E M E ) This exploration, then, will take the form of several spontaneous forays through remembered feelings (recountings of my experience of engaging with various of his performances and images) interwoven with theoretical inquiries and the noting of historical points of context in order to flesh out these feelings, to substantiate my claim that, through this very capacity to upset, they have the potential to politicize the viewer. My contention is that the emotions Athey’s work inspires are sparks that might, with the right conditions, leap into flame, reminding us that suffering in others must be addressed, that we must acknowledge our hurts but go beyond them, look outward, in order to engage with others. Inspiring both righteous opprobrium on the part of congressmen and critics, and delirious appreciation from many audience members and from the art, performance and BDSM communities, Athey’s work must be taken seriously as among the most important art and performance practices today. Activating extreme reactions, Athey’s works thus point to the complexities of living with illness and pain; his acts of bodily harming are quintessentially turn of the twenty-first century strategies of aesthetic engagement, attending to the failure of the subject articulated in Enlightenment to modern European thought.

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Ron Athey, Solar Anus (2006), Hayward Gallery, London. Photo by Regis Hertrich.

Athey in Martin O’Brien, ‘A Dialogue with Ron Athey’, Martin O’Brien Performance (14 February 2011), http:// martinobrienperformance.weebly.com/ dialogues-ron-athey.html [accessed 16/09/11]. All published interviews and dialogues with Athey are powerful, but this one, to my mind, is the most riveting as he gets deep into questions of suffering, illness, queer and death with O’Brien, a cystic fibrosis sufferer and performance artist. Thanks to Lisa Newman for pointing out this dialogue to me.

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See also Patrick Califia’s description of his experience of Solar Anus in ‘The Winking Eye of Ron Athey’, Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex (San Francisco: Cleis, 2002), pp. 357–64. Califia reminds me that Solar Anus often begins with a film of Athey having his asshole tattooed.

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For a critique of Abramović’s piece, see my ‘“The Artist is Present”: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence’, TDR: The Drama Review, 55: 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 16–45.

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Solar Anus: Opening the frame to Athey’s ‘eroticised, penetrated, glistening’2 body I am on the front row of the audience at Ron Athey’s performance of Solar Anus in 2006 at the Hayward Gallery in London. A grotesquely over-made-up face, pinned back by hooks attached to a gold crown; a heel penetrating an anus tattooed with a sunburst; a seemingly never-ending string of pearls, drawn forth out of this asshole ringed by the glorious rays of the sun… arm shaking, body completely tense with effort and sweating (I am close enough to see, hear and smell the straining body), drops of fluid emerging with the pearls, dripping unceremoniously on the floor. Flesh, sweat, the sound of effort (a muted grunt here and there), and, if I listen very carefully as the huge number of spectators holds our collective breaths, the gentle clicking sounds of pearls as they coalesce in a pile, having been removed from the artist’s sphincter.3 Yet aside from his obvious physical effort, Athey is calm, largely emotionless. He is not screaming his outrage (like Karen Finley in her most inspiring moments) nor is he creating spectacular situations in which staged ‘emotions’ can take place (as in Marina Abramović’s recent installation, The Artist is Present [2010] at Museum of Modern Art, New York).4 He is just doing what he needs

to do to turn his body inside out, honouring (as he likes to put it) the asshole as a kind of sacred site of potential eroticism: ‘skin is the deepest organ, wide is the new deep’.5 Athey’s work pushes the very understanding of what ‘art’ might be: art as the turning inside out of the body, as the effort of casting pearls before swine (first extracting them from anal regions – in an act of deliberate de-sublimation?); art as the pain of controlling the body so that it makes an image of abjection that is at the same time an image of glorious sensuality and visual, aural and emotionally charged opulence. Solar Anus in just this briefly excerpted set of vignettes marks the power of Athey’s work to make us feel – sparking awareness of our fear to open our bodily contours to unpredictable fluids and, correlatively, sensory input. The work points to the prohibition in European aesthetics against that which escapes the ‘frame’ of its logic. Aesthetics, as philosopher Jacques Derrida notes, is the mechanism by which ‘meaning, as inner content, and form’ is staged as a meeting of opposites.6 But Athey upsets this formula, collapsing ‘inner content’ into ‘form’ in the most literal way (note his comment on skin above). For Athey, the creating body is no longer solely the origin of the work, but also its frame and its content; the slop from inside the creating body is no longer kept neatly inside – it spills out, staining the frame of the aesthetic (literally wetting the pearls, which might signify the pretentions of high culture). Then again, the slop is no longer

THE ASSHOLE AS A KIND OF SACRED SITE OF POTENTIAL EROTICISM: ‘SKIN IS THE DEEPEST ORGAN, WIDE IS THE NEW DEEP’ hidden and shameful. It is arrayed with pearls, part of the energy of sexual being in the world. In Derrida’s terms, Athey draws on that which would have been excluded as ‘surplus’, or repressed as abject and bodily, enacting these elements as the work of art. This is highly disturbing to the aesthetic. Athey’s performance of course brings into embodied, narrative time the excoriating yet joyous exuberance of Georges Bataille’s essay ‘Solar Anus’ (1929), reminding us that Bataille and his surrealist colleagues had seen the potential of this strategy of exploding the frame of the aesthetic early on in the heyday of high modernism: ‘And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy. […] Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation’. The glue that holds together Bataille’s raucous and passionate thoughts (‘an umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs’) is ‘the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love’.7 Or, as Athey describes his acts of self-penetration and/or self-fisting: ‘What interests me more than that is the split within the body when performing something physical, the half feeling it, half electrical suspended reality of injury or anal penetration, and how that crackling split experience can be channelled

Athey, in dialogue, as published in Thomas John Bacon, ‘Traces of Being: A Document of Absence in Words’, Activate, 1.1 (2011). I am grateful to Jennifer Doyle for sending me this article.

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Jacques Derrida, Truth in Painting (1978), trans. by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 21.

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Bataille, ‘Solar Anus’ (1929), Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, trans. by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 5–6. As Athey and others have noted, he is also, in Solar Anus, drawing on the SM self-portrait photographs of cross-dresser Pierre Molinier (1900–76).

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Ron Athey, Solar Anus (2006), Hayward Gallery, London. Photo by Regis Hertrich.

Athey in O’Brien, ‘A Dialogue with Ron Athey’.

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ibid. Athey notes here that his work is most closely indebted to that of ‘Gina Pane, Marina Abramović, VALIE EXPORT, Carolee Schneemann, Linda Montano, Ana Mendieta, the ladies!’ and traces a line of political and artistic energy from ‘body art to feminism to ACT UP-era activism’, all linked to his practice.

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10 See my discussion of this work in ‘Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s Judas Cradle’, TDR: The Drama Review, 50.1 (2006), pp. 159–69. 11 Athey in Dominic Johnson, ‘Perverse Martyrologies: An Interview with Ron Athey’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 18. 4 (2008), pp. 503–13 (p. 506). 12 Ron Athey, ‘Deliverance: Introduction, Foreword, Description, and Selected Text’, Acting on AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Politics, ed. by Joshua Oppenheimer and Helena Reckitt (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), p. 430.

Johnson, ‘Perverse Martyrologies’, p. 508. See Athey’s ‘assholeography’ of his work in this text, p. 507.

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Athey, ‘Deliverance: Introduction, Foreword, Description, and Selected Text’, pp. 435 & 431.

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15 Johnson, ‘Perverse Martyrologies’, p. 508.

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into movement articulations’.8 These bodily actions theatricalize Athey’s indecorous straddling of gender divides of all kinds (as he has put it, ‘I am an extreme mix of butch and femme in one reality’).9 (This straddling is literalized in his adoption of operatic, feminizing excess, and apparently excruciatingly painful self-impalement on a medieval torture device – a Judas cradle – in his 2004–05 performances of that title, co-created with opera singer Juliana Snapper.)10 Presented as ‘art’, Athey’s action is ‘parodic’, in Bataille’s sense (for Athey, Bataille’s idea of the ‘solar anus’ exposes ‘the magic tricks inherent in the anus’); but in contrast to Bataille’s version, Athey’s elicits rather than eschews an emotionally charged interpretation.11 It opens the performer’s body to the audience so that we must give meaning to this body in the durational moments of our proximity to these sounds, images and smells. It does this, as I will argue below, through its exaggerated engagement of spectacle. As Athey has noted, ‘[i]n my performance material, I am guilty of enhancing my history, situation and surroundings into a perfectly depicted apocalypse, or at least a more visual atrocity’; Athey’s work is always visually, aurally, and otherwise excessive and theatrical.12 At the same time, Bataille is surely right in suggesting that this meaning is confused, confusing and inchoate, as would be any quality pierced and/or motivated by the erotic. Athey thus also writes of his visceral awareness of the fact that he is dying, and his grasping for life – ‘learning to love the monster’ of his own illness13 – is played out via an explicit eroticism; a kind of ‘testifying’ that merges the signs and excess of religious ecstasy, learned in his childhood through his fundamentalist Pentecostal faith, with images of erotic and aggressive acts such as fist-fucking, mutual cutting and penetration with dildos.14 Athey stresses he is not interested in ‘shock’ (and indeed performs largely to audiences in clubs or art venues that will be prepared at least in the abstract for his extreme acts) but in ‘generosity’, in giving what is usually withheld from public view.15 Too, there are other striking differences between Bataille’s solar anus and Athey’s. For Bataille, heterosexual coitus is the only causal

force (the ‘origin’ of the world): ‘the male shaft penetrating the female and almost entirely emerging, in order to reenter […]. Beings only die to be born, in the manner of phalluses that leave bodies only to enter them’.16 For Athey, coitus is emphatically queer, autoerotic, and enacted as art. Art is marked as onanistic, yet opening to the other (after all, Athey’s Solar Anus would not ‘work’ without its audience; we are there to witness Athey’s self-penetration). Art is a mess in Bataille’s and Athey’s world views, yet a magnificent one which opens us to the frisson of reactions, of felt responses – and thus to potential changes in our own feelings and conceptions of erotic selfhood. This mess of art is what gives political potential to these practices. By enacting Bataille’s ‘Solar Anus’, having his anus tattooed with a sun and auto-erotically penetrating himself with the heel of a shoe in the performance, Athey reminds us that ‘art’ (things made by people, whom we determine to be artists, and thus things that we view in some way as ‘expressive’ of that artist/person) at its best transforms life into meaning-making, reattaching creative work firmly to its social regimes (contexts of making, disseminating, displaying, interpreting). This transformation is not mystical. To the contrary, it is textured, tied to embodiment that is brute and immanent, and highly politicized. Performing his own tattooed ‘solar anus’ in public – and as an orifice rather than as a sealed or completed fetish or picture of the body – is Athey’s way of using the frame of the aesthetic to pull us back into social/erotic relation with one another.

Left: Ron Athey, Solar Anus (1998). Still from a performance for video. Video by Cyril Kuhn. Right: Ron Athey, Solar Anus (2006), Hayward Gallery, London. Photo by Regis Hertrich.

Feeling in/as art: Other examples to clarify Nineteenth-century modernist artists and theorists in Europe, particularly the Romantics, tended to embrace emotional excess. But by the early twentieth century, with the rise of the historic avant-gardes, the cutting edge of artistic production and aesthetic theory eschewed – if not violently rejected – the idea of art as an expression of feeling. The Dadaists, for example, parodied the very idea of the artwork as expressive of human feeling by presenting monkeys in the guise of ‘Cézanne’, as in Francis Picabia’s 1920 image for the journal Cannibale,

Bataille, ‘Solar Anus’, p. 9. Bataille’s ruminations are self-hating, but also misogynistic; the latter of course is typical of much surrealist literature and art: ‘I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night […]. The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night’.

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or by putting bottle racks and other mass-produced objects on pedestals, signing them, and calling them art (per Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades from the 1910s). Furthermore, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, architectural purists such as Adolf Loos, the constructivists and the productivists scoffed at the inclusion of any elements other than the most instrumental and rational in artistic or architectural form. While in the post-war period in the US, the abstract expressionists were touted as ‘expressive’ in various ways, the most influential critics of the movement, such as Clement Greenberg, addressed their work in terms of pure form, autonomous from individual feeling or social context. Thus abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko famously claimed in 1957, ‘I am not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else […]. I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on’.17 But three years later, Greenberg asserted: The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence […]. Thereby each art would be rendered ‘pure,’ and in its ‘purity’ will find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well of its independence.18

17 Rothko cited in Daniel Wheeler, Art Since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 50.

Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960/61), The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), pp. 67–68.

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Survey textbooks, such as Jonathan Fineberg’s Strategies of Being: Art Since 1940 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1995), epitomize this double-edged use of claims of emotional authenticity among the abstract expressionists, which allow Fineberg to promote his existentialist account of contemporary art, while relying also on the disinterestedness claimed for modernist criticism in general by presenting a singular history based on a lineage of geniuses (Fineberg opens his ‘Preface’ with the following: ‘It is my view that great works of art arise from the effort of exceptional individuals to come to terms with the facts of their existence’ [p. 13]).

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As is well known, Greenberg’s rationalism dominated art criticism and art history well into the 1970s, and the emotion-fuelled rhetoric of some of the more difficult-to-contain abstract expressionist artists, such as Rothko, was largely repressed or used only strategically to confirm white male artistic genius while allowing critical claims of ‘disinterestedness’ to remain dominant in survey histories of contemporary art.19 Of course, things began to change after 1960. Challenging the prohibition on allowing emotions to pollute the rational purity of Euro-American high modernism in its twentieth-century guises, for example, a handful of artists since 1970 – most of them feminist, queer, or inspired by the feminist and queer movements – began explicitly to activate affect, expressing or conveying excessive feelings in order to encourage emotional responses in return. Athey’s work draws on this legacy, with reference to the sensual and thematic excesses of the earlier avant-garde figures such as Bataille, whose work had long been marginalized in Anglo-American histories of modernism by the prohibition on emotion. Subsequently, I want to look more closely at how Athey’s work makes me feel, opening me to tender and often uncomfortable sadness, fear, love, longing and joy; and of how this feeling translates into a spark towards political awareness.

Dominic Johnson ‘spewing light’ from a mirror-encrusted butt-plug in Ron Athey and Dominic Johnson, Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound) (2007), Chelsea Theatre, London. Photo by Regis Hertrich.

Aesthetics, ‘structures of feeling’ and the social dimension of art In Athey’s ‘Torture Trilogy’ of the early 1990s and his Incorruptible Flesh series, performed since the late 1990s, he explores a range of complex intersubjective modes of caretaking, hurting and love, paralleling his coming to terms with being HIV-positive (since 1986) and watching friend after friend die. As Athey has noted, ‘AIDS destroyed my world, so, how to go forward?’; and the Incorruptible Flesh works were characterized by the manifestation of ‘living corpse[s]’.20 At the same time, these works manifest a triumph over what had seemed to be a death sentence. Athey says he now considers himself ‘post-AIDS’, and weirdly traumatized by ‘the loss of my own death cloud’.21 The third and final part of the latter series, Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound) (2007), performed with Dominic Johnson in London and Birmingham, worked for me as both a love story about two people trying to communicate, and a difficult tale of the violent hurting of the self and the other which occurs in any intense human relationship – here activated at the level of actual bodily wounding. The hurting is personal, linked to the most intimate feelings, and yet also spectacularized, rendered imagistic and epic and sentimental. The hurting thus speaks to broader political concerns: bodies/selves that are suffering because of their desire to love particular other subjects prohibited by law and/or cultural opprobrium, for example.

20 Athey in Johnson, ‘Perverse Martyrologies’, p. 508.

Athey, e-mail to the author, 9 February 2012.

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Perpetual Wound is gloriously spectacular, and opens with a scene of Johnson dressed in a centurion helmet, jockstrap and SM harness. He opens his hands, which have mirrors coating them; light then blazes from his hands as it reflects on the mirrors and shines into the audience – we are showered with shards of light. He then turns around on his hands and knees and exposes a mirrored surface in his ass, which spews light outward. Is this another exemplar of the solar anus? The toughest and most emotionally painful and moving image of the performance, for me, was the following: the two performers dance jerkily together as both of them bleed from a deep wound in their right legs (inflicted by Athey with a very sharp arrow). Athey pushes Johnson down to the ground, forcibly again and again – and then, face-to-face, they rub their legs against a pane of glass held between them, smearing blood along both sides of the screen. They are both joined and yet forever separated as they move together. The scene is lugubrious and dark, the metallic smell and the squelching sound of blood hover in the air. (There is something deeply moving about the performers’ seemingly inexorable, repetitive dance, their failed desire to connect, to mesh.) Ultimately, Athey is lying on a rack and Johnson smears him with mud. He appears to be dead. Then Johnson hangs himself upside down by the feet and immerses his head in water for several minutes, seemingly far beyond the capacity to remain alive without a breathing device. Witnessing, I catch my own breath in anxious fear of drowning (in water? in feelings?) A gorgeous metaphor for what it feels like to love someone so much you fear being consumed? Could the experience of art possibly attain such heights, trigger such a fear? Perpetual Wound is a twenty-first century version of Caravaggio’s fabulously melodramatic painting Conversion of St. Paul (1601), or Bernini’s infamous rendering in stone of an orgasmic female saint in his Ecstasy of St. Teresa (ca. 1650) – moments of religious/erotic ecstasy (extreme terror and joy) frozen in paint and stone. Just as images of excess in baroque art were aimed towards coalescing a community of believers by meshing the sensual and erotic with the spectacular (and ‘holy’), so with Athey’s excessive performances a community of shared suffering might emerge – witnesses who can go outward into the world with a more nuanced and vulnerable sense of what it means to experience pain because of the forbidden trajectories of one’s own desires, because of illness, because of the way in which the fears of others project dirt and ugliness onto the glorious rays of the sun that illuminate your most proud nether regions which, for you, might be the most important site of erotic pleasure. With works such as Solar Anus and Perpetual Wound, Athey reminds us that art is nothing if not always already about desire and politics, of one sort or another. Art activates an erotic and social connection, a matter of feeling and thought intertwined (with the feeling pushing the thought, sometimes rupturing the tendency to intellectualize 160

among people who go to see art and performances). Through this activation, its meaning and value take place. In order to understand more specifically how this activation of feeling leads to social meaning and potentially to politicized effects, I turn now to theories that address aesthetics and affect. For all aesthetic theory, whether directly or not, must address the subjective dimension of our apprehension of the objects and performances we call ‘art’, and thus open the door to feeling. So much was acknowledged from the earliest articulations of modern aesthetics in the work of Immanuel Kant. But Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) set the stage for modernism’s avoidance or repression of affect in its careful framing of art as that which must be apprehended without bodily need or desire.

Overleaf: Ron Athey and Dominic Johnson, Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound) (2007), Chelsea Theatre, London. Photos by Regis Hertrich.

AT H E Y ’ S P E R F O R M A N C E S E N AC T A N D S U G G E S T A F E E L I N G O F P A I N , O F F E R I N G T H I S T O ( S O M E M I G H T S AY FORCING I T ON) T HE MEMBERS OF T HE AUDIENCE In the Critique of Judgment, Kant thus famously insists that art must demand and entail a ‘disinterested’ attitude. ‘Taste,’ Kant writes, ‘is the faculty of estimating an object or a mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest’.22 Art cannot provoke or elicit desire, appetite or feeling; were it to make us hungry, for example, it would be food;23 were it to make us desire sex it would be an actual body in the world. Art must transcend the body, its desires and feelings. Any individual desires must be disavowed or repressed for Kant’s model of aesthetic judgment to work: for Kant, art commands a special regime of response, one of ‘subjective universality’, where the individual response to the work can be argued to extend to the domain of the ‘universal’.24 In this way, the aesthetic requires an erasure or repression of the dimension of feeling or personal response. Athey’s performances enact and suggest a feeling of pain, offering this to (some might say forcing it on) the members of the audience: the codified production of hurt translates visually (and aurally, and often through smell and implied touch) to remind us of our own potential fragility as physical and emotional beings in the world. This presentation reminds us to be afraid, but for the right reasons (for example, to be afraid of the emotional and material costs of political hate-mongering and human suffering, rather than to fear people who have a difficult-to-transmit virus such as HIV). Athey’s acts of corporeal self-wounding, purveyed through exquisitely staged narratives and images drawn from sources as diverse as the work of Pierre Molinier, Richard Wagner, Bataille and Jean Genet, make it impossible to disconnect emotions and shared bodily sensations from aesthetic effect. Athey’s work elicits a bodily response that is also always already an affective and aesthetic response. Athey’s practice, I am arguing here, is remarkable in its expansive capacity to join these different – completely incompatible in

Kant, coda to §5 ‘Comparison of the three specifically different kinds of delight’, Part I: Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Critique of Judgment (1790). A print version can be found in the facsimile edition Critique of Judgment, trans. by James Creed Meredith (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p. 35.

22

See Kant, §4 ‘Delight in the good is coupled with interest’, p. 32.

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24 See Kant, §8 ‘In a judgment of taste the universality of delight is only represented as subjective’, p. 37. Kant’s argument is subtle and complex; he retains a tension between the requirement to insist that aesthetic judgment be universal (required because otherwise art would have no ontological basis and anything could be called art or appreciated as such), and his acknowledgment that art can only be apprehended through the individual’s senses. This subtlety is lost in most modernist art theory and criticism (particularly formalism) in the twentieth century.

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conventional aesthetics – levels of human experience. Kant’s aesthetic model, as channelled and simplified in modernist theory, encouraged the separation of emotion from logic, of things or commodities from transcendent artworks, of objects from subjects, deploying binaries and categories through which the philosopher would make sense of the world. But such strategies of sense-making no longer hold. Expanding on and ratifying certain insights of the feminist, LGBT and queer movements, and earlier body art and SM performance in the art and music worlds, Athey’s work makes this clear. Hence an attention to Athey’s work is a means of understanding the rendering obsolete of the modernist logic of aesthetics, or the refiguring of art through bodily and conceptual challenges since the 1960s; and a way of thinking about developing new modes of critical engagement with art that accommodate post-1960s articulations of bodies and feelings in the aesthetic realm. Athey’s acts of eliciting feeling through the visual signs of suffering have social effects, and remind us of specific aspects of the political context in which he is been immersed and to which he has responded; he has shaped this context as well as being shaped by it. In his 1977 essay ‘Structures of Feeling’, cultural theorist Raymond Williams bravely addressed the (at the time) completely forbidden topic of emotions in relation to art and culture, and offers a brief but useful theory of the expression of feeling as pointing to the social. In particular, for Williams feeling in art provokes feeling responses – and this intersubjective relation has social and political effects: [T]o complete their inherent process, we have to make [works of art] present, in specifically active ‘readings.’ It is also that the making of art is never itself in the past tense. It is always a formative process, within a specific present […]. [In terms of the meaning of art,] the actual alternative to the received and produced fixed forms is not silence: not the absence, the unconscious, which bourgeois culture has mythicized. It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange.25

Raymond Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’, Marxism and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 129–31.

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As Williams makes clear, because we perceive the work of art as an expression of the artist’s personal suffering, pleasure and joy, art has the capacity to link inexorably the subject of its past making with the subject of its current interpretation, through its affective sparking of political and social meanings. Williams’ argument thus allows us to frame Athey’s work in relation to the political urgency of the rights movements. Since the 1960s, the rights movements in the US have motivated artists to seduce, anger or otherwise elicit emotional attachments, or provoke repulsions in relation to audience members such that the erasure of feeling became more difficult if not (as in viewing Solar Anus) virtually impossible. With the rise of feminist,

LGBT, black and Chicano art movements from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the AIDS crisis and further rise of gay activism in the 1980s and 1990s, it became increasingly imperative to reject the closures of modernism, those models of ascertaining aesthetic value and meaning that, it turned out, were hardly ‘disinterested’ at all. It became increasingly clear that the erasure or repression of emotion was part of the larger repudiation of all aspects of desire and embodiment in modernism; a repudiation that enabled the continuing exclusion of non-mainstream subjects with embarrassingly needy, injured, angry and otherwise politicized bodies/selves from the art world.

AT T E N T I O N TO F E E L I N G C H A L L E N G E S T H E L I N G E R I N G I N S I S T E N C E O N A E S T H E T I C D I S TA N C E , AS A KEY REQUIREMENT OF FORMALIST CRITICISM Many artists were angry and increasingly politicized from the later 1960s onward.26 In this context, artists performed their bodies as art to make viewers connect in emotionally resonant ways, for example: Yoko Ono instructing audience members to cut off her clothing in the 1964–65 performances of Cut Piece in New York, Tokyo, and Kyoto; Carolee Schneemann, based in New York, produces Interior Scroll in 1975, in which she undresses, paints her body, and pulls a scroll from her vagina, assertively reading a text about excluding the messiness of the body from artistic consideration; New York-based artist Adrian Piper handing out her Calling Card in the mid-1980s, a creatively reworked version of a business card with a text admonishing people who treated her in a racist fashion. Projects such as these were insistent reminders to art publics at the time that bodies mattered, that the specific identifications of the artist determine in part the social status and aesthetic value ascribed to the work. And if bodies mattered, desire was put front and centre, and feelings mattered – one can’t be included without the other. Attention to feeling challenges the lingering insistence on aesthetic distance, as a key requirement of formalist criticism that remained in place even into the 1980s with the rise of postmodern theory. Because feeling continued to have no easy or accepted place in art discourse, these works were not included in ‘serious’ art criticism nor integrated into histories and theories of contemporary art until the late 1990s.27 And until very recently, if they were included, they were not discussed in terms of the feelings or affect they expressed and/or elicited. Artists have certainly not been encouraged to express overt or excessive emotions; correlatively, critics, historians and curators have not been encouraged to deal with how particular art practices, works or strategies tended to affect viewers on an emotional level. If artists such as Barbara T. Smith, Lorraine O’Grady, Karen Finley or Ron Athey embraced intimacy, raged or cried in their work, this was largely considered an embarrassment, and the work (or at least the emotive

26 On the rise of art activism and art that used personal hurts to explore political situations, see Jennifer González and Adrienne Posner, ‘Facture for Change: US Activist Art since 1950’, A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, ed. by Amelia Jones (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2006), pp. 212–28. 27 Peggy Phelan has addressed feeling since her important Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993); see also Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York: Routledge, 1997). See also Rebecca Schneider’s The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997). From an art historical point of view, authors have addressed the more emotive kinds of body art since the late 1990s: see my Body Art/ Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998); and Jane Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). Note that all of this research is in fact on body or performance art, which provides the ideal conditions for foregrounding embodiment, desire and feelings.

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Premature Ejaculation (Ron Athey and Rozz Williams), untitled performance for camera, Los Angeles, 1982. Photo by Karen Filter.

I am thinking here specifically of Barbara Smith’s tender yet anger-driven food and sex rituals in the early 1970s, the angry actions of Lorraine O’Grady as ‘Mlle. Bourgeois Noire’ from 1980–83. See Jennie Klein on the embarrassing aspect of dealing with Barbara Smith’s interest in ritual and feeling in her work of the early 1970s, ‘Feeding the Body: The Work of Barbara Smith’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 21. 1 (1999), pp. 24–35.

28

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act) was ignored.28 The exclusion of feminist, anti-racist and queer art from canonical histories of art published in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, thus had as much to do with excluding angry, emotionfilled and explicitly political art from critical, historical or curatorial consideration, as it did with the more obvious sexism, racism and homophobia at play in art history and its related discourses. All of this started to change, as noted, with the rise of the rights movements, but it has taken a long time for emotions – for the uncontainable feelings radical art practices, often involving performance, express and elicit – to be taken seriously. Athey’s work, among the most excessive and overtly affect-driven art practices known internationally today, has been important to changing this bias against feelings. Athey’s life and practice has been informed by and formative to feminist and queer art and art theory. It has been galvanized by personal suffering, as well as by the collective pain on the part of gays and other queers subjected not only to the ravages of the AIDS epidemic since the early 1980s, but to the hostility of the US government in dealing (or not) with HIV-positive Americans. Energized through these social contexts, Athey’s work has persistently provoked intense feelings and responses that reciprocally spark the viewer or participant to be reminded of the heated (emotive, messy,

unpredictable) sources of the work’s expressive force. And in turn, these sources point to the implicit activism of work such as Athey’s: the act of ‘auto-erotic ecstatic self-fisting’ as a nominally HIV-positive 50-year old, he has noted, is not ‘strategize[d] as activism’, but the activism is ‘embedded’ and returns at the moment of reception to prick the spectator and remind her of her own holes.29 Attending to how his work does this – pricks us to make us feel, to make us reattach to our own hurts and our own socially embedded place in the world – is a way of insisting on taking feeling seriously in understanding the full range of effects of post-1960s art, and body art in particular, in the EuroAmerican context.30

Politicizing feeling More specifically in terms of the ‘kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material’ which Williams emphasizes, Athey emerged out of the underground punk club scene in 1980s Los Angeles, where he performed with Rozz Williams as the collaborative duo Premature Ejaculation, and then became a central performer in Club FUCK!, a Los Angeles venue that Athey has described as ‘a fusion of the Modern Primitive [tattooing and body-piercing] ethos at its most boiling, crossed with the rudest period of the short-lived Queer Nation activists […]. Sexually charged, exhibitionist behaviour rattled through this group like an affirmation of life’.31 Athey was a key early figure working across media to expand SM performance into art and performance venues. Early on, Athey was drawing on the energy of other modes of creative work – music, SM ritual, body-marking, and just plain activist trouble-making – in order to push the existing discourses of art to the limit, demanding that bodily reactions (including feeling) play a role in how art is made, interpreted, and comes to mean in our culture. By the early 1990s Athey was staging his ‘Torture Trilogy’ (including striking works in which he takes the martyred role of Saint Sebastian) in explicitly visual arts contexts. For Athey, the suffering saint epitomized the survival of the AIDS body: ‘The archetype of the suffering body is so graphically and richly represented in paintings of the martyr saints, that I soaked my head in them’.32 In 1994 he was involved in a national scandal in the US. Athey presented sections from his epic 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life at Patrick’s Cabaret in Minneapolis, sponsored by the Walker Art Center; billed as Excerpted Rites Transformation, the event was reported sensationally in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, by a journalist, Mary Abbe, who hadn’t seen the show.33 Abbe described the act of Athey cutting and tending to the wounds of fellow performer Darryl Carlton (Divinity Fudge), and hoisting the blood-stained paper towels from this act of caretaking into the air via a pulley. Interestingly, as Jennifer Doyle has pointed out, this was the only part of the performance involving intimate acts between two men – most of the performance was ‘much more queer and much centered on […] bull-daggers’.34 And, while Carlton was not HIV-positive, Athey

Athey in O’Brien, ‘A Dialogue with Ron Athey’. On being reminded of one’s holes, see my elaborated interpretive essay on Athey’s Judas Cradle with Juliana Snapper in Jones’ ‘Holy Body’.

29

Surely many of these points would stand in relation to radical practices coming out of, say, China as well, but I cannot claim extensive knowledge of that work so I am keeping my comments to the Euro-American context.

30

31 Athey in Johnson, ‘Perverse Martyrologies’, p. 510.

Athey in O’Brien ‘A Dialogue with Ron Athey’.

32

For a detailed analysis, see Dominic Johnson’s chapter in this publication.

33

34 Jennifer Doyle, e-mail to the author, 19 September 2011. For an account of how poorly even the mainstream gay press, such as The Advocate, responded to this 1994 controversy, see Califia, ‘The Winking Eye of Ron Athey’, p. 359.

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has been since 1986; this distinction, not to mention the fact that HIV cannot be transmitted in such a fashion, however, was glossed to produce a fear-mongering account of the event. As Athey has put it, 1994: The polemics of AIDS blood, or how I became the Typhoid Mary of performance art. Or really, how the distortions of media reporting fanned the flames of HIV-phobia. Briefly, after the whole sterilisation and latex glove ritual, I incised a scarification pattern into the back of Darryl Carlton, made imprints from the wound, which was then run out on lines over the audience. Carlton, not HIV positive, became guilty by association, and the story went, that blood was either dripping or being thrown onto the audience.35 

Athey in O’Brien, ‘A Dialogue with Ron Athey’.

35

36 Correlatively, the failure on the part of the Left to accommodate religious or spiritual aspects of personal and cultural experience has led to the easy appropriation of discourses of faith and belief on the part of the Right, particularly in the US. I write about this in Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York and London: Routledge, 2012).

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An explicitly queer performance, particularly in its focus on crossgendered relationships among variously sexually expressive masculine and feminine bodies, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life nonetheless provided the one scene that exacerbated anxieties relating to the AIDS crisis, then at its height. Athey’s 4 Scenes unfortunately afforded journalists and politicians in the US Congress a symbolic means to generate fear and homophobic sentiment among the general public, largely with the apparent goal of demonizing ‘Left’ culture and appealing to increasingly conservative constituencies. This one performance – in support of which a mere $150 was funded by a general National Endowment of the Arts grant to the Walker – contributed to ongoing debates in Congress about federal arts funding, and spurred Jane Alexander, then Chair of the NEA, to defend Athey’s project. Along with the ‘NEA Four’ – Tim Miller, John Fleck, Karen Finley and Holly Hughes – Athey was scapegoated by US politicians and the mass media as epitomizing the dangers and excess of left-wing culture and art. There is a strange and dangerous irony here, and it has to do with feelings. One of the reasons such reactionary efforts among the media and politicians in the US have worked so well is, I would argue, that artists, art critics, curators and historians have allowed (or even forced) feeling to fall out of the picture.36 Without some attention paid to the emotions raised by loving, angry, visceral practices such as Athey’s – or Karen Finley’s, similarly scapegoated during the culture wars – the work becomes fair game for right-wingers themselves intent – ironically – on using feeling (usually politicized variants of ‘outrage’ about public morals and public funding) in order to further their own political ends. At the same time, the feelings they evoke are disingenuous. Far from directly addressing the anxiety they obviously experience at the very thought of HIV-infected blood, they veil and distort these feelings under fulminating rhetoric supposedly bent on establishing the true cultural meaning and value of the work. Hence, as Williams’ essay suggests, from a Marxian, left-wing cultural theory perspective, it is politically imperative to return emotions to discussions of how art works, and how it comes to mean and have value

Athey being released from the ‘crown of thorns’ in Ron Athey and Company, 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994), Patrick’s Cabaret, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Still from a video recording by Lawrence Steger.

(including negative value, as with Athey and the NEA Four) on various registers: personally, in art world discourse, and in the broader social arena. As Williams’ arguments suggest, it is crucial to return emotions to the picture, but also explicitly to reclaim the arena of feelings for a progressive or radical political agenda. Given the resistance of critical thinking about art to dealing with feeling until very recently, how does one theorize, write about or in any way seek to understand the work of an artist who has for three decades relentlessly pushed beyond our capacity to sustain aesthetic ‘distance’ in relation to his work? Clearly one must attend to the specific emotions expressed and elicited (such as, in 1994, anxieties about HIV infection, before medical advances later in the 1990s made the virus less deadly for those who had access to new drugs), and to the strategies mobilized in Athey’s works to stir and provoke our feelings. But also one must theorize how feeling is working in Athey’s performances. For that, I turn to Rei Terada, who theorizes affect and subjectivity in her book Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’ (2001).37 This capacity of Athey’s work to interrelate aspects of experience that had been kept firmly separate in high modernism is the focus of my ruminations here. How does the work work on me? How does it thus create a personal connection with the artist’s suffering, and the context of his making and thinking this work, and thus in turn, per Williams’ arguments, spark potential social effects? Along with Williams’ early ruminations on feelings, Terada’s book marks a growing willingness, particularly since around 2000, to think about emotional effects in relation to art and culture.38 To some degree, these theories of affect resonate with pre-twentieth century modernist ideas of art linked to European romanticism. According to this earlier, pre-avant-gardist model of modernism, art is that which makes us feel something

Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). Terada’s book was recommended to me by Jennifer Doyle, who draws on it in articulating a theory of feeling in art in Hold It Against Me: +PMÄJ\S[`HUK,TV[PVUPU*VU[LTWVYHY` Art (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 37

See the new work emerging in this area: Jill Bennett, Empathetic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); José Esteban Muñoz, Feeling Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming); Doyle, Critical Limits. See also Doyle’s important essay, ‘Critical Tears: Franko B’s I Miss You’, Franko B: Blinded by Love, ed. by Dominic Johnson (Bologna: Damiani, 2006), pp. 41–47. 38

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39

Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’, p. 132.

Jameson’s essay was first published in New Left Review in 1984 and reprinted in revised form in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). For Terada’s critique of Jameson, see Feeling Theory, pp. 1–2.

40

41 As theorized by Roland Barthes in his 1967 article ‘Death of the Author’, where he was positing the impossibility of unmediated intentionality in authorship; this article is often misunderstood and misquoted as stating that the author is completely irrelevant in postmodernism, that the subject is ‘dead’. See Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977).

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that cannot, in fact, be instrumentalized (in spite of the tendency of discourses on art to attempt to rationalize its meanings and effects, and to rationalize away its affects). And yet, as Williams points out, art is also, through this feeling, inexorably rooted to structures of social relation and ways of being common to specific communities, areas and generations of viewers. It is through feeling that we connect with the making of the work, inasmuch as we have access to imagining the processes, desires and social pressures that informed this making. In ‘Structures of Feeling’, Williams thus attempts to explore ‘meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt’, rather than imposing them via predetermined ideas about ‘world view’ or aesthetic transcendence.39 Meaning, as he argues in the quote I cited earlier, is determined through the ‘exchange’ that occurs across and over time between the person engaging the art and the person who made it. Rather than mythologizing what cannot be understood about the work, as with bourgeois conceptions of ‘unconscious’ significance or aesthetic transcendence, Williams urges us to stay with the ‘living’ and ‘feeling’ that art can bring forth. Contrary to mainstream and high art concepts, Williams insists that staying with this processual, affective level of ‘structures of feeling’ enables an understanding of art that is deeply and structurally social, rather than personal, mystified, commodified. In this way, Williams’ theory is strongly differentiated from that of the nineteenth-century Romantics, who dreamed of artistic expressivity as transcending all social and political constraints and structures – summarized in the phrase ‘l’art pour l’art’ (or ‘art for art’s sake’). More recently, in Feeling in Theory, Terada has explored the significance of affect or emotion in modern and contemporary philosophy. Terada takes issue with theorists such as Fredric Jameson, who famously claimed postmodernism to be characterized by a death of subjectivity, correlated with a death of emotional life, using Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes as exemplary of this ‘waning of affect’. 40 Terada, drawing primarily on the post-structuralist philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, argues conversely that the ‘subject’ – a trope and structure of belief central to European modernity – suppresses emotionality; the death of the subject (or as more commonly stated, the ‘death of the author’41) has the potential of opening up and encouraging emotions rather than suppressing them. While myriad western philosophers addressed emotions before the eighteenth century, she notes that emotions were anathema already to Enlightenment theorists keen on defining the proper modes of (masculine) individualism. As a corollary to this point about anxieties regarding emotions, and as feminists and postcolonial theorists have pointed out, in this belief system the modern subject was rational and only the female or colonized other was ‘emotional’. Terada defines emotion as ‘a psychological, at least minimally interpretive experience whose

physiological effect is affect’, and feelings as an open and ‘capricious’ term connoting both ‘physiological sensations (affects) and psychological states (emotions)’; in contemporary discourse, emotion and feelings have been largely eradicated from theories of subjectivity. Terada thus notes that ‘[t]he discourse of emotion from Descartes to the present day describes emotion as nonsubjective experience in the form of self-difference within cognition. The ideology of emotion tells a supplementary story in which emotion fills in the difference it registers’.42 Terada stresses that emotions and feelings, as Kant and his colleagues theorizing the aesthetic understood, have no place in a logic of coherent subjectivity – a logic which art and aesthetics in their conventional modernist forms has substantiated since the discrediting of romanticism in the early twentieth century. Art, thus conceived in conventional art discourse (stripped of feelings, at least aside from the versions of the Romantics), confirms the modern subject. Emotions disrupt it.

A T H E Y L I T E R A L LY, A S W E L L A S P S Y C H O L O G I C A L LY A N D S Y M B O L I C A L LY, E X P L O D E S T H E S U B J E C T But, as I have argued, Athey’s work activates feelings in art to ‘upset’ this entire belief system. Athey literally, as well as psychologically and symbolically, explodes the subject: Athey’s acts of violence on his own body perform its incoherence; eliciting our attachment through feeling, these acts reciprocally point to the incoherence of our bodies/ selves in return. We cannot complete the meaning of his ruptured body, no more than we can secure ourselves in the face of his acts of self-injury. So much the anxious members of the US Congress intuited in 1994 better than many aficionados in the art and performance worlds, who seem to embrace or at least begrudgingly respect Athey’s work. One could argue it is precisely this dispersal of the subject through feeling, coupled with Athey’s insistently autoerotic and queer iconography, which makes his body artwork so threatening to the powers that be. For Athey’s work threatens the very structures of art and culture, strictly policed, through which control is maintained at the highest levels of political and social power. As the 1994 scandal made clear, Athey’s work challenges the very idea of ‘American art’ or ‘American culture’ – or even of art and culture, tout court – and nothing short of that. Terada theorizes as well the nuances of ideas about emotional people in the world. People with passion are viewed as ruptured, beside themselves (as the saying goes), as going beyond their proper ‘subjectivity’. As I have already suggested, while twentieth-century modernism has scrupulously resisted feeling, passion was a key trope in German, French, and English romanticism in the nineteenth century. In this way, feeling (particularly as excess) has sometimes in the history of Euro-American art been called upon to substantiate the indefinable, to confirm the transcendence of art and its capacity

42

Terada, Feeling in Theory, pp. 3–5.

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Opposite: Ron Athey and Dominic Johnson, Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound) (2007), Chelsea Theatre, London. Photo by Regis Hertrich. The action of bleeding on and shuffling panes of glass first appeared in Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound). It was adapted and expanded as Self-Obliteration I-II, and performed frequently after 2007.

to go beyond the subject – what Derrida might call its excess or supplementarity. But, as Terada points out, in all forms of modernism, from romanticism to avant-gardism, pathos, usually posed as passion’s debased opposite, frequently has been forbidden. Terada defines sentiment or pathos as that which ‘conveys the explicitly representational, vicarious, and supplementary dimensions of emotions’.43 Athey’s practice is, in fact, committed to precisely this type of expression. His performances are all wilfully and self-consciously always already spectacular and representational, as he himself celebrates: Bloating these physical actions with superficial accessories is not meant to whitewash their reality, but to repackage it. The artifice makes the orifice iconic. Using real actions to stand in for even more serious ones […], I rely on distance, sightlines, timing, haze, and lighting.44 However, if Romantics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries put a premium on the capacity of extreme emotional expression in art to transcend everyday society and politics, then Athey is far from classifiable in these terms. Athey ruins the capacity for the ‘passionate’ to be claimed as ‘transcendent’ by crossing it explicitly with pathos; in his overwrought, spectacular and upsetting performances, Athey forces passion to coexist with pathos or sentimentality – queer bedfellows indeed. This has something to do with his persistent interest in spectacle. As Terada argues, if passion ‘characterizes the nonsubjectivity within the very concept of the subject’,’ thus for the Romantics providing the aesthetic with a frisson of transcendence, pathos is related to mediation and admits that it is. 45

AT H E Y I S [. . .] C O U R AG E O U S A N D O U T R AG E O U S I N T H E FAC E OF T H E V IOL E NC E OF HOMOPHOB I A AND OTHER FORMS OF SOCIAL OPPRESSION

43

ibid. p. 5.

Ron Athey, ‘Becoming Total Image’, Manuel Vason: Encounters – Performance, Collaboration, Photography, ed. by Dominic Johnson (Bristol: Arnolfini, 2007), p. 209. 44

45

Terada, Feeling in Theory, p. 5.

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Exploding, viscerally, beyond the coy sexual politics of Warhol, with his deliberately campy (pathos-filled) lifestyle and artworks such as the 1980 series of prints Diamond Dust Shoes, Athey is an artist more like David Wojnarowicz, an artist of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, courageous and outrageous in the face of the violence of homophobia and other forms of social oppression. Athey elicits and performs structures of feeling that are particular to the extremity of his moment, and the rapidly transforming modes of being in a world that at the same time has fewer and fewer rigid geographical boundaries, and is more and more micro- and macroscopically policed (via modes of surveillance, border control offices firmly establishing national boundaries, and so on). Athey’s work thus insistently activates passion and pathos in interrelated ways that are queer in effect – both in an obvious sense relating to an open-ended mode of sexual

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Ron Athey and Brian Murphy, untitled club performance, 1995. Photo by Chelsea Iovino.

identification (his actions are queer), and in the nuanced sense of disruptive to the very binaries by which nations, bodies and subjects are defined as separate and discrete. In Terada’s terms, Athey’s work, far from evincing Jameson’s ‘waning of affect’, insists upon an excess of affect. Far from simply reiterating a romantic, coherent yet excessive heroic artist figure, Athey performs with a passion that takes apart the subject. Far from performing in a way that insists upon an ‘authentic’ moment of emotional truth (as is often claimed for live art as a medium overall), Athey continually activates the artifice – the pathos – of emotionally

A T H E Y ’ S W O R K S A R E O F T E N O V E R T LY C A M P, W H I L E A T T H E S A M E T I M E B E I N G V I S C E R A L , I M PA S S I O N E D AC T S O F S U F F E R I N G resonant performance. His work explicitly draws on past moments in the queer, offbeat underground histories of modernism, reiterating codes, symbols and bodily tropes from previous artists and writers (most notably Molinier, Genet and Bataille, with the latter’s ‘solar anus’ marked on Athey’s body). Athey’s works are often overtly camp, while at the same time being visceral, impassioned acts of suffering that link to the personal and collective suffering in the world around us. Athey gives camp feeling.

Thinking feeling through Athey’s pierced body: The witness Athey’s entire practice is in a sense about the representational character of the body in pain, referenced in Terada’s model. Athey is on record philosophizing about what his expression is doing on levels of the live and the representational. While he draws on the autobiographical, his work is always filtered through frameworks that give legible (if often shambolic and excessive) form to his feelings and experiences: 174

Ron Athey performs the ‘Suicide Bed’ scene in 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1997), at Le Pez Ner, Villeurbanne, France. Photo by Isabelle Chenard. © Charlotte & Cie.

‘Because many of my concepts are developed from autobiographical situations, I think I’m giving “realness”. But actually […] I’m doing something more akin to channelling’.46 At the same time, he is deeply invested in ephemeral modes of expression as challenging art systems, with their tendency to fix and commodify: Why is ‘timeless’ art considered more valid than the ephemeral? I care more if it has at least cut to the quick at some point, as opposed to it being a piece of smartypants art in a vitrine for semi-eternity. Do I need to read another queer Warhol essay?47 But Athey’s art functions not just as ephemeral, but in the form of objects and texts that circulate: mediation is built into the work, even (or especially) in its live forms. So much is clear, for example, not only in the performances themselves, but in the range of documentary images that remain after the time-based works are over. Catherine Opie’s larger-than-life-sized series of Polaroids of Athey – including an image explicitly recalling ‘The Human Printing Press’, the contentious section of the 1994 performance sponsored by the Walker – are themselves as photographs assertively spectacular. We approach them as we might approach the performer himself, with awe and trepidation. Opie’s photographs of Athey are like living bodies; they are huge, intimidating, yet seductive, gorgeous, sensual in their glossy surfaces and perfect composition. On the one hand, I am arguing that Athey himself both enacts (or ‘represents’, through the highly theatricalized and mediated medium of his body) and is the body in pain. 48 On the other hand, Athey’s practice explicitly draws on and makes use of a wide range of representational effects in order to convey its emotional impact: from vignettes within the live narrative in the performances, to artful and

Athey in Johnson, ‘Perverse Martyrologies’, p. 512.

46

47

ibid. p. 509.

Portions of my discussion of the Opie photographs and my viewing of Incorruptible Flesh are drawn from my ‘Performing the Wounded Body: Pain, Affect, and the Radical Relationality of Meaning’, Parallax, 15.4 (2009), pp. 45–67.

48

175

Opposite: Catherine Opie Ron Athey/The Sick Man (from Deliverance) 2000, Polaroid 110 x 41 inches (279.4 x 104.1 cm) courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie. See p. 148 for a larger reproduction, and pp. 145-151 for the full series of Catherine Opie’s Polaroids.

49

Terada, Feeling in Theory, p. 21.

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aestheticizing documentary photographs by well-known artists such as Opie, to widely circulated documents in print and on the Internet. All modes are fair game and none is privileged over the others in purveying Athey’s practice. In this way, Athey activates feeling as intersubjective, and as circulating across scenes, images and bodies in ways that obviate the distinction between representation and ‘live’ subject or performer. This is an important point, as it debunks the tendency common in much performance discourse to interpret violent or disturbing performance art as conveying suffering in an unmediated or ‘authentic’ fashion. To the contrary, Athey exaggerates the artifice of staging his body, in his words, to ‘make the orifice iconic’, an explicitly political act since the late 1980s. By stressing this level of artifice, I mean in no way to downplay or devalue Athey’s own feelings and expressions of pain, inasmuch as I can imagine, identify with and project onto these through his work and my personal contact with him. The point is that mystifying live art as authentic and unmediated paradoxically evacuates feeling (specific feeling, tied to specific personal-cum-social structures of meaning, as Williams identifies) from the picture, rather than ratifies or confirms it (vis-à-vis Greenberg’s refusal to hear Rothko). It is by understanding all feeling as representational that we can understand how Athey’s work affects us as much as it does (after all, we are not feeling what he is feeling; we are experiencing it representationally). As Terada notes in discussing Derrida’s approach to how affective meaning is produced and conveyed, ‘[w]e are not ourselves without representations that mediate us, and it is through those representations that emotions get felt. Emotions are neither intentional nor expressive’. 49 It is crucial, then, to honour the various emotions expressed and elicited across Athey’s specific enactments of pain across a range of media: performances (perhaps experienced live, perhaps not), photographs, websites, etc. Also, understanding the representational nature of Athey’s practice reminds us of how radically it lies outside the conventional structures of the marketplace, including the obvious site of the art gallery (he rarely sells documents of his work in commercial galleries), but also the more covertly capitalist structures of curating, art writing and even performance art discourse, which is in the twentyfirst century becoming more and more market-oriented with the rise of performance art superstars such as Marina Abramović. I have argued that in all of its forms, Athey’s work is exemplary of the enactment of experience (most pointedly of bodily pain or discomfort, but also of intimacy, desire and love) as spectacle – as both pathos and passion – to remind us how human experience is always already intersubjective. Feeling, like meaning, takes place among and between bodies (whether ‘live’ or ‘representational’) engaging each other in social spaces – not in the sterile and heavily policed circuits of the austere, disembodied, modernist formalist aesthetic, or the supposedly unmediated ‘authentic’ space of live art. Experiencing Athey’s elegantly

suffering body is potentially upsetting and moving because one is made to take the role of empathetic – or disapproving, disgusted, punitive, angry – witness, rather than distanced spectator; one becomes a potentially co-conspiratorial performer of intersubjective feeling in relation to an obdurately physical and psychologically charged body, rather than becoming (as modernist ideology valued) immersively ‘one’ with a transcendent, suffering artist. As one of the most important commentators on Athey’s work, Jennifer Doyle, has put it: ‘You won’t be hurt at one of these [Athey’s] performances. But you might feel upset, sad, disturbed, or agitated. You are more likely to feel like a witness than a spectator. This is no small thing’.50 Doyle hits the nail on the head. Athey’s work makes us witness, puts us in the circuit of desire and longing and fear that conventional aesthetics seeks to disavow, bury or occlude. The responsibility this entails is huge – and, as noted, opens us to political engagement.

Athey’s agency: How feeling can be political Athey’s work retains the capacity to engage us as witnesses rather than passive spectators (encouraging our awareness of how and why we feel what we do), and thus points us towards a more politicized relationship to the world. The social value of Athey’s work lies in its capacity to mobilize forbidden feelings, to corrupt the aesthetic and to activate pathos and spectacle in order to deflate performance discourse’s pretensions regarding the authenticity of the live. I hope my remembered renditions of experiencing Athey’s performances make clear that Athey’s body – experienced first-hand, and synaesthetically available through touch, smell, sound and sight – is also always already representational, loved and worried over, but also alien and Other. It never becomes fully bonded to my body, as spectating, witnessing body, in an unmediated fashion. Thus the pain I experienced empathetically as I sat 15 feet away from the stage watching Athey and his performance partner, Dominic Johnson, cut, touch and/or attempt to heal themselves or each other in Perpetual Wound is not necessarily more or less cutting than the pain I feel looking at Opie’s image of Athey in her life-sized photographs, such as The Sick Man, which depicts Athey as a dead martyr cradled in the gentle embrace of Divinity Fudge, who sits in the position of the Madonna: I am pierced by the sorrow at this confirmation of his impending mortality, just as I am worried by the piercing and rending of his and others’ flesh, as it is, in Perpetual Wound.51 Even potentially touched by drops of excrement and blood, one experiences the wounding of the other through a representational screen: the wound is in fact precisely a mode of signifying that makes the body of the other available as meaningful through identification. It makes pain readable as inscribed in and on the body. The spectacular nature of Athey’s performances and photographs of his performative body productively exacerbate this point. Again, Athey exaggerates

50

Doyle, ‘Blood Work & “Art Criminals”’.

I witnessed the live performance of Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound) in June 2007 as part of ‘Fierce Festival’ at the Custard Factory, Birmingham. I viewed Opie’s photograph at the Guggenheim retrospective of Opie’s work in 2009. 51

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Opposite: Ron Athey, History of Ecstasy (2009), MADRE Museo Contemporanea Donna Regina, Naples, Italy. Photo by Amedeo Benestante. Courtesy MADRE. History of Ecstasy brought together a cast of performers under Athey’s direction: Lee Adams, Vaginal Davis, Mouse, Othon, Pigpen, Julie Tolentino, Ernesto Tomasini. The hour-long performance in some ways revived the ensemble process of Ron Athey and Company (indeed, Tolentino and Pigpen were key performers in the earlier company) alongside aspects of the form of his curated events Platinum Oasis (with Vaginal Davis, Los Angeles, 20012002) and Re/Visions of Excess (with Davis and Adams, 2003-2009, various cities).

52

Terada, Feeling in Theory, p. 23.

53

ibid. p. 40.

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rather than eschews the aesthetically forbidden quality of pathos, which, as Terada notes, ‘is the precise term for emotion for another’.52 As Terada sums up this situation, emotions are always already experienced in relation to the other; they are relational: ‘There is no reason to guard mental life against theatricality, to guard emotion against representation, or to worry that layers of mediation diminish emotional intensity as copies degrade’.53 It is, in Terada’s terms, Athey’s activation of pathos and passion together, his insistent relationality (giving himself to us, allowing or forcing us to witness) that makes works such as Solar Anus and Perpetual Wound both moving and critically effective. He isn’t just asking us to wallow in his hurts. This would allow us to absolve ourselves of our participation in creating as well as experiencing the wound, the hurt and the anger. Rather, he is demanding that we acknowledge, through the theatricality of the scene, our role in producing it, in creating the wounding effect (of viewing; of being part of the culture that allows figures such as that rabidly conservative avatar of the culture wars, Jesse Helms, to have had viable political careers; of interpreting his wounding in ways that aestheticize it; and so on). To return to Bataille, Athey evokes the ‘parodic’ element of life in all its painfulness, while never avoiding the intensity of passion. At the same time, his optimism is to make life interpretable, if only to the extent that he offers to share his pain (and his insight) through something we are calling art. Athey in this way indeed embodies and enacts the radical potential to create intersubjective bonds that nurture social and political awareness of suffering as both personal and collective. In this way Athey activates the energy of the solar anus, the forbidden orifice made iconic and thus remembered – and politically cutting – in cultural discourse. The gift is offered and is there to be taken.

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R AISED IN THE LORD: R E V E L AT I O N S AT T H E K N E E O F M I S S V E L M A R O N AT H E Y

An earlier version of this text was published with the same title in the LA Weekly (30 June 1995), pp. 20–25. It has been extensively revised for this publication. Many thanks to Jill Stewart at the LA Weekly for providing an archival copy of the original text. 1

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I received a call: ‘Have you see today’s LA Times?1 There’s a full-page ad with a photo of a female evangelist in a huge yellow dress like a birthday cake. She claims to be unveiling the actual Tree of Life’. Miss Velma? I asked. ‘Dr. Velma Jaggers,’ she responded. ‘It does say Miss Velma in parentheses’. Miss Velma figured prominently but irregularly in my childhood, and I wondered if I could have imagined the fantastical details. My grandmother searched continually for the newest charismatic disciples, and her pilgrimages to find them took us from our home in Pomona, California, to far flung corners of the Inland Empire: to Chino, Ontario, San Bernardino, San Jacinto, Indio, Lancaster. The palace of the Lord that Miss Velma and her husband, Dr Orval Lee Jaggers, had erected, the Universal World Church was in Los Angeles proper, off Alvarado and Beverly Boulevards, which made it slightly suspicious to my grandmother. It was unlike the other services we attended in storefronts, or old-fashioned tent meetings. In addition to practicing the traditional Gifts of the Spirit, Miss Velma and O. Lee performed their own unique miracle, ‘cellular divine healing’, a concept my grandmother – who was particularly drawn to healing services – found appealing enough that we journeyed to their church at least once a year from as early as I can remember. Our wandering visits ended when I was 14 years old, with the death of my grandfather, who was the only family member with a

Family photograph of Ron Athey as a young teenager in Pomona, California, ca. 1973.

driver’s license. A few years later, I left home. Wanting to confirm a few fantastical things I remembered about these services, I tried unsuccessfully to find the Jaggers’ church, but all I remembered was the name of Miss Velma. In the full-page advertisement in the LA Times: there was the Miss Velma I remembered, wearing a yellow hoop-skirted dress, her hands raised, and gaze fixed towards something in heaven. Her hair, which she claimed had been pure white from the time she was born, was meticulously coiffed. The photo created the illusion she was levitating, and a red rose and sash referenced the wound in the side of Christ. Stacked, solid, all-capital headlines crowded the sides of the advert, shouting, ‘MISS VELMA IS ONE OF THE MOST CELEBRATED WOMAN [sic] IN THE WORLD… KNOWN AND HONORED BY KINGS, QUEENS, PRESIDENTS AND PRIME MINISTERS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD’. But the message to citizens of Los Angeles, the ad announced, was the ultimate Christmas present to the world. Miss Velma was going to unveil The Golden Revelation Tree of Life and hold three anointing services. On Christmas morning, the ad promised, ‘ALL THE CONGREGATION WILL TAKE HOLD OF THE GOLDEN TREE OF LIFE – THE GREATEST OPPORTUNITY EVER AFFORDED THE HUMAN RACE ON EARTH!’ I was way out of the church loop, but without question I would attend. I needed to confirm the accuracy of my memories, and hopefully understand clearer why these experiences colour my life so intensely. I had been trying to make sense of the schisms of my religious upbringing by writing about them. In my first year exiled from home, I wrote an analytical memoir called ‘Reinterpretation of False Prophecies’, and a piece with more literary ambitions, ‘Gifts of the Spirit’. As soon as I started devising performance pieces, 181

these writings and memories were layered there, either in theme or structure. I had begun developing a persona I call The Holy Woman, performed either by me or by stand-ins, through whom I speak as a female ‘illustrated sermonizer’. While the character was inspired by a variety of religious women, including saints and televangelists, it was most explicitly based on two people: Aimee Semple McPherson and Miss Velma. Aimee Semple McPherson was the obvious model for Miss Velma’s studies of the illustrated sermon.2 In the 1920s, McPherson constructed the silver-domed Angeles Temple, and attracted a huge following for her illustrated sermons, which included inquisitive Hollywood actors like Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Miss Velma arrived in the early 1950s, with a much stranger ministry that integrated the usual apocalyptic Armageddon with a contrasting miracle. After a vision, she had travelled to the Holy Land, and claimed that a Mamre oak tree opened up and offered her a vial containing waters from the Fountain of Youth. After the miracle, she set out to reconstruct the entire Book of Revelation in golden and jewelled form. By the 1970s she had embraced every new technology to create special effects for her sermons and altar: an echo box, strobe lights, suspension cables and holograms.

MISS V EL M A WAS A PRECIOUS W HI T E- H A IRED QUEEN W HO DEL I V ERED HER C AL M AND DIGNIFIED MESSAGE AS A GODDESS FROM ON HIGH

On McPherson, see Ron Athey, ‘Reading Sister Aimee’, LIVE: Art and Performance, ed. by Adrian Heathfield (London: Tate, 2003), pp. 86–91.

2

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Miss Velma and my grandmother shared similar convictions, but little else. Miss Velma was a precious white-haired queen who delivered her calm and dignified message as a goddess from on high. My fiery, red-haired grandma screamed and pulled hair; she starved herself and fell face down in the Spirit. She ruled three generations from a sickbed, using emotional blackmail to get the Lord’s work done. Miss Velma was able to command her congregation through quiet charisma, basking in the adoration of the crowd. But at the centre of both women’s belief systems was the notion of Judgment Day, the impending arrival of the Lord who would destroy all non-believers while saving his Chosen People. In my performances, I alternate between their two extremes, at times speaking with measured humility, and at others raging throughout self-righteous fits in the name of the Lord. Yes, I would attend, like a pilgrimage, but I was nervous about attending the service. I know when Christians say ‘all are welcome’, especially in these smaller Protestant cults, what they really mean is ‘all Christians and wannabe Christians’, not an extreme-looking gay man with facial tattoos trying to understand the demented grandiosity plaguing his life. But I’m good at constructing personae, and I also found the perfect escort: Patty Powers. This would be the only time in my life I’d use a lady friend as a ‘beard’.

Letter from Miss Velma (Dr. Velma M. Jaggers), dated 30 June 1996. Collection of Ron Athey. Miss Velma sent the letter to Athey after he published an earlier version of this chapter as an article in the LA Weekly.

In my childhood visits to the Universal World Church, I had no context for Miss Velma’s spectacle. I was a young child the first time my grandmother and Aunt Vena took me. I know I was younger than 9 years old, because I received the Gift of Tongues at 10, in the back of a small wooden building, with Sister Crow’s greasy vibrating hands laid upon me. My grandmother came from a sort of Grapes of Wrath tradition, having come to California during the Depression after nearly starving in the Dust Bowl. In my childhood, she would talk about having been lucky to eat the meat from the squirrels her brothers shot, as if it had happened yesterday. We were still very poor, but always ate. My grandfather was a labour union man – the sole worker in the household of eight – and his wage was supplemented by child support 183

benefits. It wasn’t until high school that I walked into theatres like the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and saw oversized chandeliers for the first time. In suburbia, there were no buildings of public grandeur. It was not only lacking design, it was grim on all fronts. So when we walked in Miss Velma’s Universal World Church that first time, it was fantasia. I had seen Catholic altars in movies, but that didn’t prepare me for the glittering, glaring manifestation of Miss Velma’s visions. It was holy, and it was beautiful.

SHE APPEARED IN DIFFERENT BIBLICAL SET TINGS, WEARING COSTUMES, FOR E X AMPLE DRESSED AS THE QUEEN OF SHEBA IN A SEASHELL THRONE

Opposite: Rick Castro, Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis (1997), Palm Springs, CA. Photo: www.rickcastro. com. Courtesy Antebellum Gallery, Hollywood. Athey and Davis travelled to the White Party in Palm Springs in 1997, and wrote up their trip as an article for the LA Weekly in the same year. Rick Castro attended to document their circuit party experience. See Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis, ‘White Like Me’, LA Weekly (1997). Excerpt available at: obsolete.com/athey/ atheywritings/atheywritings.html‎ [accessed 28/05/13].

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Miss Velma’s sparkling altarpiece was as wide as an aircraft hangar. A three-foot-tall statue of Christ, with hair made of diamonds, was displayed in a glass case near the centre. Christ appears in the Book of Revelation as a deformed white lamb, and Miss Velma was born with white hair, hence the symbolism of Jesus’ diamond hair. Hanging above the statue, spanning the width of the altar, seven life-sized golden bejewelled angels carried the Seven Plagues to destroy mankind. Beneath them stood the seven small ‘tabernacles’, seven mounted gold, right fists of God, from which seven healing waterfalls of oil glowed, merging together in an anointing trough with seven automated spinning crowns, and a bridge. And above all these precious treasures there shone a giant sequined rainbow, adorned with seven spinning Ezekiel wheels. There is documentation of some details, but not the whole, so I am piecing together my memories of the Holiest of Holies. Miss Velma and Dr Jaggers called the ministry a ‘Revelation Revival’, and their golden altar was a physical representation of the Book of Revelation, built according to Miss Velma’s prophecies. Revelation reads as a hallucination full of monsters, and was interpreted thusly, in conjunction with Miss Velma’s personal iconography. Some sections of the altar were concealed with silver Mylar fringe curtains, and it was only unveiled for services as important as the Transubstantiation of the Holy Spirit, which had its own pagan flair. Communion was prepared at the front of the room by Dr Jaggers and 24 elders dressed as cardinals, who broke loaves of bread and compressed them into individual dough balls, and poured full glasses of dark red wine. Although her husband usually gave the main sermon, Miss Velma was the star. She appeared in different biblical settings, wearing costumes, for example dressed as the Queen of Sheba in a seashell throne. In another, perhaps trying to raise Babylon, I remember her perched on a crescent moon. But more well known were her Christmas extravaganzas, broadcast on cable access TV, which interpreted stories from the Bible in less camp historical fashions. In the church, however, she was the living centrepiece to the altar. The energy was grounded in her.

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As prophets, my grandmother and aunt discerned I had been born with ‘the Calling’ on my life. According to their narrative, I was born in a force field of blue electricity crackling around me so strong that the doctors had to remark there had been phenomena. So I was to have a unique, powerful ministry, foretelling the Second Coming of Christ, who was going to be birthed immaculately by my aunt. Having this Calling, I was treated differently to my brother and sisters. My religious training included daily practices like Bible reading, dream interpretation, space-out time for mini-visions, and late night prayer meetings with my aunt and grandmother. They were building up my stamina. I was led to receive each Gift of the Spirit. My grandmother arranged for me to spend quiet time in order to seek divine inspiration. Late at night, I was taken to healing services, where I eventually received the Gift of Tongues. I was often the only child at these services, and I was so sensitive and open to gifts that I often cried with rapture. My disappointment was that I never received the Gift of Automatic Writing. I attempted over and over, but it just wouldn’t come.

M Y G R A N D M O T H E R V E R Y M U C H B E L I E V E D T H A T O U R F A M I LY WA S B E I N G P E R S E C U T E D L I K E JO B , A N D T H AT W E S H O U L D E X P E C T TO FAC E T R I B U L AT I O N S , S U C H A S PA I N F U L D I S E A S E S It was no secret that my grandmother’s and aunt’s religious practices were often more spiritualist than Pentecostal, but no explanation was ever given. One scried in a crystal ball, the other studied astrology and interpreted dreams. They both paid visits to psychics. Through automatic writing, my aunt channelled messages from my dead great-grandmother, Audrey, from whom piles of letters were collected and stored in a wooden box. These letters established an esoteric relationship to the Virgin Mary, and laid out the plans for my Aunt Vena’s prophesied marriage to Elvis Presley after she bore the Second Coming of the Christ Child. Unfortunately, being talented and inevitable wasn’t enough, and the prophecy was void. My grandmother very much believed that our family was being persecuted like Job, and that we should expect to face tribulations, such as painful diseases, or gaining huge amounts of weight without eating, or suddenly receiving uneven legs – and, of course, psychic warfare with demons. My mother’s schizophrenia, for which she was institutionalized most of her life, was another sign of our persecution, though somehow the fault of my mother. My sister’s overbite and crooked teeth were another sign, one that caused my grandmother on occasion to lament how beautiful my sister could have been, and then slap her for becoming ugly. But she also believed that one day we would have suffered long enough, and when Deliverance was at hand, my own ministry would take form. Most of the world would be listening. Christ would be born and Elvis would enter, and we would finally come into our power and God’s graces. 186

Ron Athey and Nicola Bowery performing excerpts from Deliverance at Torture Garden, London, 1995. Photo by Jeremy Chaplin (www.jeremychaplin.com)

I’m not sure what my grandmother thought of Miss Velma’s church. She did believe in the hierarchy of beauty – both her daughters had a glamorous sense of style, overseen by her – but otherwise she made no concessions to the pursuit of opulence. I have always assumed that she was one of the few that came to Miss Velma for cellular healing, and the guaranteed anointments in holy oil, but she eventually condemned every minister as misguided, if not worse. Maybe she just fancied an annual show. Regardless, she voiced neither too much enthusiasm nor criticism. The phrase ‘never a dull moment’ was coined for the spirit-filled churches we visited, and for the kind of Christianity my grandmother practiced. Miss Velma’s was the only church we attended that broke the pattern of following an evangelist. By its nature ephemeral, evangelism and vaudeville have plenty in common. The Apocalypse would be here either today or by next week. The Antichrist is not just some clovenhoofed devil: he is often named as a popular televangelist, like Billy Graham or Oral Roberts. Cancers would be vomited up into special bowls, and demons rebuked, with sound effects like the lowing of an injured animal. In one of my favourite duties to witness, a sister would hold squares of fabric that functioned as modesty cloaks, so that when a woman in a dress danced in the Spirit and flopped out on the floor, she could be confident she wasn’t flashing a beaver shot while convulsing, because the sister was ready with the fabric to cover up her indecency. The Pleading in the Blood, the chaotic Tongues, the dramatically delivered Prophecy, all this was heaven for showboaters. But it could also get personal and ugly. Like the original Pentecostal church origin from 1911 with a ‘one-eyed black minister and multiracial congregation’, these groups we attended were usually mixed, but not always harmonious. 187

Opposite: Catherine Opie, The Lamb of God: Divinity and Pigpen (Portrait for Deliverance). Polaroid. 1996 © Catherine Opie. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

The congregation at the World Church practiced the Gifts of the Spirit – if they didn’t we wouldn’t have attended. But it was lukewarm compared to the charismatic movement we followed around the region. The speaking in tongues was only done as a solo by one of the 24 elders, then immediately discerned by another. Neither Dr O. Lee nor Miss Velma was great at delivery, so the performance of their sermons lacked fire. But I was excited by the special communion ritual, and the altar, which always had a new element like a flaming angel with a neon sword. Fashion is unique and of utmost importance in the old timey Pentecostal church. Think of Grand Ole Opry stars bumped up a few notches: big hair, wigs, angel sleeves, layers and layers of vestments. But Miss Velma’s approach to fashion was beyond precedent. Her elders wore floor-length blue and gold vestments, hemmed with chunky bells. She was clearly the queen: according to the poster, Miss Velma ‘honors the Lord Jesus Christ with the most beautiful robes and gowns made by leading fashion designers, which she wears in the pulpit to honor the beauty of the Lord Jesus Christ’. And she is confident in her fashion sense: ‘She is called by a leading fashion designer one of the 12 best-dressed women in the world’.

T H E T E L L I N G A L O U D O F M Y H I S TO R Y M A D E C L E A R W H AT I H A D P R O B A B LY K N O W N F O R Y E A R S : M Y L I F E H A D B E E N BASED ON PURE DELUSION, ON FEAR OF THE DEVIL AND THE PROMISE OF GRANDEUR Isolation played a big part in enabling the lie I lived as a child; the lie that allowed me to believe fervently in the teachings of Miss Velma and the others. We lived in a neighbourhood that was half African American, and half Chicano, and my family were passive racists. They proclaimed all as God’s children, but couldn’t quite allow us to bring ‘coloured’ friends home. Also, because of their fanaticism, extended family steered clear of us, so it was a rare occasion to meet a relative. But, inevitably, I became socialized. When I was 15, my commitment to the prophecies started to unravel. It all came to a head one night in a bowling alley, when I described my spiritual life to a new friend. She was dumbfounded by my story, looking at me with a mixture of embarrassment and concern for my sanity. The telling aloud of my history made clear what I had probably known for years: my life had been based on pure delusion, on fear of the devil and the promise of grandeur. I put my head on hold until I got home, and I locked myself in the bathroom (my only private space). I cried convulsively and let the delusional reality and all its comforts crash, until I had nothing left but a painful emptiness. I started to pray for His comfort and rejected the idea, and got caught in that loop. I couldn’t stand the feeling of not being in my body, and slammed my head against the floor. I was, at the least, still a piece of animated meat. It was a pathetic excuse for an awakening. 188

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Ron Athey performing excerpts from Deliverance at Torture Garden, London, 1995. Photo by Jeremy Chaplin (www.jeremychaplin.com)

I became more sophisticated during the next round of feeling hollow, by performing Christ aversion therapy on myself. Each time His name entered my pleas, I stuck a pair of tweezers into the electrical outlet until I emptied myself of my God yearnings. No Jesus, no sweet fairytales to make life less harsh. I opened myself to the reality that my mother was in the nuthouse, and I was unwanted yet messianic, and nothing but another headache and expense. No God. No family. That near breakdown was not the first sign of my emotional problems. At 10, a neurologist prescribed me Valium for nervousness. After my awakening, my abuse of the pills accelerated. My family was aware of my Valium use. What is ironic is that if I had been caught 190

drinking a light beer, I would have been kicked out of the house. Somehow, through all this, I was an exceptional student. I excelled in science and particularly focused in lab experiments and dissection. I was encouraged by my physiology and chemistry teachers to pursue a career in laboratory work, and was offered a spot in a gifted minors program for two summers during high school, to intern at the Jonas Salk Institute in La Jolla. I avoided telling my grandmother until a month before leaving. But nothing escaped her. I was no longer ‘spiritfilled’, and she finally confronted me. I told her I wanted to work in research science and find cures for diseases. (At the time, the irony escaped me that we were both so interested in healing.) She could not accept my scientific ambitions. She screamed and badgered me at the dinner table, to the point of throwing plates of food at me in fits of rage. She bemoaned my refusal of the Calling. She accused me of being bisexual and using heroin, which at the time was correct. She had psychic hooks in me that took years to shake. After the science program, I had lost my faith entirely and understood I couldn’t allow my fundamentalist family to judge me. I never felt wrong about my sexuality, and they were the ones who had started me on drugs. I made a commitment to myself that I would die before I returned home, and I stuck to that.

I O P E N E D M Y S E L F TO T H E R E A L I T Y T H AT M Y M O T H E R WA S IN T HE NU T HOUSE , A ND I WA S UN WA N T ED Y E T ME SSI A NIC 18 December 1994. I wake up bug-eyed and trembling. Can’t back out. I put on a turtleneck, roll it up all the way to my chin, and remove the jewellery from my visible piercings. I don an old brown suit with pinstripes, a cap and fake prescription glasses. I look ridiculous. I wonder if I’ll have to take the cap off out of some formality. Just go. Eastbound on Beverly Boulevard, I made a left turn just before Alvarado, and there it was, white with painted globes on top. Inside, I was surprised at the accuracy of my memory. I could not see more than 20 per cent of the altar, as most of it was draped in gold lamé and silver Mylar curtains. The one small section that was exposed was beautiful. I could see a jewel-encrusted angel, an ark, and a valve from which anointing oil was dispensed. The stage was adorned for Christmas with seven white Christmas trees, and a seven-point star mounted on the wall that rotated when the Miss Velma Singers sang. The female choir members wore cheap nylon muumuus with a few sparse sequins. A huge lumpy curtain hid the Tree of Life from view. The service started with hymns, most of which I believe were World Church originals (one contained the line ‘Miss Velma holds the key to your eternity’), after which an elder gave a tedious account of the mathematics of the Tree of Life. According to the church flier, the Tree has ‘60 main branches built according to biblical measurements – twice 24 plus 12 – there are 432 smaller branches – 3 times 144 – there are 1,296 yet smaller branches – 9 times 144… the 144 fruits of the 191

Tree of Life, in 12 manners or varieties, are made of 144,000 jewels set one at a time… imported from Europe’. After a song by ‘special guests’ from the church’s fellowship in Hawaii, the congregation was asked to walk around the room and greet each other. Miss Velma appeared for the first time during this distraction. She was wearing a trademark couture gown with full skirt. Though quite a bit older-looking than her picture in the advertisement, she was the manifestation of radiance. Her pure-white hair was pulled back from her strong face in girlish ringlet curls. Though she was well into her 70s, her complexion was rosy, her waist tight. I looked around the room and noted the undercover hipster faction. Most were trying to be invisible like myself, but others were snickering. This made me oddly angry and embarrassed. Despite my lack of faith, I felt protective of the church. I was still respectful and even had a certain amazement at what had once been my life. But of course people came who were curious. She had bought a full-page advertisement in the LA Times after all, so I’m surprised the congregation wasn’t even more mixed.

I B E G A N FA N TA S I Z I N G A B O U T H AV I N G A N AU R A O F L I G H T T H A T R A D I A T E D A R O U N D M Y B O D Y, A N D T H E N L E V I TAT I N G , N U D E , A B O V E T H E L I G H T I N G G R I D Sitting in the solid wood pew, I was overwhelmed and disoriented. Then came deep sorrow, the part of me that never knows how to identify being lonely, so achingly empty. Absence again. Dissociation. Suffering a ‘chosen one’ complex, I find it difficult even to just sit still and feel like part of the crowd. I began fantasizing about having an aura of light that radiated around my body, and then levitating, nude, above the lighting grid. For the sake of being present and functioning, I tried without cynicism to surrender to the realm of Miss Velma. But it was a blur until we lined up to partake of the Golden Revelation Tree of Life. It was like a fairground ride, with 12 mini-trees each corresponding to astrological star signs. I was the Flaming Sword Tree. I walked over the hologram bridge, and an elder in an Elvis wig instructed me to hold the ‘horn’ of my tree. I watched my little tree turn within the Tree of Life, which was expelling scented oils. The next week was Christmas, and I returned to visit a morning service with my friend Scott. I knew what to expect this time, but I was more paranoid. It is as if there is a groove in my brain reserved for spiritual feelings, and I was touched deeply in that place on Christmas morning. I was losing myself to the Holy Spirit. Inside I felt a deep yearning. ‘Oh Miss Velma,’ I pleaded silently, ‘can you feel me here? Can you remember a spirit-filled boy, who felt the vibration of your altar?’ The first Sunday I had not held on to the horn of the Tree long enough for Miss Velma to get all the way around to anointing me (the 192

tree holds 12 people at a time). At the Christmas service, I stood still while Miss Velma anointed my head with oil. I thought maybe she would be frightened by my facial tattoos, or become angry that a sinner dared to take hold of a horn of the Tree of Life. This was not the case. She gave brief but equal attention to everyone she touched. Earlier in the Christmas service, tithing envelopes had been passed around, and we were led down the aisles to a gold treasure chest that sat below Miss Velma. She said that at the Universal World Church, gifts to God were offered, not collected. I put my money in an envelope that said ‘My Offering Made By Fire To The Lord Jesus Christ’, took off my shoes, as one must do to walk near the altar, and threw my $20 into the pirate chest. Miss Velma beamed at everyone. As I walked away, the elders directed us the long way back to our seats – all the way across the front row around the side to the back of the church. I suddenly became panic-stricken that my grandmother and aunt might be in the audience. What if they had come to see the Tree? The thought had me close to hyperventilating. Of course there was a possibility that they would be there; why had I not thought of that? My grandmother was old and sick. She would hope to experience a healing when she touched the horn of the Tree of Life. I now know she was not there that day. Several months after my visits to Miss Velma’s church, my sister called to tell me my grandmother had died. I cannot say I felt heartwrenching grief. But neither did I feel the relief I imagined would come from her death. I have thought a lot since then about my history with her, and my rebellion against her, through much of which I came to be what I am. My grandmother and I shared more than just our religious bond. We gardened and baked together, and I know she loved me when we did those things. When I wrote ‘Holy Letters’, she nearly worshipped me. My family was so poor that my getting a Boy Scout uniform was almost out of the question; yet we lived a life of mystical power and grandiosity. The connections have been hard to break. As a child, I was anointed and prayed over by screaming women until I received the spirit, whereupon thunderous voices and wild dancing poured out of me. I witnessed healings in the name of God. Some were hokey sideshow tricks, but during others it seemed real shifts took place. Since becoming HIV-positive, I have drunk water at Lourdes, I have eaten the holy dirt from El Santuario de Chimayó in New Mexico. Under the right circumstance, I can still feel the tamping of the tongues on the roof of my mouth.

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J OYC E : T H E V I O L E N T D I S B E L I E F O F R O N AT H E Y LY D I A L U N C H

An earlier version of this text was published in Lydia Lunch, Will Work For Drugs (New York: Akashic Books, 2009), pp. 141-9.

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If the inside of your head gets pummelled with enough emotional blunt force trauma to splinter the psyche, you develop ways to punish the body, that fleshy prison that houses the pain.1 When the agony of life’s relentless frustration is steeped in the malignant tyranny of deception and abuse, and the ones closest to you deny not only their culpability, but worship at the feet of false idols to justify the perpetuity of their violence, your trusty friend the razor will never tell a single lie. If the sight of blood brought forth from your own hand spells an almost immediate relief, a sublime release of pressure, consider yourself a member in an elite coven that strives to decode the mystery of self-sacrifice. A violation you now control can provide a temporary satiation, a stifling of the nauseating screams and endless insinuations of a world turned inside out. The undeniable aroma of skin melting under the cigarette’s ugly kiss localizes the all-consuming daily irritants until it fills yellow with pus, leaks out, drains, scabs over and is eventually picked clean, revealing a fresh growth of virgin pink. As the wounds heal and the blistered skin renews with life, these marks of identity play as time capsule, which can further separate you from the original sinner, the antagonist responsible for your infection, a soul sickness born of pain and loss. The cycle of abuse changes course only once you have decided to own your self-flagellation, not simply as revenge or repetition of the crimes committed against you, but in celebration as ritual to all that has been wilfully overcome. This is the first commandment of the New Testament in accordance with the Bible of Pope Ron Athey, whose staged exorcisms offer transcendence to the chosen few who are strong enough to submit to a Baptism of Fire. It is a cleansing combustion, which erupts in order

to drown out the deceit of lies uttered by false prophets, who forever masquerade as commissaries of a higher calling in order to justify the degradation of lesser mortals who dare to question or challenge their moral authority. Athey’s multimedia theatrical presentation, JOYCE (2002), like most of his previous work, summarizes the insane beliefs and outrageous behaviours of his family’s religious perversity, and goes beyond the flesh and blood in order to investigate the viral overload of a psychopathology which acts as a contagion of blistering sickness, a sickness that has contaminated the very roots of the familial DNA. JOYCE narrates an eternal wellspring poisoned by generations of matriarchal madness, which found filth in every crevice of existence, and drove itself mad with blind vengeance when unable to scrub the scum from the very soul from which it sprang forth. Raised in an extremely dysfunctional Pentecostal household, the young ‘Ronnie Lee’ was sainted as young prophet messiah, who proselytized in tongues, and whose tears were coveted by the entire congregation. The adoration bestowed upon him in the revival tent did little to alleviate the daily nightmares heaped upon him as unwitting victim of his mother’s schizophrenia, his aunt’s hyper-sexualized insanity, and his grandmother’s channelling of other-worldly spectres.

Ron Athey, Ronnie Lee (2001), video featuring the author Gene Grigorits as teenage ‘Ronnie Lee’ Athey. Stills from a video by Cyril Kuhn. The video was shown in JOYCE (2002) on large screens below the live performances. It has also been exhibited elsewhere, including as a video installation as part of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp, Belgium in 2009. The other powerful video produced for JOYCE is Vena Mae (2001), in which Sheree Rose gives Patty Powers a Betadine douche, and vaginally fists Powers. Vena Mae and Ronnie Lee were shown together as a video installation at Shedhalle, Zurich, Switzerland in 2004.

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JOYCE debuted at the prestigious Kampnagel Theater in Hamburg, Germany, in 2002. As Athey’s most accomplished ensemble work, the stark beauty and emotional impact of this production all but defies description. Three immense screens project an onslaught of terrifying images: a young Ronnie Lee self-mutilating; his Aunt Vena undergoing an agonizing Betadine-douche-turned-fist-fuck for Jesus; his highly strung mother, Joyce, squirming and maniacally lint-picking; and his grandmother, Annie Lou, summoning the ectoplasmic angels whose beseeching shrill is exorcized in a series of automatic writing and action paintings. The stage is platformed above the video screens and divided into four rooms where the main characters’ repetitious compulsions escalate into an orgiastic frenzy. Mother Joyce is unable to withstand another moment of the voices within or the chaotic surroundings, and smashes through the plasterboard walls while suspended upside down. Joyce has for the duration of the performance been trapped in a makeshift one-room insane asylum, which mimics her unfortunate real life. The video screens vortex Joyce into infinity; an endless, unbelievably moving, visual spiral, which reveals the vulnerability of the body as a prison inside a prison, where the only possible escape is through repeating dangerous acts of near suicidal physical devastation.

Opposite: Ron Athey, JOYCE (2002), Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany. Stills from video by Cyril Kuhn. The stills show Athey, Patty Powers and Rosina Kuhn on the raised platform, with videos below (Hannah Sim is also onstage, but not visible in her plasterboard cell). Below is a still from a video of Miss Velma, as shown in the performance). The only recording is a low quality video document, from which we were able to create stills. The stills published here retain the quality of the original recording.

H E S H A R E S H I S C O M PA S S I O N AT E E P I P H A N Y: W E A L L N E E D TO BRE AK FREE FROM THE SHACK LES PL ACED UPON THE I N D I V I D U A L B Y S O C I E T Y, F A M I LY, R E L I G I O N A N D G E N D E R The entire spectacle is an unholy convulsion, which marries Jean Genet’s The Balcony, the Marquis de Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and ends in the madhouse staging of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. It is a tour de force of brutalizing intensity. Ron Athey forces the body to transcend its confines. His brilliance manifests as exorcism not only of and for the cauterizing of his own pain, but by pushing the boundaries of endurance through artistic expression, he shares his compassionate epiphany: we all need to break free from the shackles placed upon the individual by society, family, religion and gender. And possibly through the catharsis of performance and ritual, we might finally be able to lay to rest the demons who sent us in search of the respite only a knife or needle could at one time provide.

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J U D A S C R A D L E : I N VA S I V E R E S O N A N C E JUL IANA SNAPPER

Opposite: Ron Athey, performance for camera based on a scene from Judas Cradle (2004), Ljubljana, Slovenia. The image was made in collaboration with Manuel Vason. Photo: Manuel Vason. Athey made Judas Cradle in collaboration with Juliana Snapper, and they showed work in progress in a deconsecrated chapel at Grad Kodeljeva Castle, as part of Athey and Vaginal Davis’ Visions of Excess, commissioned by Aksioma (Janez Janša). Athey restaged the impalement scene with Vason after the live performance.

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I think it was April 2004 when Ron called me up to talk about sound design for a new piece. He had been reading about a system of torture called a Judas Cradle that involved lowering a person onto the penetrating tip of a large sharp pyramid. What made this horror stand out from a long list of such devices, he explained, was that it was designed to be more humane. And it was still in use. Ron’s interest in the object extended to what he described as the dissociative states in its orbit – not only the experience of the tortured subject, but of its inventor, the torturer and especially those who witness. I thought the sound score should stem entirely from his body. Ron described his own experiences of dissociation like being enveloped in a kind of shrill hum that was both inside and outside of his skull at the same time. We talked about amplifying his body in various ways, and batted around ideas for how to capture its internal sounds. He read some texts out loud and I suggested different ways to make them more embodied, noisier. I looked at Ron as he read, his broad ribcage, those wide, high cheekbones. Did that Heldentenor architecture hold all the way through? I kept my voice light as I asked if he’d be game to try a voice lesson – not to really sing, I lied, just to explore his instrument. I lured him with the promise of full conservatory treatment at a scarfdraped grand piano, complete with re-enactments of my most famous teachers’ nastiness: Blanche Thebom’s pinching claw, or Richard Miller’s vocal laboratory. Americans associate the cultivated voice with social detachment. We expect protest and critique to be quasi-spoken or shouted – hip hop, punk – and take the droopy grizzled surface of Bob Dylan’s voice

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Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper, Judas Cradle (2005), 291 Gallery, London. Photos by Manuel Vason.

as a sure sign of his sincerity. True, the operatic voice is not so hot at delivering a cogent argument or even recounting a complex story. It is often hard to understand an opera singer’s words even when they are in a language you speak. Contemporary opera has tried to fix this ‘flaw’ by switching out the fully developed operatic voice for tame and undercooked bodies, and then bridging any remaining gaps with video. But where it sacrifices vocality for storyline, opera is just a plain musical putting on of airs. In Judas Cradle (2004) – the production we collaborated on together – the voice was the primary text.

W E TO O K T H R OAT-S AV I N G B R E A K S TO L I S T E N TO O P E R A S C E N E S , P A R S I N G T E R M I N O L O G Y, S T Y L E S A N D D I F F E R E N T S T R U C T U R A L A P P R OAC H E S T H AT O P E N E D I N TO D I S C U S S I O N S A B O U T T H E I R U N D E R LY I N G M E T A P H Y S I C S Ron and I spent every spare moment of the months that followed that first meeting in intensive training, cloistered together in San Diego or Palm Springs for long weekends, sometimes incorporating several hours of voice lessons in a day. We took throat-saving breaks to listen to opera scenes, parsing terminology, styles and different structural approaches that opened into discussions about their underlying metaphysics. I drilled him in Italian and French diction. We mined the music library for scores, pored over opera serials to grab opera’s visual language, and Xeroxed the photos that made us cackle 200

hardest. We watched the worst parts of my favourite opera videos over and over again, debating the exact moment that a sublime voice cut through and cancelled out the wooden movements, monstrous maws and failed cinematic realisms. Ron upped the ante on each one with abject echoes from other arenas, like a transcendent Mae West, aged 80 in Sextette (dir. Ken Hughes), literally kept upright by sandbags under her skirts, in a locker room of singing men in their panties. By August, we had the foundation for an hour-long operatic duodrama addressing torture and dissociation – the Judas Cradle. In the three years that followed, we gave more than 20 performances in half a dozen countries.1 Halfway into my twentieth year, a short in my brain snapped my relationship with language. I could start sentences, but my initial thought was eclipsed by a veiny tree of word combinations (a map of flight routes that only got near my destination), none of them right and, worse yet, none of them a better wrong option. Those times that I managed to latch onto a word string that could foreclose the defaulted effort, the thought that started my lips moving was long gone, and the whole effort overtaken by a hissing overlay of humiliation and very genuine lack of conviction. I lived with a gorgeous woman who was learning at the lips of Kathy Acker how to read French feminism, and to shape words like fists, fuck-ready and dangerous and, I swear to god, shaping exquisite word combinations in glass and illuminating them with neon gas. I had seduced her when we were teenagers by luring

Amanda Piasecki designed, programmed and performed the interactive electroacoustic sound score for the full-length production of Judas Cradle that toured the UK in April–May of 2005, and played at the RedCat Theater in Los Angeles that summer. Piasecki was instrumental in fleshing out the psychoacoustical architectures of Judas Cradle, and its realization as an integrated operatic work. We also drew on the support and creative input of other phenomenal musicians: composer/opera director Sean Griffin helped us early on with our vocal treatments of the text and designed the notated score for ‘The Riddle’; Carol Plantamura, prima donna assoluta of the avant-garde, showed us how to sharpen our vocal interactions and did her best to fix our French and Italian diction. The performative tectonics of Judas Cradle demanded an orchestra pit of quick-witted improvisers which included (at different times) Drew Boles and Lauren Wooley of The Mercurial Gay Beings, percussionists Paula Cronan and Ponto Paparo, and trombonist Pierre Corneau.

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Opposite: Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper, Judas Cradle (2005), 291 Gallery, London. Photos by Manuel Vason.

her into elaborate criminal adventures, but could now only bleat my adoration in apologetic crusts and moisture-seeking smackings. When she left, so did my trust of language. Ron Athey, with his divine and divining tongue, would teach me to let language fail and allow the voice to make contact. Imagine us there at the very beginning under twitching fluorescents in a windowless bomb shelter of a classroom. I am at the keyboard, clawing arpeggios and barking at Ron poised half-naked in the curve of the battered Steinway grand piano. I listen to student singers by feeling the inner operations of their bodies in my own – phantom sensations of tension in the neck or disengagement in the abdomen that show me how to direct them. We all listen to voices this way to some degree, scanning one another’s insides with our ears, gleaning information on mood and other things the visible body camouflages. Ron was impatient with explanations and drills, and preferred a kind of direct transfer. Just as I did with him, he clocked my insides when I sang and met my sound by enacting the internal mechanics behind it.

AT H E Y ’ S B O N E S C A N C H A N N E L V I B R AT I O N W I T H S U C H F O R C E T H AT YO U C A N F E E L H I S VO I C E H A M M E R I N G O F F H I S S K U L L , JU S T BY S TA N D I N G B E H I N D H I M The ability to read one another’s insides would ultimately facilitate a thrillingly mobile axis for improvisation and onstage play. But before anything else, it let me lead Ron through his instrument, up and down through his registers, lifting his palate by lifting my own, coordinating his thoracic and abdominal movement of breath by coordinating my own, shifting the timbre, and changing colours as we got more flexible in channelling complex and ambivalent affective states into our overlapping ribcages and releasing them on the breath. Ron later described this as ‘invasive resonance milking space of dissociation, ecstasy and exorcism’. These physiological transfer studies became mutual invasions, duets. I began pressing my own instrument into new shapes to meet Ron’s sounds and body-states, his voice that others have described as a ‘hellish jet engine’ (a Brooklyn Rail review), or ‘a piercing impregnating sound’ (Amelia Jones). The gears and ballast of his breath are visible in the gap left when his spleen was removed (in an operation for HIV-related idiopathic thrombocytopenia). His bones can channel vibration with such force that you can feel his voice hammering off of his skull, just by standing behind him. I made Ron’s body an instrument as he gave my instrument a body. This exchange between our voices became the foundation not only of the piece, but of a transformative creative dynamic. The extent to which my work with Ron changed me is bigger than what I can convey here now. I learned creation as exchange rather than conveyor belt; I learned to trust vulnerability and generosity, and confirmed my distrust of any dialectic without pleasure, shame and cracking up. 202

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Ron showed me that performance at its most powerful is neither a precursor to interpretive works of critical theory, nor the staging of a critical thesis, but a living critical discourse that listens and responds. Ron guided me toward the formation of new instruments that extend rather than retreat from my cultivated coloratura by way of how my everyday body is situated: a voice that sings as it self-destructs, a voice that sings under water, a receptive voice that listens as it sings. The last performance of Judas Cradle was in 2008, in RouynNoranda, a hollowed-out gold mining town nestled into a polluted forest in northern Quebec.2 The festival had hired a local woodworker to craft the Judas Cradle – a 3-foot high pyramid of tapered, waxed and polished, well-oiled hardwood. But just before the show it mysteriously vanished from his studio. (Imagine the horny thief, probably still taking long weekends to self-impale in the swollen, tainted forest.) As a result, Ron had to give his body over to a splinter-ridden hatchet job. In the audio recording from that night, Ron’s breathing narrates the action. It quickens as he climbs the rigging up to the Judas Cradle, and then we only hear his exhales, slowing into a forceful rhythm, corralling his nervous system as he surrenders his weight and sinks incrementally down the Cradle’s widening base. Sometimes small cries would escape him when he did this. A few times he howled melismatic strains. By the very end of our UK tour, he sang Bellini’s ‘Malinconia, Ninfa Gentile’: ‘One who despises your pleasures is not born to true pleasures’! The Judas Cradle was a set of modular improvisational algorithms that changed with every performance. The one constant in every performance was the Cradle scene, which was always quiet, the only music-free moment in the piece. In that last performance, Ron’s quiet was hijacked like his beautiful Cradle had been. An unseen body cried out over his suffering breath – ‘HEYYY-unh!’ – a beat followed by a sequence of tuneful sobs rushing to fill the musical hole. Mewling sobs tightened around melodious wails, fuelled by long rattling pulls of snot and air. I have since thought of Ron’s impaled rectum as simply the lower portion of his glossolalic throat – a part that does not speak but rather pulls sounds up and out of witnesses to its breach. Ron likes to threaten me from time to time by recounting an evening in the future that will sneak up on me no matter how much I yearn for it: I will be singing my heart out, knee-deep in orchestra and dripping in sparkle on a formal concert stage, when a thin echo will leak up from the audience. It will start meekly at first, an embarrassed stalker, a runny little sound, always just a fraction of a second behind the beat (because he doesn’t actually know the melody). But little by little it will grow more forceful, brassy, resentfully shimmying its way upstage, a showboating parasite made entirely of throat.

Opposite: Ron Athey, performance for camera based on a scene from Judas Cradle (2004), Ljubljana, Slovenia. The image was made in collaboration with Manuel Vason. Photo: Manuel Vason.

Judas Cradle, ‘Quatrième Biennale d’art performatif’, L’Écart Gallery, RouynNoranda, 4 October 2008.

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ILLICIT TR ANSIT A D R I A N H E AT H F I E L D I saw a face of sovereignty. Not the sovereignty of the person, but of the compassionate no-self, eyes open upon the universal impermanence. – Alphonso Lingis1

Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), p. xi.

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The performance is Incorruptible Flesh (Dissociative Sparkle) at Artists Space, part of ‘Where Art and Life Collide’, a performance series co-sponsored by New York University and PERFORMA, 25 April to 5 May 2006. An earlier version was performed as Incorruptible Flesh (Il Luminous) in Glasgow in February 2006. ‘He’ is the author of this essay, but also a device to acknowledge the speculative nature of a discourse that is more fiction than testimony, more translation than interpretation, more response than critique.

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It is 1 May 2006 and he is winding through the streets of Soho to find the small gallery on Greene Street where Ron Athey is performing.2 He has timed his visit for an arrival at some point in the first hour of what promises to be a ‘come and go as you like’ five-hour-long performance. He quickens his pace as he hits Greene. He must somehow feel that he is missing something. The entrance is an anonymous warehouse-style grey door hidden amongst the high-end antique shops and fashion boutique façades. A neglected lobby leads straight to a lift that lazily takes him up a few floors and turns him out into the small white cube space. His eyes make adjustments to the altered light. He sees Athey located at the centre, lying naked on a high table or bed constructed of narrow steel poles. There is already a dense feeling of ceremony in the room, though there are just a few other spectators scattered around. They acknowledge each other’s presence without really exchanging looks. He feels the vortex of another temporality installed in this space; the mood is that of a vigil, a waiting, a draw to an irresistible force, but also an abeyance. Hovering at the side there is a female figure dressed in black, an attendant of sorts, who subtly motions a welcome. He gravitates to a wall and leans, in an attempt to take in the scene now overcoming his sight. There is a rapid accommodation of some physical facts. The ‘bed’ frame has a tubular ‘headboard’ that functions as a lashing point for taut cords attached to metal hooks piercing Athey’s cheeks and eyebrows, pulling his flesh back and apart into a startling grimace. The wounds are bloodless. Athey’s geometrically tattooed and glistening body rests harshly on the metal frame that appears to him now more like an industrial deck or torture rack. Fast on the contorted face there is another revelation. Athey’s buttocks are sunken in the middle of the frame where, at an upward angle, a greased blue aluminium baseball bat is fixed and consequently lodged deep in Athey’s rectum. The slender handle juts out. Pinioned and penetrated. This thing takes a while to perceive, and its mystery is further adorned. Sitting atop the intrusion, Athey’s testicles and penis are bulbous balloons: inflated to a preposterous limit they present as animal or desexed genitalia. He is transfixed. He feels the torsion of these

counterpointed facts within the figure, within the living body before him. He starts to try and work with them, to work them out: sifting through and separating material phenomena, feelings, gestures and images as they meld and re-meld in his thoughts. For all his abjection, Athey is somehow glorious here: a monarch lying in state. A delicate vein of translucent liquid is trailing down the handle of the baseball bat and gently puddling on the polished wooden floor. Time passes in some kind of immeasurable warp. He notices he is taking a few deep breaths, the first in a while. He comes around to his new being in this space, and just now recognizes the lighting in the room, turning sparkles and casting blurred shadows about the walls. Above Athey and directly in his opened, blinkless eyeline are twirling miniature mirror balls, some clustered like heads of pollen, another turning in a planetary solitude. They take his gaze for some time. He thinks disco, displaced or mutated. He thinks of childhood bedrooms with plastic starscapes and suspended planets belonging to the night, to sleep. It is only after he dwells on this overhead array that he becomes aware of other lighting effects: the floor spots illuminating Athey’s underside as if he were roasted meat on a spit, and then,

F O R A L L H I S A B JE C T I O N , AT H E Y I S S O M E H O W G L O R I O U S H E R E : A M O N A R C H LY I N G I N S T A T E comically, the small flashing white bicycle light incongruously strapped to the baseball bat and beating out a silent but impetuous rhythm. A light fuck? The bat is motionless, Athey too, but his flesh seems to be sinking into the metal, slipping deeper in. He thinks of anal sex, he thinks of baseball, street violence, gangster swings, and fish caught on hooks. Time passes, and from time to time he moves about the space, taking new angles of perception, negotiating the relation between his body, Athey’s and the bodies of other spectators in the space. Some come and go, but he is staying. The mood is careful, caring; there is difficulty and acceptance in the space. Occasionally the attendant will tend to Athey and, looking over his opened face, will gently drop liquid into his exposed eyeballs, like an expert horticulturalist feeding a temperamental exotic plant. In his mind’s eye, Athey is a hardy but needy succulent, skin stretched, bloated; he somehow needs more fluids within. He has no idea how long he has been in this space, but eventually an experiential passage feels like it is closing. The imperatives of his day resurface and he makes his way back into the city, fully intending to return. Divinity. Majesty. Human. Animal. Vegetable. Each is present – each within the others. A figure of a singular classless non-identity. 207

Ron Athey, Incorruptible Flesh (Dissociated Sparkle) (2006), Artists Space, New York. Photo by Julia Portwood Hipp.

Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (London and Cambridge: Live Art Development Agency and MIT Press, 2009).

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I am thinking of recent sculptural works by artists such as Mona Hatoum, Janine Antoni, Antony Gormley, but also the current proliferation of artworks at the intersections of the human and non-human.

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The works of Tehching Hsieh, Gina Pane and Alastair MacLennan are exemplary early articulations of this current that now runs through a range of practices: body art; environmental, community and Internet writing projects; and pedagogic marathons.

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Looking across the history of late twentieth- and early twenty-firstcentury contemporary art and performance practices, two powerful aesthetic currents are pertinent to the discussion here: an interrogative approach to the relation between enfleshed being and other materials, and an exploration of what I have elsewhere termed ‘durational aesthetics’.3 In the first current, artists have pursued experiments with objects, places and architectures in which their corporeal presence and action in relation to these materialities opens a field of enquiry around their relative being, power and signification. More recently, this enquiry has begun to question the supposed passivity of non-human things, drawing phenomenological attention to the interactions, vitalities and forcefulness of all matter. 4 In the second current, artists have deployed extremely long (and short) durations of action, representation or exchange, where time itself becomes a form through which its force upon, and shaping by, human consciousness may be questioned. Lately these durations have been used as modes of enquiry into alternate temporalities of being, sustainable life and persevering values in capitalized cultures characterized by acceleration, short-term thinking and violent change.5 Athey’s Incorruptible Flesh (Dissociative Sparkle) might be experienced and thought as a confluence of these frequently mingled currents, but first it would seem important to ask: what understanding of the artist as a human subject and agent is in play in such performances, and what kind of action and activity is in motion here?

The artist of performance, no longer separated from the material that they create, is the art matter through which expression takes place. This gesture is one in which the artist as a subject not only loses contemplative distance from ‘its own’ art, but also loses itself, or something of itself, in the process of becoming that art. The subject gives itself over to art and to others: it becomes the partial object it gives. It will never see or know its art outside of itself as the constituting matter of that art. This ‘self-production’ is, then, an art of incorporation, implicating others in its witnessing. In Dissociative Sparkle, the artist’s labour is given particular qualities: it is characterized by extreme passivity; the lying in state is evidently not instrumental or functionally ‘productive’. This is an action of inactivity, an undoing, marked by a sense of continuing redundancy. One might say that its only purpose is to arrive at a certain purposelessness. All that is produced in this unworking of the work is a passage of transient affects. The work attains and retains nothing, and it is this uselessness, this wastage, that it laboriously sustains. But why are such useless acts so compelling; why do they implicate their witness? Perhaps it is because they are resolutely intangible and unassumable. In refusing us they draw us on and in: we must try to make something of this nothing. The experience is somewhat like Emmanuel Levinas’ understanding of ‘useless suffering’ as a fact of consciousness: it is pain’s assertive denial of meaning in experience that calls us to respond, to be responsible.6 This ‘interhuman perspective’, as Levinas puts it, arises ‘without concern for reciprocity’, before the order of established customs of exchange, ‘in the asymmetry of the relation of one to the other’, where the pointlessness of the other’s pain may perhaps be commuted in what Levinas calls the ‘non-useless suffering’ of compassion.7 Athey’s performance cannot simply be reduced to the manifestation of pain, repelled or shared. But whatever feelings such performed relations instantiate for a spectating subject, whatever meanings are therein attached, the work brings to attention a particular quality of being, a precondition of being, that is our singular interdependence, our differentiated co-being. If the tattooed body in contemporary capitalized cultures has come to signify a profuse but still somehow resistant attitude to an array of nebulous powers, a living statement of social affinities and a mode of self-styling, how might the forces of the tattoo be read once it is extracted from its milieu of body-craft and fashion, and enters other spheres of aesthetic expression? The tattooed body is then part of a phenomenal assemblage in which questions of flesh-as-pictograph and pictograph-as-flesh are counterposed. Here, the tattooed body can be seen as an affect field that admits temporal awareness and confusion, and pulls the spectator into conditions of attention as touch. What is

Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, [1991] 1998), pp. 91–101.

6

ibid. pp. 100–01. For a reading of the eroticism of this ethics of relation, see Amelia Jones, ‘Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s Judas Cradle’, TDR, 50:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 159–69.

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a tattoo if not the imprint of others on one’s skin, the inexorable sign that one has been touched, marked by another? Before its modern remaking as a voluntary practice, the tattoo was a form of branding, a stamp of ownership and enslavement, or the penal retribution of the law. Its vestigial association with the criminal, as Steven Connor has shown, is affiliated with a refusal of regulated time: it signified excess, profligacy and ‘waste time’.8 As an inscription in the flesh from a particular time, the tattoo fixes a time within a continuing organic surface. The skin ages and the sign transforms. That which is set in flesh is not set in stone. The indeterminate temporality of the tattoo goes beyond the simple paradox of the popular misnomer ‘modern primitive’. The tattoo marks the irreversibility of the past within the contingent present, just as it declares its finitude in this specific body, its subjection to an inevitable future. In the phenomenal facing of performance, skin and coding get intertwined, become inseparable; here there is no pure body that is not already imprinted. The inscribed body is not just an adorned surface of delegated authorship or artistry, but a mobile collage or assemblage of many unwilled marks and styles. As such it is a body as a singular bearing of collective signatures. The tattoos register and recall the touch of others, the sensuous crossings of the flesh of the many. As Connor notes, ‘The skin’s capacity to bear and retain marks is also a capacity to transfer affect from body to body’.9 The tattooed flesh bared to the body of the visitor, etched with inky scars, is a graphic collaborative work demanding to be read and decoded through the visitor’s caress.

Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), p. 85.

8

9

ibid. p. 84.

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In Dissociative Sparkle, Athey’s iconography of his posed body in duration is less evidently referential than in some of his previous works, and readily appears as an assemblage of diverse materials, images, affects and actions. His work taps into a rich vein in performance and live art practice, coursing from an Artaudian impetus, in which the individuation of bodies (and consequently of subjects) is dissolved through the sensory appreciation of corporeal co-presence. Acts of carnal misuse and expropriation come to usurp some of the automatisms of the body’s biologically, socially and culturally designated functions. In Dissociative Sparkle, the holding together of counter-forced gestures within the prone figure leads the spectator to inhabit a space of sensory and emotive paradoxes. What is this face with which the spectator is faced? It simultaneously oversees, but it cannot see its viewer; it gives itself over without a returned look or mutual recognition. Moreover it is caught (as is the spectator) in a continuous ambivalence, simultaneously expressing dread and delight, pain and pleasure. Is Athey frightened or fearless? Is he perhaps protecting himself from a mortal rapture by being pre-surprised by it, or inoculating himself through an enduring astonishment? Or perhaps,

on the contrary, he is giving himself utterly and enduringly to the inevitability of this joyful cruelty. Who could say? This expression is an opening of the features as if they were responding in excited anticipation of/at a shocking surprise: neither before nor after the event of a stimulus then, but instead thoroughly acausal and anachronous, instantaneously locked into a sustained duration. An expressive supra-response. Athey’s visage is at once a death mask and a living face: still moving.10 One might think that this is a face of ‘fixation’ whose ostensible object is the glittering and rotating spheres that hang above the scene. The spectator sees this ‘seeing’. A seeing which is configured here as a non-correspondent act, caught between pleasure and pain, whose ‘object’ is a shattered reflective surface, out of reach but ceaselessly in motion. The concatenation (and inseparability) within the figure – the bat in the rectum and the over-opening of sight – suggest a certain relation between pleasure, violence and enlightenment. If seeing is implicated in knowing, then the epistemology on offer here is one derived through an experience of carnal illumination in the ‘darkest’ recesses, in which the violence of self-rupture is a matter and rehearsal of ecstatic oblivion. The sphincter dilates as the pupil contracts: they are coterminous. The flesh of the self is opened and stilled in order to give itself over to this restless

AT H E Y ’ S V I S AG E I S AT O N C E A D E AT H M A S K A N D A L I V I NG FAC E : S T I L L MOV I NG interior dazzlement, to this ‘inverse sensory deprivation’.11 There are too many suns in this bauble cosmos, and there is too much light in this room, light on light; this excess, belonging to a radiant non-object, is figured as the irresistible force toward which the hooked up Athey is drawn out. Solar energy, as Lingis remarks, has a certain aneconomic force: ‘Were we to envisage laws of wealth from the universal point of view, we should discover that the first law of a generalized economy of solar wealth is expenditure without recompense’.12 It is this profligate expenditure of energy toward which Athey’s bronzed, glistening body is oriented and within which it is bathed, encountered and engaged. The cosmic solar force may be rendered through disco balls, but the felt action calls to mind the sacrificial principle Georges Bataille found in the life and work of that other sun-obsessed artist Vincent Van Gogh: ‘the necessity of throwing oneself or something of oneself out of oneself’.13 What is this figure that waits beside another, caught in the in-between time, the meantime, neither coming nor going, but watching with those who come and go? Perhaps a surrogate spectator and shadow witness. An attendant is also a tender, someone who serves another, but also someone who tends, who gives, who stretches out, extends,

10 This combination of the vital and the deathly is also resident within the multiple influences that led Athey to this image: the ‘garish glamour’ of facelifts and photographs of the corpse of the much mythologized Elizabeth Short, whose face was mutilated by her killer into a cut open smile (Athey, e-mail correspondence with the author, 6 January 2012). 11

ibid.

12

Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture, p. 72.

Georges Bataille, ‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh’, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. and trans. by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 61–72 (p. 67).

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who offers help, and does so carefully, with a tendency to tenderness. The action of the attendant is often overlooked, as histories are centred on named and individuated ‘causal’ agents rather than ‘supporting’ characters, who too often remain in the nameless collective background, the shadowlands of events. One only has to think of Chris Burden’s anonymous marksman, Tehching Hsieh’s cell ‘warder’ or Sophie Calle’s recalcitrant beloveds to trace an alternate history of performance written from or at the margins of a legible agency. In the context of Athey’s Dissociative Sparkle, the attendant is a vital figure, not least because it is her action that models the touching relation and relation of touch that sustains the work and gives it its meanings. Jennifer Doyle, the attendant in this event, has reflected extensively on this work, in part from her location within it.14 For Doyle, Athey’s body is feminized from the start through an aesthetic insistence on its ‘permeability’, ‘pliability’, and ‘fragility’. Her thought goes on to trace the importance of the work’s rare assertion (in art-historical terms) of an enacted discourse on the maternal concerned with masculine dependency and nurturing. Importantly, Doyle’s role within the work is to keep Athey’s eyes ‘functioning’ and safe. The very corporeal nexus of masculine scopic power, the organ of distantiation and objectification, is presented here as a surface to be protectively touched; a passive membrane, whose mobility and wetness Doyle must sustain. Passage through a membrane is a movement that is reversible depending on the pressure on either side. Fluid is given to the eyes, but tears are also shed. Though Doyle’s critical discourse identifies her performed role as an echo of other sadistic feminine ‘caring’ figures in Athey’s earlier work (she maintains his ‘tortured position’), this identification seems less certain when one considers the reversibility inherent in sadomasochism, the indeterminacy of feeling in this work, and the uncertain force and direction of liquid gestures at a membrane or threshold. The performance subtly conditions its reception and response: as Connor has noted, ‘a delicate object requires careful handling, just as a curious object makes us inquisitive’.15 So who can tell the toucher from the touched? Who is commanding and whom the commanded? The relation of touch that is modelled in this performance is an open-handed one: rather than seeking to grasp, to make of Athey (and his work) a solid object to be held, the attendant’s action is a touching that does not touch: it is mediated through the fluid, it withdraws even as it approaches, it is re-served, tactful in its tactility. The attendant feeds without consuming, without taking in hand. Such caresses honour the instability and mobility of the work with a light touch.

See Jennifer Doyle, ‘Touchy Subject’, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

14

15

Connor, ‘Disfiguring’, p. 271.

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He takes a left off Greene and onto Broome and heads toward Broadway. Already the sidewalk is heavy with people getting on with shopping at the periphery of a disruptive and consuming event. Up ahead he can see a thick stream of protestors with placards and flags slowly heading down Broadway: a march on employment rights for immigrants. He crosses into the stream of unknown bodies and finds himself walking in the flow, absorbing and participating in the spirit of resistance and celebration, the show of force. He is not an immigrant worker, nor an intentional protestor, but some accident has carried him into this scene, into this action, into shared necessity. In every step of this walk he is carrying Athey’s body with him, thinking through the correlation of this public tumult and the somewhat secluded but nonetheless public world he has just left. Illicit affinities are sustaining life. Here is their consanguinity. Touching intensities, bodies and voices of all creeds intermingle in a fugitive movement that seeks to leverage senses, states, spaces of freedom, inside the impoverishing and penalizing conditions of the law.

Overleaf: Ron Athey, Incorruptible Flesh (Il Luminous) (2006), National Review of Live Art, Glasgow. The image was made in collaboration with Manuel Vason. Photo: Manuel Vason. The image is one of a series taken before the audience entered the performance space.

If Athey’s early theatrical works in part deployed a ritualistic ‘modernprimitivism’ in ‘tribal’ dance, ceremonial piercings, incantations and glossolalia – thereby marking their otherworldliness and othertimeliness as well as their contemporaneity – the iterative nature of later works, such as Dissociative Sparkle, is not so locatable or legible. Yet, a strong sense of the immemorial persists. As his performance work has evolved over a thirty-year period, its internal references have sedimented just as its formal range, image-repertoire and actional vocabulary has grown. Since its emergence from the LA punk rock, death rock and SM club scenes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Athey’s performance has subtly made use of the stilled figure. This statuesque form is a vestige of the tableau vivant: the curious pictorial arrangement of live bodies posed and suspended in gestural relations. The form is migrant, with deep historical roots in both the practice of painting and theatre. It has also come to occupy a resonant place in contemporary dance and photography, not least because of its ability to evidence the constructed nature of imaging whilst at the same time drawing attention to its kinetic and temporal dynamics. Here the look, composure and posture of social relations are put in question.16 Such trans-aesthetic and transhistorical queer iterations of temporarily posed life, frozen into a plane, are evident in Athey’s larger theatrical works of the 1990s, and in his photographic collaborations with Catherine Opie.17 In each, one could see the posed image of a figure as an echo amalgam of canonical Renaissance paintings (of already heavily iterated biblical and mythical scenes) transmuted to the stage or to the lens.

In photographic practice, the works of Jeff Wall, Steven Arnold and Yinka Shonibare are most prominent. The tableau vivant form recurs in recent practices of conceptual dance, in the work of artists such as Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy and Ivana Müller, as a means to interrogate the nature of movement, and its social and anthropological conditioning.

16

17 I am thinking of 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994) and Deliverance (1995). See Opie’s images in this publication.

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In these influential paintings, the figure stilled in the captured moment of the work can be seen, as Philippe-Alain Michaud’s analysis of Aby Warburg’s readings of Renaissance art have exposed, not as a depiction of a resolved state of being (say of composure, equilibrium and harmony), but rather as an evocation of agitation and movement. Warburg’s interest lay in the way these arrested figures disclosed themselves as given over to internal and external forces: ecstatic expressions that returned movement to the rested image, giving it a sense of duration. Michaud notes the hallucinatory affect that such forms have on the spectator and indeed on Warburg (dead figures live again); the spectator becomes aware of their ‘intervention’, their own movement in relation to the work with which they dance.18 If the use of such perturbations in painting and in photography is capable of returning to these static forms the motion that they lack, what might one say of the obverse: the stilled figure in performance? Here, the arrested body denies us the animated action we expect, pressing it instead into its corporeal phenomena, the micro-affects of the event, and making explicit the relation and plane of vision through which the living frieze is given to be seen. The plane no longer holds. Such affects bring us to a threshold, to an interface or crossing that is neither inside nor outside, to an indeterminate space.

E C S TAT I C E X P R E S S I O N S T H AT R E T U R N E D M O V E M E N T TO T H E R E S T E D I M AG E , G I V I N G I T A S E N S E O F D U R AT I O N

Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. by Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, [1998] 2004), pp. 82–85.

18

Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘On the Threshold’, The Muses, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1994] 1996), p. 60.

19

20 Here again is a kind of residual presence beyond death. The model for the Virgin Mary may have been a drowned woman, a prostitute, or one of Caravaggio’s mistresses, Nancy notes (ibid. p. 62).

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In his reading of Caravaggio’s painting The Death of The Virgin of 1606 (the virgin is another kind of incorruptible flesh), Jean-Luc Nancy makes explicit the impure, erotic and deathly forces at work in such thresholds of sight. For Nancy, the compositional dynamics and assemblage of posed figures around the thrown body of the dead Mary evoke the ultimately irreducible and infinite force of death, its inherence in every moment of existence: ‘If there is not death itself, neither is there before nor beyond. Death: we are never there, we are always there’.19 For Nancy, ‘the painting is our access to the fact that we do not accede – either to the inside or the outside of ourselves’; an evocation then of another kind of material corporeal limit and ecstatic transport. Caravaggio’s painting was of course rejected by the Barefoot Carmelite church in Rome, a refusal that Nancy reads as being due to the presence in the painting of a feeling of vulgar and profane abandon, and at the same time, a sacrificial resonance that is queer, erotic, fecund.20 Isn’t the spectator of Dissociative Sparkle cast as an enfleshed ghost of some such vigil at the edges of queer being? Athey is a static figure in a mobile composition that draws the spectator into a momentary tableau vivant within which they will act, making an image that they will not see, that obeys no single organizing perspective or plane of vision. The body in extremis acquires its invigilators. If one takes up

Ron Athey, Incorruptible Flesh (Dissociated Sparkle) (2006), Artists Space, New York. Photo by Julia Portwood Hipp.

Athey’s invitation to touch, to commune, one is instantly posed in an immemorial gesture of attendance to the prone sacrificial body, the echo amalgam of such thresholded bodies throughout time. The spectator, now an agent or player, is not so much at the threshold, as within it; a threshold that keeps unfolding and enfolding in and around their active presence. Here, time is ongoing but it seems impossible to know which way things will go. Up, down, in, out, round and around. The kinetic dynamics of this work are in continuous counterpoint. Up and down: the micro-movements of breath against the stillness of the figure. Round and around: the spheres, lights and bodies in the space. In and out: the public, the baseball bat and the nourishing tears. He returns to the gallery on Greene. It is some hours later now, and as he retraces his steps back to the space his mind is filled with thoughts of what has happened in the meantime, in his absence, in this place. He realizes that through the two or three hours that have passed since his first visit he has been carrying the experience of this work silently inside himself, feeling it unfold and reformulate in memory, in every iteration of its resurfacing to consciousness. More than that, the performance has been continuing within him virtually, in some hazy and amorphous internal cinema. Every now of his actual experience has been shadowed or mirrored by the knowledge and feeling of another continuous reality in that place, touching his reality. The present is saturated with so many other times. As the lift doors trundle open, his first sense is of the disjunction between the scene before him now and his mental projection. The room is fairly crowded, and although he is no stranger here, he feels he needs to navigate an 217

entry into another populated realm. Some people are sitting against the walls, others are standing, and from time to time a spectator will snap on a pair of medical gloves from the pile at the side of the space and massage Athey’s limbs. This is instantly a more social space, consensual, punctuated by sporadic muffled exchanges between Athey and the spectators, around the nature of their physical intervention. The silent contemplative air of the earlier passage is transformed from time to time into a negotiation between the work as image, object, presence, and a sensual and linguistic feedback loop. He is caught up in some new dynamics around his agency in the space: whether he wants or doesn’t want to be part of the work in this different way, his identifications or disidentifications with the other actors. His own desire, his senses of boundary, his proprieties, all are now more blatantly in question. Over by the far wall he sees the Serbian performance artist whom he has met on a few previous occasions. She looks rooted. She smiles, a glance of recognition, and returns to what he perceives as an intense scrutiny of Athey. Later, as people shift about the space, they find themselves adjacent to each other; they briefly hug and she softly mentions the mesmeric grip of the work. It seems that she has been here for quite some time. Time passes and there is a steady flow in and out of the space; a gentle choreography of coming, lingering and going. But a growing band of people here are definitely long-stayers. He is starting to feel a non-specific welling up, a verging tear to give back to Athey’s dried-out eyes. It holds a question within it. He has felt something like this feeling before: the accumulated weight of a duration. The way felt experience piles upon itself; the time served pressing into being another order of psychological and emotional consequence. It’s not at all like the wince or repulsion one gets from an act of carnal risk, but rather a sensual conviction, a fraught affinity with the work’s powers of exposure. He starts to feel he feels as it feels, thinks he sees as it sees, in flashes of recognition of the very being of things. All of this is wordless even in thought. He is uncertain of Athey’s wellbeing; he looks frailer, drifting away. Or is that merely his projection? Now there’s definitely some nervousness in the room. All that time dazzled, slabbed, deep on the bat. Was his anxiety the viral cause of these tremors? He thinks not. One of the spectators has taken up gloves and is massaging Athey more vigorously, chattering and laughing anxiously as he goes. There’s some kind of overcompensation, over-identification, he feels. Someone is trying to make things all right, but in fact it is not all right, and it seems to him that most folks here are all right with this being not all right. A blur of some time. The mood has shifted again, and now it is thick with alteration and joy. He realizes that the performance is coming to a close. Though as it ends, he is strangely not there, not present to its formalities. Perhaps the attendant said some words, or a representative of the gallery, or Athey himself drew the work to a close, he cannot tell. In the moment 218

he knows he does not want it to end, and he has the intuition that the spectators themselves were psychically compelled to close the work. He also knows that the performance is not over when it is ‘over’: there is no shift in register, no imperative to leave, and it continues to work on and within him.

Ron Athey, preparatory sketch for Incorruptible Flesh (Dissociated Sparkle) (2006).

Divinity. Majesty. Human. Animal. Vegetable. Each is present – each within the others. Each is present as an absence of itself. Each estranged from itself in this chiasmatic field of strangeness. This figure is a shapeless, beautiful thing: that sense of a life intimated without taking a visible form. This figure is a nameless, monstrous thing. Yet, it is all too human and already under one’s skin. No one could name it without at once expelling it from within, separating from it, declaring oneself inviolate. And in so doing, becoming someone by renouncing what one utterly is: a stranger to oneself as to another. In the grip of this alluring and repulsive strangeness, folded one into the other, as Nancy says, ‘I recognize […] that I am unrecognizable to myself, and without that there would be no recognition’.21 In the given figure, being is shown without itself, a presentation, not assumable by ideas. The words come nonetheless – the discourse too – to babble over this monstrosity, to tame and normalize its force. Revisiting Athey’s oeuvre through the watered lens of Dissociative Sparkle, the question of what Athey’s performing body does can be reformulated. Aside its rupturing affects, its challenges to social and cultural powers that discipline the flesh and mould the subject, its

Nancy, ‘Painting in the Grotto’, The Muses, p. 70.

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experimental morphologies of the human, Athey’s body presents and discloses itself as a delicate force of carriage. It is the vessel and the scene of uncertain transports: of joy and pain, most evidently, but also the transit of other bodies that are re-borne and transformed through iteration. Here, Dissociative Sparkle’s rack is less a platform of deathly display and more a conveyor belt of lives. Think: not just of all the voices speaking through Athey’s tongue in his performances, or the many familial characters channelled through his vestigial acts, but of the other artists and their works carried in and through the materiality of his flesh. One might see this performing body as a ‘living archive’, to use the artist Julie Tolentino’s phrase. In this notion, flesh is thought

I R E C O G N I Z E T H A T I A M U N R E C O G N I Z A B L E T O M Y S E L F, A N D W I T H O U T T H AT T H E R E W O U L D B E N O R E C O G N I T I O N

Michel Foucault, ‘The Historical a priori and the Archive’, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper and Row, [1971] 1976), p. 130.

22

André Lepecki has recently recast the proliferation of practices of re-enactment in performance art, visual art and dance through the notion of the body as archive. For Lepecki, ‘The body is archive and archive a body. […] To re-enact would mean to disseminate, to spill without expecting a return or profit. It would mean to expel, to ex-propriate, to excorporate under the name of a promise called giving’: André Lepecki, ‘The Body as Archive: Will to Re-enact and the Afterlives of Dances’, Dance Research Journal, 42. 2 (Winter 2010), pp. 28–48.

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as a vessel for the historical transport of past times or lives that were always incomplete, and already iterative and non-original. The archival would then be practiced somewhat following Michel Foucault’s thought, as a rigorous mode of reinvention: ‘[B]etween tradition and oblivion [the archive] reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements’.22 The archive then is not simply a static repository of traces of lives, nor is it solely an institution, architecture or collection nominated as such, but rather a diffuse cultural system moving between occurrences, the corporeal, the textual and the artefactual in an ongoing state of flux. A living archive would involve the assertive incorporation (in buildings, things or bodies) and reanimation of such historical traces not as recovery of a knowable and locatable past, but rather as a generous and generative act. 23 Dissociative Sparkle is one such form of living archive, part of a relational series of works under the heading Incorruptible Flesh whose first instalment was a collaboration in 1996 with the late Lawrence Steger (1961–99). In this work, a master-slave duet that moves from calm speculation to carnal evocation, Steger, nude beneath a diaphanous cassock, gently commands the space with a manifesto-like speech, invoking a future state in which hunger and illness are absent and the body is impassable. This incorruptible flesh, the preacher says, would be both agile and robust, it would exist in a condition of continuous satiation, and it would possess ‘a light more luminous than any sun’. Steger then proceeds to drag out the exemplification of this body, pulling an upright Athey on a carriage to the front of the stage. Athey appears as a gaffer-taped gimp with pneumatic breasts and a protruding, distended prosthetic mouth through which he is breathing heavily. Steger slowly cuts Athey out of this garb, as brilliant white light pierces Athey’s crown and his tattooed flesh is revealed. Athey is half dragged up, but his lips have been pinned open to his

cheeks so that his mouth appears as a swollen, overly open orifice. He dons further drag accessories and begins to dance in an ecstatic, sexualized, but shambolic vaudeville. If Dissociative Sparkle is in part a resurgence and a reliving of the concerns of this earlier work – a collaboration between two HIV-positive queer men – then it is a continuance that takes place as a dialogue between the present and the past, between the surviving and the lost. Here what it means to ‘carry’ (a virus, a memory, another body) and what it means to carry on (to bear the unbearable) are at stake. The modality suggests that ‘illness’ is not an interior enemy to be fought or expelled, but an alteration necessitating new understandings of freedom. The living archive of Athey’s body is the still vital scene of this enquiry: it endures, and in doing so, continuously investigates and makes evident the impossible desire for an incorruptible flesh. It was a version of this desire (and its attendant fear of corruption) that animated the violent homophobic public discourse in relation to Athey’s earlier formation of a living archive, the ‘Human Printing Press’. Then, fear transported a biological virus across and against material facts, as if it were an idea.24 But the insistently material body posed by Athey and Steger, caught between mortality and immortality, subjection and freedom, desire and satiation, dances in the joyous light of the always already corrupted flesh. It is, in this sense alone, an incorruptible corporeality. Athey’s durational lying in state is in part a revision of that ecstatic dance (white light, blown lips, slow carriage), and an exploration of what it means to endure, to be an enduring being, who carries within his body and his acts the force of these other works and lives. The living archive of performance is sustained in the movement from one body to another: it requires careful relay and response, as modes of iteration and regeneration. It is this imperative (not of preservation but of ethical rejuvenation) that is also implicit in Matthew Goulish’s writing on Steger, and his writing in this book on Athey’s collaborations with Steger.25 The gesture of transit is a kind of re-nurturing of lost lives in the present; not ‘properly’ nostalgic or melancholic, but attendant to the past in ways that make it live again, differently. Revivifying Steger’s archive, Goulish finds himself, in writing at least, travelling back with Steger to a moment in Sarajevo, nine months before his death, to give him a glass of water. Steger is carried beyond his death into the present through such inscriptive acts of re-nurturing, in semblances of a life, the text becoming flesh in the tissue of the page. The watering is not just sustenance of the past (or passed), but an artistic means to generate another future. So too, in Dissociative Sparkle’s reliving and reposing of the gestures of the previous collaborative work, Athey carries Steger and his traces with(in) and beyond. This is a re-forcing of an afterlife, or as Goulish puts it, a reassertion of ‘some emerging life force that lived on, potent and ordinary, perceptible only through proximity, only in the present, that memory cannot conjure but only recognize’.26 A memory then that is

24 For a strong discussion of the politics of this violent projection see Doyle, Hold It Against Me.

Matthew Goulish, ‘A Glass of War: LS (remix) Chapter 7’, Performance Research, 15.1 (2010), pp. 15–23. See also Goulish’s similarly nourishing ‘The Milk Factory on Winchester’ in this book.

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Goulish, ‘A Glass of War’, p. 18.

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Opposite: Ron Athey and Julie Tolentino, Resonate/Obliterate (2011), Los Angeles. Photo by Franko B and Thomas Qualmann. Overleaf: Vaginal Davis (facing) and Lee Adams (from behind) in Ron Athey’s ensemble performance, History of Ecstasy (2009), MADRE Museo Contemporanea Donna Regina, Naples, Italy. Photo by Amedeo Benestante. Courtesy MADRE.

not a remembering, but nonetheless involves a re-seeing, a recognition, a reminding. In turn Athey is reanimated, re-watered as we have seen, not just on this occasion by his tender attendant, but by other artists such as Tolentino, a frequent and longstanding collaborator of Athey’s, whose recent performances with him (and with others) are archivations for her ‘life’s duration’.27 As witnessed live processes of ‘learning’, ‘imitation’ and ‘appropriation’ of Athey’s work, they carry it on and off. Artistic community is modelled in these enfleshed intertextual relays, as a coming-undone-together, as a transhistorical labour of collaborative passage. It can be invented once again and again, through acts of care, continuance and transit. It is 1 May 2006 and the performance is over after many hours. Some of the audience are staying in the space, shrugging off their spectatorial roles, re-entering other lives. He too remains in the space, still a visitor, an uncertain stranger, but unable to leave, absorbing, feeling, thinking. The attendant releases the cords from their frame and helps remove the hooks from Athey’s face. A towel is firmly applied to stanch any bleeding. Gripping the frame Athey slides himself up and off the bat. With a single swing he is down, feet on the floor, but unsteady. Athey comes toward his many attendants, smiling with ease, exalted. He is tottering. Neither a stumbling nor a falling but a trembling, delicate, unhabituated walk. Like a child’s first steps. Athey is bare in a world of others. Being borne again.

27 Julie Tolentino, The Sky Remains the Same, performance series (2008–). This work’s rendition of the notion of living archive is discussed in Lepecki, ‘The Body as Archive: Will to Re-enact and the Afterlives of Dances’ p. 32–34.

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BY WORD OF MOU T H: R O N AT H E Y ’ S S E L F - O B L I T E R AT I O N T I M E TC H E L L S

1 Athey performed Self-Obliteration I: Ecstatic, Self-Obliteration II: Sustained Rapture, and the premiere of SelfObliteration III back-to-back as part of the National Review of Live Art’s 30 th anniversary festival at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, on Friday 19 March 2010.

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By the time I reach Glasgow for the National Review of Live Art (2010), Ron Athey’s Self-Obliteration performance of the previous night is already part legend.1 In the stories which float through the foyer and out towards Hope Street, witnesses agree to disagree about pretty much everything – from the quantities of blood spilled either deliberately or accidentally, to the precise number of fainting punters, to the exact length or trajectory of the crimson parabola that spurted from one particular wound in his scalp (or forehead, or eyes), spraying splatters to the ground. Rumours, many of them more or less absurd, seep, grow and shrink exponentially in the diverse microclimates of The Arches. Something went wrong. He was in danger. An ambulance was called. No, not really, and no, it turns out. But the mix of mildly hysterical HIV-fear and potent art images stirs the venue’s subterranean air in strange ways, whilst Athey’s absence – slipped away in the darkness of the Glasgow night – only seems to further fuel the rumour fire, adding mystery to deliberate injury. The impact of performance is always to some extent a word-ofmouth affair. The event is a temporal kink or rupture – a whirlpool in time that functions as catalyst, trigger and flashpoint. Working this dynamic potential of initial event and complex fecund echo, Athey’s performances propose themselves as unsolvable, unresolvable imagefacts. Each work is a tightly bound conundrum in flesh and being with no evident solution, a wound (in the body, in the quotidian), an illogical proposition in tangled suspension whose meaning lies always in abeyance. The performance event – action posed as problem – is at once a place of origin and a point of departure. Its material unfolding provides the spot from which accounts in all forms – rumours, stories, anecdotes, lay speculations, as well as academic theorizations – will proceed. The event takes place, and even as it does so begins a process of movement, cultural drift or explosion, circling outwards and inwards as all kinds of repetition, exaggeration and distortion play their part in the re-imaging and reimagining of what transpired. For Athey – ghosting Georges Bataille, Marlene Dietrich, Saint Sebastian, Joan of Arc, Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud, or the 1970s evangelist sermonizer Miss Velma – the performance event is also a point of arrival in which energies from the past, actions, stories, myths, practices and images are corralled into the present, reconfigured,

Ron Athey, Self-Obliteration I (2007), performance for camera, Morongo Valley, California. Photo by Serge Hoeltschi. Overleaf: Ron Athey, Self-Obliteration I (2008), Galerija Kapelica, Slovenia, Ljubljana. Photo by Miha Fras.

centrifuged, deflected and then sent on their way again refreshed, drained, spun, redirected. In this way, both potential pasts and potential futures flow through and around the present moment: the moment of performance. And meanwhile, as ever, that moment, the present still and slowed and made vivid in image action, insists on itself – makes and takes its own time and place. Ron with stapled scrotum. Ron with stretched, bloody face. Ron shitting pearls. Ron suspended, needle-punctured: simple (bodies, machineries, action) and complex (invocations of culture, counterculture, queer culture).

B L O O D A N D TAT TO O S , B R E AT H I N G , B L E E D I N G , W R I T I N G A N D D R A W I N G : A T H E Y R E P E A T E D LY P O I N T S U S T O T H E B O DY A S T H E R AW M AT T E R O F H U M A N E X I S T E N C E Just as the work multiplies time (the present woven thick with futures and pasts), Athey uses performance to stage a second compelling double insistence, this time related to the body. Each work in different ways invokes both the materiality of the body and its link to the immaterial – the body as brute flesh on the one hand, and the body as the living container of consciousness and transcendence on the other. Blood and tattoos, breathing, bleeding, writing and drawing: Athey repeatedly points us to the body as the raw matter of human existence, and at the same time insists on the body as the substance, site, material and conduit for culture, the flesh of consciousness. His body is the ground in and through which the ephemerality of desire, history, memory, imagination and narrative can grow. Indeed, from the ‘Torture Trilogy’ to Self-Obliteration, Athey’s work exists in the fraught twin spaces of the theatrical/factual, the imaginary/actual, the bodily/ 227

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fantastical, such that these troubled, if not collapsed binaries, braid constantly around each other; we are never in one space but rather, always between two. The actual always and at all levels is remade as imaginary. Often constituted as a single inhabited image or series of simple performative processes, Athey’s works place performer(s) and spectators in a position of temporal and bodily uncertainty. Eschewing experimental performance’s common tendency to excess dramatic information, Athey’s work often confronts the spectator with detailed singularities; situations of apparent stasis offering little in the way of development or declared dramaturgy; arrested image or images bearing scant information with or through which to orientate. Athey’s work, in this sense, frequently proposes itself as fragments or parts which pose their before or after as a question – fragments which through persistence are given the status of a problematic (unstable, inexplicable) whole. We are presented with a person or persons in a state – a fixed state, moment or situation that changes only little, a state that we simply encounter, glimpsing, and is then gone. The status of this moment – as a fragment (divorced from context, hinting at but lacking confirmation concerning its future or past) is the thing that poses a problem for the spectator – a problem of confounding persistence and radical incompletion. And it is this incompletion and persistence, the after-image trauma of this event-problem, which gives rise to (and compels) narrative.

JU S T A S AT H E Y ’ S TAT TO O E D B O DY I T S E L F I S W R E AT H E D A R O U N D W I T H S TO R I E S , H I S A R T P R AC T I C E T W I S T S I N A F O G C O N S T E L L AT I O N O F N A R R AT I V E , AC C U S AT I O N , S U P P O S I T I O N A N D A N E C D O T E

Congressional Record 140.81 H [House] (23 June 1994). Congressional Record Online via the Government Printing Office, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC1994-06-23/html/CREC-1994-06-23-pt1PgH29.htm [accessed 04/06/12].

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Even before the lazy exaggerated criticism of California Representative Robert Dornan first framed Athey’s work as that of a ‘porno jerk’ endangering the audience with what Senator Cliff Stearns called the ‘slopping around of AIDS infecting blood’, the work proceeds in true and untrue versions, in rumour space.2 Just as Athey’s tattooed body itself is wreathed around with stories, his art practice twists in a fog constellation of narrative, accusation, supposition and anecdote; all of these and other texts threading round the original object by word of mouth, by word of print, by word of Internet, sometimes obscuring it entirely, refiguring its contours, expanding its mass and reach. It’s a vulnerable and frequently (if not always) violent process – because as Dornan and Stearns demonstrated, the pull to narrativization is by no means always benign. But Athey works the event in full knowledge of its volatile overproducing machinery. He works the event not as a stone thrown into water – sending out ripples in the mappable and regular concentric circles implied by missile, trajectory, point and ground of impact – but rather he works the event through a much more complex physics of mystery and energy transfer. Each work is indeed a kink,

Ron Athey and Company, excerpts from Deliverance (1998), Cinema Rex (Rexane Erotisch Theater), Rotterdam International Film Festival, Netherlands. Photo by Ron Athey and Company. Athey and Company performed excerpts from Deliverance and Trojan Whore. The late Brian Murphy is shown in the foreground during a section of Deliverance.

rupture or knot in time – a portal, open wound or orifice through and out of which stories, cultural tensions, echoes and quotations pass. Each work is also a gravitational attractor, an event that pulls existing yet disconnected strands of thought and story into play, bending paths, altering trajectories, dragging some things into orbit, as others continue, their way changed through the encounter. In one sense, of course, you had to be there, at The Arches in Glasgow in 2010 for Athey’s Self-Obliteration, to know what really happened, or what that work really was; or you had to be there at the Cinema Rex in Rotterdam as part of the event A Day and Night at the Rex (1998), in which Ron and collaborators performed cabaret style, ending with Ron in a double-dildo ass-fuck scene with Brian Murphy whilst trying to read a text from his laptop (having somehow been unable to get the text printed because he was too busy searching for a different lube – all they could find was flavoured lube he said, something like chilli-flavoured), anyway, Ron more or less laughing down there on the floor of the small stage, as he read off the screen to an excitable cheering crowd, the laptop jerking and bucking with 231

Ron Athey, Self-Obliteration I (2007), Donau Festival, Krems, Austria. Photo by Christophe Chemin. Opposite: Ron Athey and Julie Tolentino, Resonate/Obliterate (2011), Los Angeles. Photo by Franko B and Thomas Qualmann.

the fucking action, as he held it (the laptop) one-handed, the whole of his weight on his other hand, and people were laughing and Ron was laughing too (or that’s how I remember it), and you pretty much had to have been there to know the strange circulation of energies and tensions in the room. The sadness of the text is what I am talking about, and the laughter, and the movement of the bodies – and Ron’s eyes are very beautiful when he laughs; and afterwards when we went back towards the centre of town in the cab the driver said earnestly, ‘You know the last time I brought people to this venue it was two Scandinavian guys looking for a fat whore and heroin, and now it’s full of artists, what’s going on?’ And we told him, still laughing, the whole event and you could see the driver taking it all in, working it all through in his head, so that, no doubt, he could later repeat this shifting strangeness of the city and the world to some other passengers… and of course you did not have to be there at all because the whole thing is still rolling out always anyway in story form, mutating, transforming, echoing, turning, changing, spinning, breaking, dying, revitalizing, bleeding, stressing, shivering, shimmering, laughing and living, by word of mouth.

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T H E N E W B A R B A R I A N S : A D E C L A R AT I O N O F POE TIC DISOBEDIENCE FROM THE NE W BORDER G U I L L E R M O G Ó M E Z- P E Ñ A

Opposite left: Premature Ejaculation (Ron Athey and Rozz Williams), untitled performance for camera, Los Angeles, 1982. Photo by Karen Filter. Opposite right: Ron Athey performing in the music video Cardinal Newman (1981) by the iconic punk bank Nervous Gender. Directed by and courtesy Michael Intriere. Overleaf left to right: Ron Athey, Trojan Whore (1995), Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. Photograph by Ron Athey and Company. Rick Castro, Ron Athey and Piglet (19 92), Hollywood, CA. Ron Athey, blood traces from Self-Obliteration I (2008), Abode of Chaos, Lyon, France. Photo by Lukas Zpira. Ron Athey, Self-Obliteration I (2007), performance for camera, Morongo Valley, California. Photo by Serge Hoeltschi.

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I first met Ron Athey in Los Angeles: one of the margins of western civilization. It was 1988, and he was writing for the LA Weekly and I was writing for Spanish language newspaper La Opinion. We both were cultural journalists in the daytime and performance artists by night. We shared many wild friends, a twisted sense of humour and occasional performance powwows at Highways Performance Space, LACE and other venues. Despite his fierce look, he was the most tender and soft-spoken person I had met in Los Angeles. We started a longterm friendship, and since then we’ve been attentive witnesses to each other’s work. We have many other things in common. Like Ron, I had to leave my country to find respect in a distant land; like him I engaged in forbidden love – I married a Colombian (Mexican and Colombian are the most criminalized nationalities in continental America). Like Ron, I have endured innumerable forms of censorship. My Mapa/Corpo series was banned in the US from 2003 to 2006. We are both veterans of many public and secret wars. In the years since, we have reconvened in London, Glasgow, San Francisco and Madrid – where we share many friends – and more performance powwows. Some of his workshop alumnae have ended up working with La Pocha Nostra and vice versa. His precious live imagery and hardcore commitment to ritual art have been an ongoing source of inspiration to my Chicano colleagues and I. His tenderness and generosity always linger in my psyche, and this to me is as important as his body of work. I dedicate a performance poem, ‘Declaration of Poetic Disobedience from the New Border’, to my carnal friend Ron Athey, who taught me the power of a single live image. The reader will find Ron’s scent and presence interspersed throughout the text. These words are some of the connections we share.

1. To the masterminds of paranoid nationalism I say, we say: ‘We,’ the Other people We, the migrants, exiles, nomads & wetbacks in permanent process of voluntary deportation We, the transient orphans of dying nation-states la otra America; l’autre Europe We, the citizens of the outer limits and crevasses of ‘Western civilization’ We, who have no government; no flag or national anthem We, the New Barbarians We, in constant flux, from Patagonia to Alaska, from Juarez to Ramalla, todos somos mojados We, the seventh generation, the fourth world, the third country We millions abound, defying your fraudulent polls & statistics We continue to talk back & make art [Shamanic tongues] 2. To those up there who make dangerous decisions for mankind I say, we say: We, the homeless, faceless vatos aquellos in the great American metropolis little Mexico, little Cambodia, little purgatory We, the West Bank & Gaza strip of Gringolandia We, the unemployed & subemployed who work so pinche hard so you don’t have to work that much We, whose taxes send your CEOs & armies on vacation to the South We, evicted from your gardens & beaches We, fingerprinted, imprisoned, under surveillance We, within your system, without your mercy We, without health or car insurance, without bank accounts & credit cards, We, scared shitless at ground level, but only at ground level like a pack of hungry wolves exploring the ruins of an empty mall we continue to be… together

[Shamanic tongues] 3. To the lords of fear and intolerance I say, we say: We, mud people, snake people, tar people We, bohemians walking on millennial thin ice Our bodies pierced, tattooed, martyred, scarred Our skin covered with hieroglyphs & flaming questions We, the witches who transform trash into wearable art We, Living Museum of Modern Oddities & Sacred Monsters We, vatos cromados y chucas neo-barrocas We, indomitable drag queens, transcendental putas waiting for love and better conditions in the shade We, bad boy & bad girls over 50 We, lusting for otherness We, todos somos putos We, ‘subject matter’ of fringe documentaries We, the Hollywood refuseniks, the greaser bandits & holy outlaws of advanced Capitalism We, without guns, without Bibles We, who never pray to the police or to the army We, who never kissed the hand of a bishop or a curator We, who barter and exchange favours & talismans We, who still believe in community, another community, a much stranger and wider community We, community of illness, madness & dissent community of horny angels & tender demons We, scotch, mescal and bleeding saliva We, frail and defiant; permanently outraged but always tender We shape your desire while you contract our services to postpone the real discussion We are waiting, still waiting for you to go to sleep so, we can continue the party [Shamanic tongues]

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4. To the lords of censorship I say, we say: We, the artists & intellectuals who still don’t wish to comply We, who talk back in rarefied symbols & metaphors against the corruption of formalized religion & art We, critical brain mass spoken word profética, sintética We, bastard children of two humongous nuns: ‘Heterodoxia’ e ‘Iconoclastia’ We, the urban monks who pray in tongues & rap in Esperanto We, who put on masks, penachos & wigs to shout ‘you just can’t take my art away’ We, who dance against the rhythms of the times We, who suddenly freeze! [Pause] Standing still in our underwear right in the centre of the stage with the words carved on our chests: ‘Performance artist: will bleed for food’ ‘Obsessive artist: will die for one idea’ We, critical brain mass fuga inminente de cerebros y hormonas spoken word profética, sintética We continue to talk back… talk back… talk back… [Shamanic tongues] 5. To those who are as afraid of us as we are of them I say, we say: We, who have no name whatsoever in the news We, edited out, pixelated, censored, postponed We, beyond the video frame, behind the caution tape We, tabloid subject matter par excellence We, involuntary actors of ‘The Best of Cops’ eternally stalking mythical blonds in the parking lot, We, mistaken identities in your computer memory We, generic brown & black males who fit all taxonomic descriptions We, black & brown nude bodies in the morgue, taxidermied bodies in the Museum of Mankind We, prime targets of ethnic profiling & capital punishment We, one strike & we’re out We, prisoners of consciousness without a trial

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We, of the turban, burka, sombrero, bandana, leather pants We surround your neon architecture While you call the Office of ‘Homeland Security’ [Pause] Yes, we are equally scared of one another [Shamanic tongues] 6. To the shareholders of mono-culture I say, we say: We, Americans with foreign accents & purple tongues We, bilingual, polylingual, cunnilingual, We, los otros del mas allá del otro lado de la línea y el puente We, lingua poluta et disoluta, rapeando border mystery; a broader history We, mistranslated señorita, eternally mispronounced We, lost and found in the translation lost & found between the layers of my words We, interracial lovers, children of interracial lovers, ad infinitum We, Americans in the largest sense of the term (from the many other Americas) We, from Patagonia to Alaska From São Paolo to New York We, in cahoots with the original Americans who speak hundreds of beautiful languages incomprehensible to you We [Shamanic tongues] We, in cahoots with dozens of millions of displaced Latinos, Arabs, blacks & Asians who live so far away from their land We, trapped between ICE and organized crime [Shamanic tongues] We all speak in unison therefore you cease to be even if only for a moment behind the curtain of language I am, US, you sir, no ser Nosotros seremos Nosotros, we stand not united We, matriots not patriots & when we talk back, you become tongue-tied pendejos

[Shamanic tongues] the people you call ‘aliens’ are the original inhabitants of this earth 7. To the masters and apologists of war I say, we say: We, matriots not patriots again We, rebels, not mercenaries like you We, labelled ‘extremists’ for merely disagreeing with you We, caught in the crossfire, between Christian fear & Muslim rage, We, a thinking majority against unilateral stupidity against pre-emptive strikes & premature ejaculation We reject your arms sales & oil deals We distrust your orange alert & your white privilege We oppose the Patriot Act patrioticamente hablando the largest surveillance system ever, the biggest prison complex to date We, whose opinions are never on the front page of your morning paper We, who are never polled by Fox News who never get to debate those TV pundits We did not vote for you, do not support your wars, do not believe in your violent gods do not respect your immigration laws Standing scared but firm We demand your total, TOTAL withdrawal from our minds and bodies ipso facto [Shamanic tongues] And when we speak in tongues, you disappear 8. Finale [Finally facing/addressing the audience] We, baaaad poetry, baaad art! We, techno-pirates, Region 4 We, the shamans exorcising Enron los brujos against Microsoft poetas solitarios contra Wal-Mart We, dervishes under the arches of McDonalds radical clowns confronting the global police immigrant teens torching the cars of the wealthy We, los indignados y desterrados

El Movimiento Sin Tierra Paracaidistas en Wall Street The Other ‘99%’ We, the ghosts of the past in cahoots with the future warriors in cahoots with all innocent civilians killed on both sides of the useless War on Terror We, nosotros, going crazy to remain sane literally dying for new ideas performing against all odds dancing on the edge of a crater We, witnesses & willing victims of the End of Empire We, Western World imploding disfunctionalia history’s final chapter… colapso total! [Pause] Tabula rasa, take 2 We, mapping, mapping the immediate future so you and I can walk on it without falling inside the great faults of history. You & I, verbally walking together; you & I, ephemeral community; you & I, a tiny little nation-state; you & I, a one-hour-long utopia titled ‘You & I,’ alone on stage, fighting together the World Bank, the WTO & the G8; fighting avant-garde desire & the Patriot Act; tu y yo, juntitos, bien abrazados, fucking suavecito fighting isolation & isolationism…. And art is our battlefield, que otra? And if we fall we are caught in mid-air by a total stranger.

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FURTHER READING

The critical literature on Ron Athey is extensive. The following is a selected list of sustained or otherwise important discussions of his work in scholarship and journalistic commentaries. Beyond these substantial references, there are also many brief or passing references that are not included. Also listed is a full bibliography of Athey’s own published writings.

Archive: Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles, 1945–1980, ed. by Ann Cvetkovich (Los Angeles: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, 2011), pp. 140–57. —, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013).

Abbe, Mary, ‘Bloody Performance Draws Criticism’, Minneapolis Star Tribune (24 March 1994), p. 1A.

Freeland, Cynthia, ‘Blood and Beauty’, But is it Art? An Introduction to Art Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 1–29.

Anger, Ed, ‘National Endowment for the Arts is Run by a Bunch of Clinton Perverts’, Weekly World News (23 August 1994), p. 17.

Goldberg, RoseLee, Performance: Live Art since the ‘60s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004).

Battersby, Matilda, ‘Ron Athey: The Masochist who Puts Writers under his Spell’, The Independent (4 April 2012).

Goulish, Matthew, ‘Fleshworks’, Live: Art and Performance, ed. by Adrian Heathfield (London: Tate, 2004), pp. 184–89.

Bhabha, Homi K., ‘Ron Athey: Bombs Away in Front-Line Suburbia’, The Guardian (8 July 1995), p. 31.

Grimes, William, ‘For Endowment, One Performer Means Trouble’, New York Times (7 July 1994).

Blocker, Jane, What the Body Cost: Desire, History and Performance (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

—, ‘Senate Passes 5% Arts Cut’, New York Times (27 July 1994).

Bowie, David, ‘The Diary of Nathan Addler: or, The Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Belew – An Occasionally On-going Short Story’, Q (January 1995), pp. 176–81. Bowie, David and Brian Eno, ‘Internet Conversation, October 26, 1994’, Q (January 1995), pp. 182–83. Breslauer, Jan, ‘Theatre: The Body Politics’, Los Angeles Times (2 July 1994). Butler, Kateri, ‘Ron Athey: In Extremis and in my Life’, Los Angeles Times (28 January 2007). Califia, Patrick, ‘In Praise of Assholes’, Out (May 1999), pp. 42–45. —, ‘The Winking Eye of Ron Athey’, Speaking Sex to Power (San Francisco: Cleis, 2002), pp. 357–64. Carlson, Marla, ‘Whipping Up Community’, Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 103–30.

Gund, Catherine (dir.), Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance [DVD] (Aubin Pictures, 1998). Harradine, David, ‘Abject Identities and Fluid Performances: Theorizing the Leaking Body’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 10.3 (2000), pp. 69–85. Harris, William, ‘Demonized and Struggling with his Demons’, New York Times (23 October 1994), pp. 31–35. Hart, Lynda, ‘Blood, Piss, and Tears: The Queer Real’, Textual Practice, 9.1 (1995), pp. 55–66. Heathfield, Adrian, and Jones, Amelia (eds), Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Bristol and London: Intellect and Live Art Development Agency, 2012). Johnson, Dominic, ‘Ron Athey’, LA Artland: Contemporary Art From Los Angeles, ed. by Oriana Fox (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005), pp. 192–93. —, ‘Perverse Martyrologies: An Interview with Ron Athey’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 18.4 (2008), pp. 503–13.

Carlson, Marvin, ‘Performing the Self’, Modern Drama, 39.4 (Winter 1996), pp. 599–608.

—, ‘Ron Athey’s Visions of Excess: Performance After Georges Bataille’, Papers of Surrealism, 6 (Winter 2009), pp. 1–12.

Carr, C., ‘Washed in the Blood: Congress Has a New Scapegoat’, Village Voice (5 July 1994), p. 16.

—, ‘Ecstatic Intervals: Performance in a Continuum of Intimacy’, Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Interfaces, ed. by Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Rachel Zerihan (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 89–101.

—, ‘Ron Athey’s Artful Crown of Thorns’, Village Voice (15 December 1998). Chatelle, Bob, ‘Artists Must Organize for their own Sake, not the NEA’s’, Boston Tab (31 January – 7 February 1995), p. 30. Che, Cathay, ‘Movie on the Edge’, The Advocate (8 December 1998), pp. 73–75. Doyle, Jennifer, ‘Ron Athey’s Dissociated Sparkle’, Cruising the

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—, ‘Intimacy and Risk in Live Art’, Histories and Practices of Live Art in the UK, ed. by Deirdre Heddon and Jennie Klein (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 12248 —, Theatre & The Visual (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Jones, Amelia, ‘Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s Judas Cradle’, TDR, 50 (2006), pp. 159–69.

Sucks: Five Years of Coagula, ed. by Tom Patchett (Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 1998), pp. 70–75.

—, ‘Lost Bodies: Early 1970s Los Angeles Performance Art in Art History’, Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983, ed. by Peggy Phelan (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 115–84.

Murrin, Tom, ‘Healing Tortures: Ron Athey’s Transgressive Theatrics’, Paper (November 1998), p. 123.

—, ‘Performing the Wounded Body: Pain, Affect and the Radical Relationality of Meaning’, Parallax, 15.4 (2009), pp. 45–67. Kammen, Michael, ‘Art Politicized: Ideological Issues’, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), pp. 149–80. Killacky, John R., ‘Called to Serve’, Leading Creatively: A Closer Look, ed. by Daniel Dewey Schott (San Francisco: National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, 2010), pp. 10–21. Kramer, Mark, ‘The Medium is a Mess’, Spy (November 1997), pp. 36–43. Krpan, Jurij, ‘Ron Athey Interview’, Virus, 10 (January 1997), pp. 44–47. Kruger, Loren, ‘Making Sense of Sensation: Enlightenment, Embodiment, and the End(s) of Modern Drama’, Modern Drama, 43.4 (Winter 2000), pp. 543–66. Kuppers, Petra, The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Lawrence, Charise K., ‘David Bowie Makes Amends over Bloody Good Photos’, National Law Journal (3 July 1995), p. A27. Leopold, Shelley, ‘Rocking the Cradle: Ron Athey returns to L.A. at Redcat’, LA Weekly (7 July 2005). Lopez, Vincent, ‘Outrageous Oasis’, The Advocate, 686 (23 July 2002), p. 63.

Myers, J., ‘An Interview with Ron Athey’, TheatreForum, 6 (1995), pp. 60–61. O’Brien, Martin, ‘Treating the Body’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 22.1 (2012), pp. 146–51. O’Dell, Kathy, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Pitts, Victoria, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Richards, Mary, ‘Ron Athey, AIDS and the Politics of Pain’, Body, Space and Technology, 3.2 (2003). Román, David, ‘Solo Performance and the Body on Stage’, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 116–53. Sandahl, Carrie, ‘Performing Metaphors: AIDS, Disability, and Technology’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 11.3–4 (2001), pp. 49–60. Schemo, Diana Jean, ‘Endowment Ends Program Helping Individual Artists’, New York Times (3 November 1994). Shalson, Lara, ‘On the Endurance of Theatre in Live Art’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 22.1 (2012), pp. 106–19. Shank, Theodore, ‘Ron Athey: Self-Mutilation as Religious Experience’, Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 221–24.

Lunch, Lydia, ‘The Violent Disbelief of Ron Athey’, Will Work For Drugs (New York: Akashic Books, 2009), pp. 141–49.

Sikes, Alan, ‘The Performing Genome: Genetics and the Rearticulation of the Human’, Text and Performance Quarterly, 23.3 (2002), pp. 163–80.

McGrath, John E., ‘Trusting in Rubber: Performing Boundaries during the AIDS Epidemic’, TDR, 39.2 (Summer 1995), pp. 21–38.

Smith, Caroline, ‘Hide and Seek with Rebels: Tracing Contemporary Queer Art in Cracks and Rips’, Wasafiri, 22.1 (2007), pp. 32–42.

Mey, Kerstin, ‘Abjection and Dis-ease’, Art and Obscenity (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 31–51.

Spackman, Helen, ‘Minding the Matter of Representation: Staging the body (politic)’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 10.3 (2000), pp. 5–22.

Miglietti, Francesca Alfano, Extreme Bodies: The Use and Abuse of the Body in Art (Milan: Skira, 2003). Mock, Roberta, ‘Visions of Xs: Experiencing La Fura dels Baus’s XXX and Ron Athey’s Solar Anus’, Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance, ed. by Karoline Gritzner (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010), pp. 178–201. Monaghan, Constance, ‘Backstage with Ron Athey’, Most Art

Spurrier, Jeff, ‘Blood of a Poet’, Details (February 1995), pp. 106–11 & 140. Stephanou, Aspasia, ‘Baptism of Blood: Bodies Performing for the Law’, Journal for Cultural Research, 15.4 (2011), pp. 409–26. Stychin, Carl F., Law’s Desire: Sexuality and the Limits of Justice (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 1995).

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—, ‘Promoting a Sexuality: Law and Lesbian and Gay Visual Culture in America’, Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, ed. by Peter Horne and Reina Lewis (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 147–58. Tillotson, Kristin, ‘Athey Pushes Taboo Envelope’, Minnesota Star Tribune (1 November 1994), p. A4. —, ‘Rituals are Essence of Artist’s Performance’, Minnesota Star Tribune (1 November 1994), p. A4. Vance, Carole S., ‘The War on Culture’, Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS, ed. by Ted Gott (London and Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 1994), pp. 91–111. Vergine, Lea, ‘Diffused Body and Mystical Body’, Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language (Milan: Skira, 2000), pp. 269–91. Walsh, Fintan, ‘Wounded Attachments in the Live Art of Ron Athey and Franko B’, Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 109–45. Wood, David, Torture Garden: From Bodyshocks to Cybersex (London: Velvet, 1996).

—, ‘Dissections: Mexico City: Los Chicos’, Honcho (July 1997), pp. 63–65. —, ‘Dissections: Let’s Do the BBS Time-Sink’, Honcho (August 1997), pp. 71–73. —, ‘Dissections: Interview with Clive Barker’, Honcho (September 1997), pp. 69–72. —, ‘Dissections: Clippers’, Honcho (October 1997), pp. 71–73. —, ‘Dissections: A Tribute to Griffith Park’, Honcho (December 1997), pp. 68–71. —, ‘Dissections: Split Personality, or So Many Men’, Honcho (January 1998), pp. 65–67. —, ‘Dissections: 45 Minutes with Edmund White’, Honcho (February 1998), pp. 69–71. —, ‘Dissections: A Serious Look at the 47th International Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia’, Honcho (March 1998), pp. 61–63. —, ‘Dissections: A Peek Behind the Orange Curtain’, Honcho (April 1998), pp. 56–58. —, ‘Rozz Williams, 1963–1998’, LA Weekly (8 April 1998).

Young, Alison, ‘The Art of Injury and the Ethics of Witnessing’, Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 98–116.

—, ‘Dissections: Franko B’, Honcho (May 1998), pp. 58–59.

Writings by Ron Athey

—, ‘Dissections: The Abject Muse Perplexed’, Honcho (June 1998), pp. 59–61.

The following writings are listed in chronological order, by date of publication. Athey, Ron, ‘Gifts of the Spirit’, Unnatural Disasters: Recent Writings from the Golden State, ed. by Nicole Panter (Los Angeles: Incommunicado Press, 1996), pp. 70–80. —, ‘Deliverance: Introduction, Foreword, Description and Selected Text’, Acting on AIDS: Sex, Drugs & Politics, ed. by Joshua Oppenheimer and Helena Reckitt (London and New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), pp. 430–39. —, ‘Ron Athey’, Out of Character, ed. by Mark Russell (New York: Bantam Doubleday, 1997), pp. 32–39. —, ‘Dissections: Body Manipulations: A Clown Show’, Honcho (February 1997), pp. 70–72. —, ‘Dissections: Handballing’, Honcho (March 1997), pp. 70–72. —, ‘Dissections: Sex Work: A Breakdown’, Honcho (April 1997), pp. 70–72. —, ‘Dissections: Sex Work Part 2: Show and Tell’, Honcho (May 1997), pp. 70–72. —, ‘Dissections: Flirting with the Far Right’, Honcho (June 1997), pp. 77–79.

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—, ‘The Godfather’, LA Weekly (6 May 1998).

—, ‘Dissections: Road Dogs Part II’, Honcho (August 1998), pp. 65–66. —, ‘Dissections: National Tattoo Association Convention at the Los Angeles Marriott Airport Hotel’, Honcho (September 1998), pp. 45–47. —, ‘Dissections: Udo Kier’s Capacity for Evil’, Honcho (October 1998), pp. 73–74. —, ‘Dissections: Anatomy of a Long Term Gay “Marriage”’, Honcho (December 1998), pp. 71–72. —, ‘Under My Skin’, Strategic Sex, ed. by D. Travers Scott (London: Haworth Press, 1999), pp. 23–28. —, ‘Body Language: The Post-Human Illusions of osseus labyrint’, LA Weekly (27 January 1999). —, ‘Dissections: Doctoring up the Family Jewels’, Honcho (February 1999), p. 77. —, ‘Vanessa Beecroft at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’, LA Weekly (30 June 1999). —, ‘Honcho Featured Artist: Vanessa Beecroft’, Honcho (November 1999), pp. 73–74.

—, ‘Truckers, Tricks and Sarah: J.T. LeRoy Talks’, LA Weekly (17 May 2000). —, ‘Dissections: Hot Male/Cool Boys [sic] Shooting Diary’, Honcho (July 2000), pp. 67–69. —, ‘The Missing Link’, The Advocate (15 August 2000), pp. 50–55. —, ‘Pumpin’ Circumstance’, LA Weekly (4 April 2001). —, ‘The Beauty of the Dork: A Dialog by Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis’, LA Weekly (21 June 2001). —, ‘Some Thoughts on the Politics of the Body and the Problematics of Documentation’, Manuel Vason: Exposures, ed. by Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2002). —, ‘The Dating Test’, LA Weekly (3 July 2002). —, ‘Getting the Skinn-y’, LA Weekly (9 October 2002). —, ‘Reading Sister Aimee’, LIVE: Art and Performance, ed. by Adrian Heathfield (London: Tate, 2003), pp. 86–91. —, ‘Ron Athey’, Saint Sebastian: A Splendid Readiness for Death (Vienna: Kerber Verlag, 2003), p. 18. —, ‘Bare Beyond the Bone: A Striptease at Black’s Beach’, LA Weekly (22 May 2003). —, ‘In Service to the Outsider: How I Came to Counsel a Young Addict Just Back from the Edge’, LA Weekly (21 August 2003). —, ‘Wounded: The Transubstantiation of Franko B’, Franko B: Blinded by Love, ed. by Dominic Johnson (Bologna: Damiani, 2006), pp. 27–30. —, ‘Becoming Total-Image’, Manuel Vason: Encounters, ed. by Dominic Johnson (Bristol: Arnolfini, 2007), pp. 208–11. —, ‘Erectus Abominas’, Matthias Herrmann: Hotel IV (New York: Printed Matter, 2008). —, ‘Martin O’Brien’s Mucus Factory’, Access All Areas: Live Art and Disability, ed. by Lois Keidan and C.J. Mitchell (London: Live Art Development Agency, 2012), pp. 86–88. —, ‘Theatre: The Holiest of Holies’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 23.1 (2013), pp. 69–70. Athey, Ron and Wolf, Sara, ‘Ten Cents a Performance Art: How to Classify La Ribot’, LA Weekly (30 October 2003).

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AUTHOR BIOGR APHIES

Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English, the Director of the Humanities Center and the Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost at Harvard University. Bhabha is the author of numerous books including Nation And Narration (1990) and The Location Of Culture (1994). Alex Binnie graduated with a BA in Fine Art in 1982. He was a member of the electronic music bands Pure and Skullflower before working as a medical illustrator from 1986 to 1989. He began tattooing from home late in the late 1980s, and turned professional in 1989. He lived and worked in Los Angeles from 1991-93, where he met Ron Athey and tattooed a large expanse of the artist’s body. Returning to London, Binnie started Into You Tattoo in 1993, and opened a second shop in Brighton in 2006. His tattoo work has been published in many magazines and books, including Tattootime, 1000 Tattoos, and Forever: The New Tattoo. Since 1991, he has also exhibited works in other media in both group and solo shows in LA, New York, London, Berlin and Brighton; his prints were collected in a book, The Woodcut Portraits (2012). Jennifer Doyle is the author of Sex Objects: Art And The Dialectics Of Desire (2006) and Hold It Against Me: Difficulty And Emotion In Contemporary Art (2013). The latter was inspired by Ron Athey’s work. She co-edited Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996) with José Muñoz and Jonathan Flatley; and New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture, a special issue of Signs (2006) with Amelia Jones. She is editor of The Athletic Issue, a special issue of GLQ (2013). She was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of the Arts, London (2013-2014), and is the recipient of an Arts Writers Grant in support of her writing on the athletic turn in contemporary art. She is Professor of English at the University of California Riverside. Tim Etchells is an artist and a writer based in the UK whose work shifts between performance, visual art and fiction. He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the world-renowned Sheffield-based performance group Forced Entertainment. He is Professor of Performance at Lancaster University. Recent publications include Vacuum Days (Storythings, 2012), and While You Are With Us Here Tonight (Live Art Development Agency, 2013). www.timetchells.com and www.forcedentertainment.com Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City in 1955, and has lived in the US since 1978. His work includes performance art, video, audio, installations, poetry, journalism, and cultural theory. His books include Dangerous Border Crossers (Routledge, 2000), Codex Spangliensis (City Lights, 2000), Mexican Beasts And Living Santos (PowerHouse, 1997), The New World Border (City Lights,

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1996, winner of the American Book Award 1997) and Warrior For Gringostroika (Graywolf, 1994). In 1991, GómezPeña became the first Chicano/Mexicano artist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship (1991-1996). www.pochanostra.com Matthew Goulish was a founding member of Goat Island. He co-founded Every house has a door with Lin Hixson in 2008. His books include 39 Microlectures: In Proximity Of Performance (Routledge, 2000), The Brightest Thing In The World: 3 Lectures From The Institute of Failure (Green Lantern Press, 2012), and Work From Memory: In Response To ‘In Search of Lost Time’ by Marcel Proust, a collaboration with the poet Dan Beachy-Quick (Ahsahta, 2012). He teaches writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Catherine (Saalfield) Gund is an Emmy-nominated producer, director, writer, and organizer, and the founder of the non-profit media company Aubin Pictures. She produced and directed the feature-length documentary Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance (1996), which won Best Documentary at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Her films include What’s On Your Plate?, A Touch Of Greatness, Making Grace, Motherland Afghanistan, and On Hostile Ground. Her films focus on arts and culture, HIV/AIDS and reproductive health, the environment, and other social justice issues and have been broadcast on PBS, Discovery, and Sundance channels. She and her four children live in New York City. Adrian Heathfield is a writer and curator working across the scenes of live art, performance and dance. His books include: Out Of Now: The Lifeworks Of Tehching Hsieh; Live: Art and Performance; Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art In History (with Amelia Jones); Small Acts: Performance, The Millennium And The Marking Of Time; and Shattered Anatomies (with Andrew Quick and Fiona Templeton). He co-curated the Live Culture events at Tate Modern in 2003 and numerous other durational events in European cities over the last ten years. He is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton, London; and Marie Curie International Fellow at Columbia University, New York (201415). www.adrianheathfield.net Antony Hegarty was a founding member of Blacklips Performance Cult in New York, and rose to international prominence as a recording artist with Antony and the Johnsons. In 1998, I Am A Bird Now won the Mercury Prize, and subsequent albums have included The Crying Light and Swanlights. Key performances include Turning (with Charles Atlas), The Life And Death Of Marina Abramović (directed by Robert Wilson) and Swanlights at the Museum of Modern Art. Antony was guest curator of Meltdown at London’s Southbank Centre in 2012.

Dominic Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Drama, at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of two books: Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance And Visual Culture (Manchester University Press, 2012); and Theatre & The Visual (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He is the editor of Franko B: Blinded By Love (Damiani, 2006), Manuel Vason: Encounters – Photography, Performance, Collaboration (Arnolfini, 2007), and Critical Live Art: Contemporary Histories Of Performance In The UK (Routledge, 2013). Amelia Jones is Professor and Grierson Chair in Visual Culture at McGill University in Montréal. Her recent publications include major essays on Marina Abramović (in TDR), on feminist art and curating, and on performance art histories, as well as the edited volume Feminism And Visual Culture Reader (2003; new edition 2010). Her book, Self Image: Technology, Representation, And The Contemporary Subject (2006) has been followed in 2012 by Seeing Differently: A History And Theory Of Identification And The Visual Arts and her major volume, Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History, co-edited with Adrian Heathfield. Her exhibition Material Traces: Time And The Gesture In Contemporary Art took place in 2013 at Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, in Montreal. Bruce LaBruce is a filmmaker, writer, director, photographer, and artist based in Toronto. He began his career in the 1980s making a series of short experimental super8 films, and co-editing a punk fanzine called J.D.s (with G. B. Jones) that begat the queercore movement. He has directed and starred in three feature length movies: No Skin Off My Ass (1991), Super 8½ (1994), and Hustler White (1996). He is the director of a many films including Skin Flick/Skin Gang (2000), The Raspberry Reich/The Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2004); Otto; Or, Up With Dead People (2008); and L.A. Zombie (2010). His latest film, Gerontophilia is in production. His books include The Reluctant Pornographer (1999) and Bruce(X)ploitation (2012). www.brucelabruce.com Lydia Lunch is a musician, poet, author and performer whose early career with the band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks was instrumental to the No Wave scene in New York. She has performed in films by Richard Kern and others, and has released many albums of music and spoken word. Her books include Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary (1997), The Gun Is Loaded (2008), Will Work For Drugs (2009), and Adulterers Anonymous (1996, with Exene Cervenka). Her most recent publication is a cookbook, The Need To Feed (2012). She currently tours with the band Big Sexy Noise. www.lydia-lunch.org

Catherine Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio and received her MFA from CalArts in 1988. Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Select solo exhibitions include: Catherine Opie: Empty And Full at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011); Catherine Opie: Figure And Landscape at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010); and Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2008). Opie is the 2013 recipient of the Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography Award, and was awarded a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. She is currently a professor of photography at UCLA. Juliana Snapper creates radical operas in unlikely spaces, usually at great personal risk and inevitably drawing her closer to financial ruin. She employs opera as a technology of exchange in both grandiose collaborations and intimate performances, often applying original research to terrible ideas (i.e. singing underwater) to push the expressive limits of her instrument. Snapper studied voice at the Oberlin Conservatory and is completing her PhD in critical musicology at the University of California, San Diego. Her large works have been produced across Europe where people still like opera. U.S. incubators include Machine Project, PS1/ MoMA, Cannonball Arts and the Walker Art Center. Julie Tolentino creates intimate solo movement-based installations including time-based durational performances, sculptural endurance events and audio works. In 1990 Tolentino was original founder and creator of the New York Clit Club, and in the 1990s she was a member of David Rousseve’s REALITY Dance Theater, and Ron Athey and Company. Her solo works include Marks Of My Civilization (1992); Mestiza: Que Bonitos Ojos Tienes (1998); The Sky Remains The Same (2008-ongoing); Cry Of Love: A Labyrinth (2009); and Honey (2010). www.julietolentino.com Robert Wilson is a theatre artist, designer, and sculptor. He is Director of The Watermill Center, New York. He has present major pieces of theatre and opera since 1969, and continues to produce new works, and tours internationally. Wilson’s numerous awards and honours include an Obie award for direction, the Golden Lion for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, two Guggenheim Fellowship awards, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship award, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was named a ‘Commandeur des arts et des lettres’ by the French Minister of Culture.

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ACK NOW L EDGEMEN TS

The path of Pleading in the Blood has been a circuitous one, from its first inklings in a café in Los Angeles, to the object you now hold in your hands. Plans for this book germinated in conversations with Ron Athey and Jennifer Doyle in 2006, and the project began in earnest in 2010. Lois Keidan and CJ Mitchell were the driving force behind the reanimation of the project, and it wouldn’t have come to fruition without their work. There are many people without whom this project would not have been possible. Each is legendary. I thank Ron Athey foremost: firstly for his work, which is forever brilliant, beautiful, difficult, and sexy. I also thank him for his example as an artist, writer, provocateur, and friend. His labour is ever embedded in the practice of a life well lived. Indeed, his has been a life of few limits – he knows what Patti Smith means when she intones that ‘those who have suffered understand suffering, and therefore extend their hand’ – and he still laughs his big-hearted, famous laugh with mischievous abandon. Don’t stop. Lois Keidan and CJ Mitchell at the Live Art Development Agency have shepherded this ambitious book to publication. I thank them and their colleagues at the Agency for their commitment to the book, for their financial support, and for saving us from shipwreck several times over. I also thank Jelena Stanovnik at Intellect Books. I thank David Caines for his sensitive book design; the contributors for their writings and photographs; and Jennifer Doyle for her continued support and conversations, and for organising Ron’s archive in Los Angeles and sending artefacts and photocopies. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield gave advice at critical stages in the book’s development. Michèle Barrett and Jen Harvie at Queen Mary, University of London kindly gave me research funding to complete the manuscript; Maria Delgado and Catherine Silverstone read and commented on parts of drafts; and Harriet Curtis and Charlotte Bell provided research assistance. Franko B, Patrick Califia, C. Carr, Vaginal Davis, Pigpen, and Darryl Carlton lent their generous support. Dominic Johnson

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Key in pre-beginning: John Albert, Dwight ‘D’ Meals, Eva O, Clare Glidden, and Vaginal Davis. Premature Ejaculation and Christian Death era, the first: Rozz Williams, Mary Torcivia, Art @ Arts Building, Toxic Shock Records, and Eva O. Performance inspiration number one: Johanna Went. Firsts that turned me out: early 1980s Annie Sprinkle/ LOVE magazine, where I first saw my ecstatic role model: Fakir Musafar (I later participated in his 1992 ritual at Highways Performance Space). They always continue to inspire. Hands-on Schooling: Julie Tolentino. Others always from many angles: Lawrence Steger, Lydia Lunch, Lisa Teasley, Patty Powers, Franko B, Lee Adams, Jennifer Doyle, Amelia Jones, Ronna Frumkin, Taj Waggaman, Cesar Padilla, Mad Alan, Lois Keidan; and last but not least, Dominic Johnson. Music and our culture: Nervous Gender and Gobshite’s Edward Stapleton, Gerardo Velasquez, Patrice Repose; Throbbing Gristle, Michael Intriere, Don Bolles, Vaginal Davis, Cross, Aldo Hernandez, Bob Flanagan, Sheree Rose, Iris Moore, Elayne Angel, Joseph Brooks, Henry Peck, Paul King, Cleo DuBois, Matt Rice, Patrick Califia, Kid Congo Powers, Brendan Mullen, Rick Castro, and Bruce Kalberg/NoMag. Round two, Club FUCK!: Cliff Diller, Miguel Beristain, James Stone, Robert Woods and Brandy Dalton (Drance), Michelle Carr, Buck Angel, and Bobby Wildfire. Torture Trilogy ‘& Company’: Julie Tolentino, Pigpen, Divinity Fudge, Brian Murphy, Julie Fowells, Russell MacEwan, Alex Binnie, and Steak House. Musicians and art collaborators: Drance, Bill Van Rooy, Bernard Elsmere, Juliana Snapper, Sean Griffin, Jose Macabra, Cyril Kuhn, Rosina Kuhn, Othon, Ernesto Tomasini, Manuel Vason, Mouse, David Harrow, Hannah Sim, Barry Adamson, Elyse Regehr, Jon John, Filipe Espindola, Lauren Williams, Suzette Matheson, Nicola Bowery, Lauren Pine, Bradley J. Pickelsimer, Ivette Soler, Amanda Piasecki, and Sue Fox. Special thanks: Doug McClemont, Lewis Church, Scott Ewalt, Tania Hammidi, Zackary Drucker, Kembra Pfahler, Empress Stah, Bruce LaBruce, Chadd Curry, Jochen Hick, Knud Versterkov, Gritt Uldall-Jessen, Pamela Gonzales, Alison Fraunhaur, Michael Morrison, Assaf Hochman, Sue/Johnny Golding, David Maxwell, Marcos Lutyens, CJ Mitchell, and Sage Charles. Research and writing for this book was supported by funding from the Leverhulme Trust; I thank Thomas Dixon and the Centre for the History of the Emotions for hosting my Visiting Artist Fellowship in 2010; I also thank Lewis Church and Michele Occelli for research assistance. Ron Athey

The production of this book has been made possible with the financial support of the following, to whom Dominic Johnson, Ron Athey, and the Live Art Development Agency offer immense gratitude: A. K. Burns Aaron Morgan Adam Overton Adriano Cintra Alex Binnie Alexis O’Hara Amanda Kurtz Andrea Novarin Andrew R. Bennett Angela Bartram Angela Ellsworth Anna Crankshaw Barnaby Adams Ben Johnson Bernadette Louise Billy Rich Brian Getnick Bryony Kimmings Cassiano Luiz Mecchi Catherine (Saalfield) Gund Catherine Opie Christopher Plumb Colby Skolseg Colin Lindsay Daniel ‘Samo’ Bolliger Daniel Monk Daniel Rubinstein Daniel Snider David Duchin David Williams Deborah L. Hyde Dominic Davies Donna Hall Elisavet Pakis Ernesto Tomasini Erik Freeman Fredrik Nilsen Studio Gabriel Toso Gerald Paoli Greg Holcomb Gregory Trueblood Gunnar Neumann Heather Cassils Hector de Gregorio Hector Martinez Hendrik Backerra

Hermes Pittakos Ioanna Theodorakou & Giuseppe Gallo Iris Moore jamie lewis hadley Jane Blevin Jeffy Middleton Jennifer Doyle Jeremy Goff & Camille Rose Garcia Johanna Went Jose Sosa Rubio Joseph Brooks Joshua Sofaer Judith Soraya Au Julia Bardsley Kamal Ackarie Karen Lofgren Katarzyna Szustow & Dorota Sajewska Kevork R. Madanian Kira Vollman Kris, Nicola & Maxim Canavan Laura Godfrey-Isaacs Lee Adams Leibniz Lenny Young Leo Garcia Leon Hilton Lisa Cazzato Vieyra Lisa Derrick Lisa Fischman Lois Froud Lord McGrogan Louis Ponce Lucy Sexton Manuel Aragon Gonzalez LaO Manuel Vason Maria Sideri Marion Haenen & Niko Raes Mark Ball Mark Morgan Pèrez Martin Baasch Martin Hargreaves Mat Gleason Meiling Cheng Michele Mills

Monica Pearl Niko Esposito Noel Fuchs Oreet Ashery Othon Paddy Maginn Paul Donald & Amelia Jones Paul King c/o Cold Steel San Francisco Paul & Ray Pavlos Kountouriotis Pierre del Fondo PNK Sculpture Pony Lee Estrange Prof. Richard Sawdon Smith Rae Cailliach Ray Villescas Rick Ramirez Rob Allen Robert Pacitti Roberta Mock & Paul Prudden Roger Bygott Ron Meyers Samantha Joyce Palmer Sandy Cleary Sara Jane Bailes Sebastian Kozak Serge Hoeltschi Serge Nicholson Seven Wolf Spike Susan Anton Suzanne Popper, Esq. Tagny Duff Taj Treva Waggaman Tania Hammidi Tavia Nyong’o The Centre of Attention/ news of the world Tom Christie Tristesse Atkinson James Valentina Piras Veenus Vortex Walt Cassidy Wladd Muta Zackary Drucker

We also thank a number of other supporters, including many who wish to remain anonymous.

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INDEX

Note: Index refers to references in text. Works by Ron Athey are listed alphabetically. 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life (performance) 13, 26, 28-9, 38, 60, 64, 66-75, 78-93, 102-6, 122, 136, 139, 167-8 Abbe, Mary 67, 69-72, 89-90 Abdoh, Reza 28, 91 Abramović, Marina 154, 176, 218 ACT UP 56, 79, 112, 156 n. 9 Adams, Lee 178 affirmation 27, 29, 34, 84-6 AIDS see HIV/AIDS Alexander, Jane 73, 79, 84, 86, 89, 168 Artaud, Antonin 153, 197, 210, 226 asshole 34-6, 100, 124, 126, 128-9, 141, 154-7, 206, 211 autobiography 12, 13, 42-53, 100-2, 106, 110, 116, 156, 180, 182-91, 193 automatic writing 32, 51-3, 186, 197 Ballard, J. G. 10, 12, 36 Bataille, Georges 34-6, 127, 155-7, 161, 174, 178, 211, 226 Bhabha, Homi K. 95-9 Binnie, Alex 38, 115, 130-4 blood 10, 22-4, 42-3, 47-8, 60, 67, 68, 80, 102, 112, 122, 142, 144, 160, 177, 236 Bowery, Leigh 144 Bowie, David 17, 20, 97 Carlton, Darryl 17, 28, 66-7, 69-72, 74, 106-7, 115, 143-4, 167-8, 177 castration 116, 124, 138, 143 Castro, Rick 38, 118, 184 childhood 13-4, 42-53, 102, 106, 156, 180, 183-4, 191, 186-91 Christ, Jesus 42, 48-9, 50, 53, 88, 101 Christian Death 22 see also Williams, Rozz churches 44-5, 183, 184, 187-8, 191-3 Club FUCK! 24, 28, 38, 115, 130, 167 club performance 12, 20, 24, 74, 115, 124, 130, 156, 213 Cross (performer) 115 crying 36, 44-5, 60, 142, 186, 187, 188, 195, 212, 217, 218 culture wars 16, 60, 64-93, 95-9, 178, 221, 230, 236 Davis, Vaginal 178, 184, 198 death 10, 25-31, 36-7, 53, 55-63, 87-9, 110, 127, 138-9, 159, 160, 177, 193, 211, 216 Deliverance (performance) 26, 60-1, 100-7, 124, 126, 231-2 Diana, Mike 38, 133 Diller, Cliff 28, 102, 115, 142 Doyle, Jennifer 124-9, 152, 167, 177, 212 drag 66-7, 68, 116, 122, 130, 191, 220-1 Drance 67 drugs 12, 29, 38, 67, 98, 101, 106, 190-1

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ecstasy 10, 20, 29, 32, 36-7, 40, 49, 53, 68, 106, 116, 156, 158, 160, 167, 202, 211, 216, 221 emotion 34, 61-2, 88, 98, 153-78, 218 Estate Project for Artists Living with AIDS 59, 142 Etchells, Tim 226-32 excess 10, 14, 22, 31, 37, 93, 100-7, 153, 155-8, 166-7, 171-4, 210, 211, 248 fainting 79, 116, 143, 187, 226 family 42-53, 98, 101, 102, 180, 182-91, 193 fetish 13, 34-6, 80, 121, 157 Filter, Karen 20, 38, 84 Finley, Karen 82, 155, 165, 168 see also NEA Four fisting 51, 126, 143, 167, 197 Flanagan, Bob 16, 24, 38, 112 Franko B 16, 26, 29, 38, 118 friendship 55-63, 100-7, 122, 153, 159-60, 232, 234 Fudge, Divinity P. see Carlton, Darryl Genet, Jean 36, 101, 112, 161, 174, 197, 226 Gifts of the Spirit (book) 13, 42-53, 181-2 Gifts of the Spirit: Automatic Writing (performance) 31-2 glamour 31, 49-50, 106-7, 184, 187, 188, 192, 211 n. 10 glitter 117, 140, 100, 184, 211 glossolalia 46-7, 183, 186, 188, 193, 195 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 26, 234-7 Goth culture 20 Goulish, Matthew 136-141, 221 Gund, Catherine (Saalfield) 54-63, 116 Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance (documentary) 55-63, 116 healing 44-5, 74, 98, 102, 177, 180 187, 191, 193, 197 Heathfield, Adrian 206-22 Hegarty, Antony 9 Helms, Jesse (Senator) 29, 60, 64, 72-3, 75-83, 86-8, 92-93, 178 History of Ecstasy (performance) 178 HIV/AIDS: experiences of 12, 25-34, 32-3, 38, 55-63, 110-17, 122, 133, 138-9, 142, 159, 193, 202 in art and performance 14, 25-34, 55-63, 69-72, 91, 100-7, 110-17, 126, 138-9, 142, 161, 166-9, 221 phobic responses to 69-72, 100-7, 116, 122, 133, 161, 166-9 homosexuality 68, 72, 73, 75-6, 78-84, 90, 91-2, 121-2, 128-9, 164-5, 182 Honcho (magazine) 33, 112, 126, 129 HotMen CoolBoyz (film) 124 Hustler White (film) 118-22 hypnotism 32, 60, 107 Incorruptible Flesh (Il Luminous/Dissociative Sparkle) (performance) 33-4, 206-22 Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound) (performance) 34, 159-60, 172, 177, 178 Incorruptible Flesh (Work In Progress) (performance) 33-4, 138-9

Jaggers, Velma M. see Miss Velma Johnson, Dominic 10-40, 159-60, 177 Jones, Amelia 32, 34, 153-78 Joyce (mother) 14, 47-8, 186, 197 JOYCE (performance) 195-7 Judas Cradle (performance) 31, 156, 167 n. 29, 198-205 Kelley, Mike 16, 37 Killacky, John 66, 69-72, 74-5, 91, 112 LaBruce, Bruce 36, 118-22 laughter 54-5, 61, 69, 99, 122, 143, 200-1, 218, 231-2 Los Angeles 14, 20-4, 26, 38, 118-22, 130-4, 167, 180-93, 234 loss 14, 25-31, 33-4, 55-63, 80, 100-7, 144, 177 Lunch, Lydia 16, 195-7 Mapplethorpe, Robert 66, 75, 76, 81-3, 87, 127-8 martyrdom 24-5, 28, 36, 49, 67, 84, 101, 102, 118, 167, 177, 235 Martyrs & Saints (performance) 24, 26, 29, 58-9, 102, 136 Mishima, Yukio 36-7, 102 miracles 32, 42-5, 50, 53, 107, 138-9, 182, 186, 187 Miss Velma 180-93, 197, 226 Modern Primitives 67-8, 102, 124, 130, 167, 213 Molinier, Pierre 34, 112, 161, 174 Murphy, Brian 115, 117, 124, 133, 231 Musafar, Fakir 16, 102, 128 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) 14-6, 64, 66, 73-92, 168 NEA Four, the 75, 83, 84, 91, 168-9 Nervous Gender 16 obscenity 14-6, 66, 74-5, 78-89, 91-3, 133 Opie, Catherine 28, 37, 142-51, 176-7, 177 n. 51, 213 painting 36-7, 157-8, 160, 213-6 pain 13, 17, 28-9, 68, 80, 134, 152, 160-8, 176-8, 188-90, 194-7, 205, 209, 220 penetration 35-6, 36-7, 156-7, 206-7 Pentecostalism 12, 42-53, 106, 180-93, 194-5 see also religion performance: archives 37-40, 220, 232 artists 16, 22, 26, 36, 12-3, 72-3, 91, 165-6, 208 n. 4-5, 212, 234-7 histories 16, 22-4, 37-40, 226-7 Pfahler, Kembra 36, 118, 122 piercing 29, 34, 36-7, 68, 79, 102, 144, 167, 206, 213, 220-1 Pigpen 28, 60, 66, 67, 68, 115, 142, 178 pornography 83, 84, 87, 92, 124-7 Premature Ejaculation 20-2, 24, 167 prophecy 42, 46, 50, 53, 63, 67, 101, 106, 186, 187 punk 16, 22-4, 38, 134, 167, 213

race 46, 50, 165, 187, 188, 235-7 Regehr, Elyse 25, 115 religion 2-28, 36-37, 72, 102, 106-7, 116 see also Pentecostalism ritual 13, 68, 102, 122, 136, 188, 197, 206, 213 Rose, Sheree 24, 38, 112, 197 rumour 16, 46, 75, 226-32 sadomasochism 20-5, 81-82, 102, 116, 121-2, 124, 127, 160, 164, 167 sainthood 53, 102, 138-9, 160 scapegoat 36, 60, 64, 86, 92 scarification 67, 68, 75, 87 Sebastian, Saint 14, 28, 36-37, 88, 102, 116, 144, 167, 226 Sebastian Suspended (performance) 32 Self-Obliteration I-II (performance) 172, 226-31 Semple McPherson, Aimee 182 Serrano, Andres 66, 75, 76, 79, 83, 87 sex 16, 31, 36-7, 50-1, 60, 87, 93, 99, 100, 106-7, 124-9, 160-1, 231-2 Sin-a-matic 24, 38 Snapper, Juliana 31, 38, 156, 198-205 Solar Anus (performance) 31, 34-6, 154-7, 160-1, 178 sound 20-24, 42, 67, 154, 156, 160, 177, 187 see also voice speaking in tongues see glossolalia Sprinkle, Annie 26, 128 Steger, Lawrence 16, 26, 33-4, 38, 110, 136-141, 220-1 stigmata 42-3, 45, 67, 68, 102 tattoos 16, 67-8, 102, 106, 112, 121, 124, 130-4, 154 n. 3, 157, 167, 182, 193, 209-10, 230 theatre 12-3, 16, 69, 88, 112, 116, 156, 172, 184, 213 Tolentino, Julie 14, 28, 49, 66, 67, 68, 110-17, 178, 221 ‘Torture Trilogy’ (performance series) 26-31, 33, 55-63, 100-7, 115-6, 167, 227-30 transgression 17, 90, 127, 234-7 violence 20, 33-4, 48, 98-9, 186, 191, 194-7, 198 Visions of Excess (event) 36, 178, 198 voice 198-205 Walker Arts Center 64, 66-75, 78-81, 89-91, 98, 112, 168 Went, Johanna 16, 22-4, 127 Williams, Rozz 20-2, 167 see also Christian Death, Premature Ejaculation Wilson, Robert 248 Witkin, Joel-Peter 75, 82, 87-88 Wojnarowicz, David 12, 26, 75, 102, 112, 172 wounds 12-3, 14, 32, 42-3, 67, 86-9, 93, 159-61, 167-8, 177-8, 181, 194-5, 206, 226, 230-1 zine culture 20, 25-6, 100, 140-1

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UNTITLED ROBERT WILSON

248

Ron Athey is an iconic figure in the development of contemporary art and performance. In his frequently bloody portrayals of life, death, crisis, and fortitude in the time of AIDS, Athey calls into question the limits of artistic practice. These limits enable Athey to explore key themes including: gender, sexuality, SM and radical sex, queer activism, post-punk and industrial culture, tattooing and body modification, ritual, and religion.

Contributors

Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey presents the first critical overview of this major artist ’s work . It demonstrates how Athey foresaw and precipitated the central place afforded the body and identity politics in art and critical theory in the 1990s and beyond.

Tim Etchells

Ron Athey Homi K . Bhabha Alex Binnie Jennifer Doyle Guillermo Gómez- Peña

Adrian Heathfield Antony Hegarty Dominic Johnson Amelia Jones Bruce LaBruce Lydia Lunch Catherine Opie Juliana Snapper Julie Tolentino Robert Wilson

EDITED BY DOMINIC JOHNSON

At long last, Dominic Johnson’s book begins the dauntingly exhilarating task of assessing the richly provocative art of Ron Athey. Incorporating Athey’s own prose version of his extraordinary childhood, astute critical essays, and moving appreciations from other artists, Pleading in the Blood advances Performance Studies and Art History by forging a mode of commentary expansive enough to address an artist who consistently works to expand the intricate drama of human embodiment. Athey’s art refuses the usual distinctions between pleasure and pain, or faith and doubt, and has been both blamed and celebrated for its radical inquiries into the limits and possibilities of queer bodies. Athey emerges from these pages as one of the most compelling theatre artists of our time. Peggy Phelan, Stanford University

PLEADING IN THE BLOOD

Catherine (Saalfield) Gund

T H E A R T A N D P E R F O R M A N C E S O F R O N AT H E Y

Matthew Goulish

Honest, pure, generous, uncompromising... a baptism by fire. Robert Wilson, artist and Director of The Watermill Center In his bloody self- obliterations, Ron Athey reveals the profound enigma of the body as a primary location of SELF. His flesh is a source of Life and a source of Death. Athey creates vital images drenched with human violence; his blood is spilled to placate our fear of the unknown and of mortality. Yet his performances are also implicit celebrations. Genesis BRE YER P- ORRIDGE, artist and cultural engineer

ISBN 978-1-78320-035-1

9 781783 200351

PLEADING IN THE BLOOD THE ART AND PERFORMANCES O F R O N AT H E Y EDITED BY DOMINIC JOHNSON