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

PLEADING IN THE BLOOD

THE ART AND PERFORMANCES OF RON ATHEY

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 978-1-78320-173-0

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 OF RON ATHEY

EDITED BY DOMINIC JOHNSON

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

FOREWORD

ANTONY HEGARTY

INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS A MORAL AND JUST PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

DOMINIC JOHNSON

GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT

RON ATHEY

‘ THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO SAY HALLELUJAH! ’

CATHERINE ( SAALFIELD) GUND

‘DOES A BLOODY TOWEL REPRESENT THE IDEALS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE? ’ : RON ATHEY AND THE CULTURE WARS

DOMINIC JOHNSON

BOMBS AWAY IN FRONT-LINE SUBURBIA

HOMI K . BHABHA

DELIVERANCE : THE ‘ TORTURE TRILOGY’ IN RETROSPECT

RON ATHEY

THE IRREPLACEABLE BODIES: RESISTANCE THROUGH FEROCIOUS FRAGILITY

JULIE TOLENTINO

ATHEY-ISM, COLLABORATION, AND HUSTLER WHITE

BRUCE LABRUCE

SEX WITH RON

JENNIFER DOYLE

THE MAN AND HIS TATTOOS (BY THE MAN WHO DID THEM)

ALEX BINNIE

THE MILK FACTORY ON WINCHESTER

MATTHEW GOULISH

FLASH: ON PHOTOGRAPHING RON ATHEY

CATHERINE OPIE

HOW RON ATHEY MAKES ME FEEL : THE POLITICAL POTENTIAL OF UPSETTING ART

AMELIA JONES

RAISED IN THE LORD: REVELATIONS AT THE KNEE OF MISS VELMA

RON ATHEY

JOYCE : THE VIOLENT DISBELIEF OF RON ATHEY

LYDIA LUNCH

JUDAS CRADLE: INVASIVE RESONANCE

JULIANA SNAPPER

ILLICIT TRANSIT

ADRIAN HEATHFIELD

BY WORD OF MOUTH: RON ATHEY’S SELF-OBLITERATION

TIM ETCHELLS

THE NEW BARBARIANS: A DECLARATION OF POETIC DISOBEDIENCE FROM THE NEW BORDER

GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEÑA

FURTHER READING

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INDEX

UNTITLED

ROBERT WILSON

FOREWORD

ANTONY HEGARTY

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.

INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS A MORAL AND JUST PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

DOMINIC JOHNSON

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

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 historical avant-garde project of radicalizing the everyday via artistic practice – scaring oneself along the way.

Opposite: Portrait of Ron Athey (2011). Photo by Tom Garretson.

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

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 anti-theatricality 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 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

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 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).

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.

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

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 ‘post-punk 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’ participant-viewers 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 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.

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.

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

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:

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 knife-blade contentment

Who would cut you open concept?

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.

ATHEY AND WILLIAMS DESCRIBE THEIR PROJECT AS GOVERNED BY ‘NO LIMI T, NO RULE, NO SANITY’

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: