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Ron Athey is an iconic figure in 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, radical sex, queer activism, post-punk and industrial culture, tattooing and body modification, ritual and religion. This landmark publication includes Athey’s own writings, commissioned essays by maverick artists and leading academics and full-colour images of Athey’s art and performances since the early 1980s. The diverse range of artistic and critical contributors to the book reflects Athey’s creative and cultural impact, among them musician Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons who contributed a foreword.

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 Gomez-Peña

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Performing Arts

History of art

Live Art

Performance art

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 janvier 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783201730
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	16 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

PL EADING IN THE BLOOD
THE ART AND PERFORMANCES OF RON ATHEY
CREDI TS
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.
PL EADING 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.
INTRODUCT ION: 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 Exhibition 1
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 repre