By Ian Morton
What a difference 25 years makes. On July 25, 1994, North Carolina U.S. Senator Jesse Helms stood on the Senate floor, and used a performance photo of Ron Athey to attack funding through the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA). Although Athey had never actually received a grant or funding from the NEA, this contributed to Athey being blacklisted in the United States arts community for his controversial elements of BDSM, profuse bleedings and religion iconographies. On Nov. 24, fresh off a residency in Ireland, Athey was presented with the American Academy of Religion 2019 โReligion in the Artโ award at the San Diego Convention Center. This annual award is presented to an artist, selected by a jury, โwho has made a recent significant contribution to the understanding of the relations among the arts and religions.โ I was fortunate enough to both sit down for a lunch interview with Athey, and to attend the Q&A session at which he was recognized for his work.
Before reading another word of this column, I strongly encourage you to do a little research into Atheyโs vast catalogue of performance art. There simply is no way for me to do even minimal justice to his aesthetic with writing, and simply typing โRon Atheyโ into your YouTube search engine will bring up several options. Even this cannot offer the experience of live performance art, but it can provide some context for our conversations.
We started our lunch conversation talking about his 1981 foray into performance art, and what he wanted to communicate as an artist.
โSomething louder than a scream,โ Athey replied, โWith layers that can take [the audience] into a state.โ
One of his earliest attempts was a collaboration with Rozz William, together performing as the experimental duo Premature Ejaculation. In the performance art world, Athey found a way to utilize the elements of his own Pentecostal upbringing to create his own lane in the Los Angeles punk world. Atheyโs youth was spent in a religious community that performed religion as extreme pageantry โ think tent meeting evangelism, Aimee Semple McPherson โ and was โanointed as a prophetโ at the age of 9. He experienced being rubbed with oil by the congregation, an aspect he later pulled into his own performance, to promote his gift of prophecy.
At 15, in the LA punk-rock scene, Athey found an artistic community that may not have been able to exist anywhere else, geographically. As he described it, โItโs โundergroundโ in the shadow of something as โmainstreamโ as mainstream can get. You can meet all these beauties who came to be an actor or actress, but they didnโt make it, and their โsecond bestโ turns into something weird and twisted.โ
In this world, he found influences by artists like Johanna Went, Annie Sprinkle and authors like Jean Genet. Simultaneously, Athey was exposed to โbody modificationโ in what were called โtabloid magazines,โ which were centered in music, but also featured literature around extasis, BDSM and disassociation.
These themes intersected with Atheyโs own religious performative experiences and spoke to his fascination with the pageantry of religious iconography. Much inspiration has been pulled from stories and images of martyrs and saints, including the mortification of the body. St. Sebastian, traditionally depicted as being pierced with arrows, has been a recurring self-performed image in Atheyโs work. This idea of being pierced and bleeding also connected with his performances centered around the HIV/AIDS epidemic, his own positive status, and the stigma that accompanied the disease. In his Q&A session, Athey expressed that he found himself asking questions, like, โWhat does healing look like?โ as he witnessed the same sort of โsnake-oil salesmanshipโ of โAIDS curesโ being peddled that religious communities offered.
Atheyโs work has ranged from solo shows, having his own small company, collaborating with other artists, to performances that are staged as full-scale operas. During the 10 years Athey was blacklisted, he lived and performed abroad, and the range of influences in his body of work is evident. Themes from classical European iconography, Greek mythology and Egyptian garb are among the many aesthetics that Athey has reframed to illuminate contemporary issues. As well as pulling from artistic influences, Athey referenced his โbiochemistry brainโ (he worked at the Salk Institute for a time) and his study of Kabbalah and sex magick.
His most recent work,ย โAcephalous Monster,โ is steeped in Nietzcheโs prophecy of โ1,000 years of chaosโ after the fall of Western Religion, and incorporates text from Genesis P-Orridge’s collection,ย โEsoterrorist: Selected Essays 1980-1988,โ in โcut-upโ form. This multilayered performance positions Athey as โmonsters,โ mythological and historical, across centuries, and illuminates the threat of fascism in our current climate. About this piece, Athey asserts, โThe myths and symbols of the past were attempts to articulate intimation of what is possible.ย The themes of mythology are not just archaic knowledge โ they are living actualities of human beings.โ
Having now leveraged his physical body toward the construction of performance art, Athey recognizes โitโs unnatural to turn yourself into an artistic object,โ yet his nearly 40-year tenure speaks to a continued inspiration.
Senator Helms has not been, and will not be, the only critic of the โappropriatenessโ of Ron Atheyโs art, but the artist knows who his work is for. He never set out to create performances to please the masses; as Athey contends, โThe people I care about can respond to this work, because they are living it!โ
Images and information can be found at ronathey.org and LTD Gallery in Los Angeles will host โWitness,โ a retrospective reading of Atheyโs texts from 1981- 2019 on Dec. 13. โPleading In the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Atheyโ is a great text to explore, and there are many videos of performances and interviews to be found online.