Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (March 21, 2008)
MARCH 21,2008 So tTfApri 115t hla»17 pm u : gìyìdres 5 RARTiY ¿g«. * ■> jk . - RAFFEL BE PRES Hosted by: j MYLAR* S? Ron Athey's work has enshrined and lifted to the level of high art all sorts of kinky behaviors: bondage and sadomasochism, bloodletting, mock castration, self-mutilation, branding, flogging and genital stapling. A BENEFIT FOR 1 NE'S OREGON’S GLBT COMMUNITY are long over, but they too reappear transformed There were only a few performances, as venues sewn-together lips. In another COME HELP in his work: During performances of Four Scenes in piece we see him writhing naked on one end of a SUPPORT this epoch of his life by inserting 30 hypodermic weren’t easy to come by: In one of them, Athey reportedly ate a crucified road-kill cat. Nothing much appears on Athey’s resume be needles into his arm. tween Premature Ejaculation and the early ’90s. He a Harsh Life in the mid- to late ’90s, he symbolized Opie, Catherine So what does it all signify? Does it have artis did some more theatrical performance work with a photographer tic merit beyond shock value? And why is Athey the bands Christian Death and Nervous Gender, has worked extensively compelled to express himself in this way? but mostly it was what he terms his “heroin va “In a culture obsessed with bodily health and cation.” Not until the beginning of the '90s did beauty, it’s particularly shocking to see people cut his career begin in earnest. He worked as a per themselves in the name of art,” asserts Andy Lee former and go-go dancer at Club Fuck!, which he in The Human Canvas, a documentary he directed describes as “a sort of queer techno/dance/body for the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 in 2006. Yet modification club” that was an integral part of Los there is a sense in which the sort of bodily modi Angeles’ hardcore queer scene at the time. In 1992 fication that Athey and other body artists inhabit he began performing Martyrs and Saints, the first on stage is not at all alien to our culture, but is in fact endemic to it, and perhaps today more of his elaborate performance pieces treating the than ever. Consider the current vogue for plastic from that point on, and the first installment of a Torture Trilogy that would be followed by Four fl surgery that has trickled down from our celebrity gods and goddesses to mere mortals cursed with religious themes that would run through his work Scenes in a Harsh Life and Deliverance. In these imperfect features. (Remember the bizarre televi sion show The Swan that aired on Fox for two sea pieces Athey (mis)appropriates various talis sons in 2004?) We can find it as well in the world For instance, in the guise of a modern-day of sports. “I really can’t see the difference between St. Sebastian of indeterminate gender, he going to watch someone get their face bashed in wears a literal crown of thorns that causes in the boxing ring and sitting in a dungeon and blood to drip down his face and onto the watching someone get pierced,” Athey points out. floor. The 1998 feature-length documen- j “In the end, that person’s in fine health, whereas the boxer is punch-drunk with a broken nose and a couple of teeth missing.” mans redolent with Christian significance. tary Hallelujah! Ron Athey : A Story of Deliverance follows him and his 1! Of course, there is also religion, Christianity in particular, with its iconographies of pain and martyrdom so thoroughly embedded in Western entourage from their 1995 tour of culture. One thinks, naturally, of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, with its protracted, (In the wake of the NEA furor, bloody sequences depicting the torture and death of Jesus. Is the film any less brutal or sadomasoch istic than the work of Ron Athey? At least in the latter case, the pain inflicted is consensual. MANY WAYS TO IIEAL Mexico City through their sum mer 1997 run in Zagreb, Croatia. Athey had found venues outside the United States as more ac commodating.) Through a mix- ture of interview and perform- ance footage, we see Athey as the charismatic leader of a cult of queer acolytes who drive for “I’m a nihilist who believes in the healing ward his “frenzy to make it big process,” Athey says. “I’m not utopian enough to imagine what it would have been like to have ger, make it more.” In a vignette called “Nurses’ Penance,” Athey savvy, life-loving, queer-friendly parents.” His re-creates the institutional terror process began at the beginning of the ’80s with of a hospital setting, depicting Premature Ejaculation, a collaboration with Rozz a patient brutalized by huge Williams of “deathrock" band Christian Death. drag queen nurses with E OUR WORKI double-sided dildo. who Continued on Page 42 "4% / .AND TING INA GEON AND TCHING OMEONE GET PIERCED •A .1 & SbJ RON ATHEY WW.UMALT.COM UMATILLA MORROW ALTERNATIVES HUMAN DIGNITY GROUP • 541-922-0126 COMMITTED TO SOCIAL CHANGE THROUGH EDUCATION AND UNDERSTANDING vote ¡out * 2008 * FOR CANDIDATE COVERAGE THAT MATTERS TO YOU VISIT WWW.JUST0UT.COM Generation Accounting Inc. ▼ Full Service Bookkeeping ▼ Accounting ▼ Payroll ▼ Taxes ▼ Licensed Tax Consultant Susan G. Robertson, L.T.C., EA. gÈ BO 1 1804 NE 43rd Ave Portland, OR 97213 (503) 282-7247 • Fax (503) 282-7406
