MARCH 21,2008
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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
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INA
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AND
TCHING
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GET
PIERCED
•A .1 &
SbJ
RON ATHEY
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