Ron Athey at P.S. 122 - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Feb, 1995 by Stephanie Cash

Ron Athey was born with the calling. Raised by fundamentalist relatives, he was trained to become a Pentecostal minister. He attended faith healings and received the gift of tongues at age 10. Teenage disillusionment prompted rebellion and led him into a period of depression and self-destructive behavior. Influenced by performance artists such as L.A.'s Johanna Went, Athey has been performing intermittently for over 10 years, culling experiences from his unusual and varied life.

His current series of autobiographical performances, presented in October at P.S. 122 as "4 Scenes in a Harsh Life" (five including the introduction), has been evolving since 1991. A segment of this show (in which, onstage, Athey cuts a design into the back of another man) was presented in Minneapolis last spring, sparking political histrionics and provoking further cuts in the NEA budget [see "Front Page," Sept. '94 and "Issues and Commentary"]. His recent performance incorporated religious iconography, various ritual practices (such as body piercing and scarification), AIDS references and lots of blood. Athey describes his work as an exploration of fetishism and acknowleges its spectacular sideshowlike quality, which compensated here for his (at times) less-than-commanding stage presence.

In "Introduction: The Holy Woman" Athey was dressed as the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Standing beside him was a naked, sometimes quivering woman pierced with arrowlike needles a la St. Sebastian. As Athey spoke about his upbringing, his association of religious fanaticism with pain and suffering became clear: yearning as a child to receive the gift of the stigmata, he sliced his and his sister's hands with a razor blade.

The first scene, "Working Class Hell," was set in a titty club with two cavorting nude dancers and a balloon-bedecked drag queen who, after being stripped bare by two "customers," proceeded to a chair for the ritual cutting. This virtual jump cut to the notorious bloodletting scene was the least successful integration of narrative and spectacle in the show, making the scene seem a bit gratuitous; but it was engrossing, nonetheless.

The next scene, "Suicide/Tattoo Salvation," was similarly gut-wrenching but more emotionally compelling. Athey described (via a recording) his past heroin addiction and suicide attempts as he calmly inserted a series of hypodermic needles into his arm from wrist to shoulder, removed them, and then repeatedly and brutally jabbed a 6-inch spinal needle through his scalp, wincing from the effort and evoking gasps from the audience.

"Dagger Wedding," (Scene IV) was exhilarating and exhausting. Athey, as a sort of minister, presided over the far-from-traditional "wedding" of three women. The brides wore bells on numerous fish hooks that pierced their flesh; Athey wore limes on his. Cleverly intertwining symbolism and practicality, Athey administered "communion" (an antiseptic) to each woman, which was spat back out, and painted a tribal-like stripe of Betadine down each cheek. Then he quickly and easily inserted a long, thin needle into one cheek and out through the other for all three "brides." The wedding party was joined by five men, also wearing the fish-hook-and-lime ensemble. The ensuing feverish dance caused the hooks to pull and tear their skin, bells and limes gradually dropping off from the force. Cathartic shouts and beating drums carried the performers along, their endorphine high vicariously experienced by the audience. Shock value aside, the performers' endurance of pain was oddly inspirational.

While pain, self-inflicted or otherwise, is not a new component in art, it seems to be making a comeback of sorts, helped along by the mainstreaming of piercing, tattooing and S&M. Concurrent with Athey's performance was the New Museum's show by Bob Flanagan (the self-titled "Supermasochist" and long-time survivor of cystic fibrosis). While both artists have gotten under the public's skin, so to speak, they raise critical issues about freedom, pleasure, pain, suffering, disease and surviving. Athey's and Flanagan's public displays of their private joys and personal hells are potent. They should not be dismissed simply because of their radical means.