|
>> Ron Athey, America's most controversial performance artist, on S&M ritual, being used by the religious Right and the difficulties of staging castrations by MATTHEW HAYS Difficult as it is to believe, Ron Athey was once a bible-thumping Christian. Brought up by Pentecostals, the L.A.-based performance artist still recalls speaking in tongues and being part of his family's staged crusade to recruit new folk and save souls. That all changed at age 15, when he finally began to question the extremist Christian thought he'd been indoctrinated with throughout his childhood. Athey also began to dabble in S&M and a bevy of substance abuse, which led to a heroin addiction. He eventually kicked the habit, embracing performance art and alternative journalism as a vocation. Athey describes his work as "certainly not mass popular culture," and he's right. His pieces, which include "Martyrs & Saints," "Scenes in a Harsh Life" and "Deliverance," employ strains of S&M sexuality and ritual (piercing, cutting and mutilation) to create a visceral effect among the audience. Athey attracted international attention in 1994, after a Minneapolis performance in which he sliced into the back of a fellow performance artist, placed strips of paper towel over the wounds and then hoisted the bloodied strips of paper towel, via pulley, over the heads of the audience. Though no blood dripped down onto the audience, and though the performer who was cut was HIV negative, Athey's own HIV positive status led one audience member to claim that the crowd had been spattered with HIV-positive blood.
Since then, Athey has continued to perform his act around the world (he has been particularly successful in Zagreb and Mexico City) and to write (currently an editorial assistant at the L.A. Weekly, his work has also appeared in Details, the Village Voice and Infected Faggot Perspectives). HIV vs S&M Mirror: You've inspired a lot of controversy. I'm wondering, what do you think bothers people most about you: is it HIV or the S&M thing? Ron Athey: It's funny, because I think there are two different things that have brought on different issues. In the States, the idea of disease and audience safety was sort of the hype. In England, it was more challenging. That whole Operation Spanner thing that was happening there [a British police crackdown on S&M sexuality, in which people involved in consensual S&M acts were arrested for assault], which is more about the rights the individual has over their own body. They were charging people with grievous bodily harm; in effect, people didn't have the right to their own body. I found those to be really different phobias. Here it was more of a prudishness and ignorance about HIV, really. M: The controversy you found yourself in with your work must have felt odd. On the one hand, you were held up and used by the Right as a way to attack the NEA. But you've also described being alienated by the Left as well... RA: I was between a rock and a hard place. It's obvious that the religious Right were going to brand me an enemy. I don't think the arts establishment is necessarily progressive, though. I found American institutionalized art treated me as a hot potato. Before the controversy I didn't even understand the art world. By playing it safe, I feel a lot of people just embrace mediocrity. Like a person with a mic just telling their life story. I don't know if the NEA should stay open if they're not going to further new ideas. Otherwise, they should just produce classical work. Otherwise, they're just going to show safe, mediocre, supposedly experimental work. Art should be supported, but the way that most of those venues were being scared about the way in which they were showing things was ridiculous. I see amazing things in Europe that are government funded, that are too expensive for the box office to pay for, that will never come here. The government can have a place in arts funding, but there can't be that decency clause. Narrow-minded fetishists
RA: I don't do this work to be mass popular culture. I think when people see it they think it'll be like Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. I can't blame people for the way my work describes. If you describe cutting and penetration and bleeding, you get this image of a harsh spectacle. I think the reality is ridiculously poetic and melodramatic and sometimes too dense with historical reference. They're burying themselves trying to describe that. It certainly makes for an interesting cross-section of audience though: the gnarly tattoo guys, and the blue-haired arthouse ladies. The people who are usually disappointed with my act are usually the proper S&M people. They think it's going to be a titillating S&M scene, and instead it's sad and funny and ridiculous and all these other things, and too costumey for them. They tend to be very narrow about what they want to see. M: So the most narrow-minded are the fetishists themselves? RA: Yeah. But I don't actually consider my stuff S&M work. It just cross-sections with some of the techniques. AIDS and the Apocalypse M: I'm an outsider when it comes to S&M, so certainly when I watch a lot of this stuff I feel strictly like a voyeur. Is there a certain catharsis derived from S&M? For you it appears to be something deeply spiritual. RA: I think the idea of S&M is to make a controlled and intense experience. And that does in fact make for a chemical change in your body. I think that even for the audience, it's so different than watching a splatter film. I think the experience is so different for different audiences. In Zagreb, it went straight to the heart of the Balkan war; they don't have an open AIDS issue there. You create an Apocalypse landscape and everyone can relate to that. I avoid the narrative in the shows. Even the narrative in the pieces are very ironic. I think most theatre is pretty ghastly. M: You mean you haven't seen the musical version of Trainspotting? RA: [groans] Or how about 10 naked guys just singing? There's a whole slew of really bad gay theatre out there. It's shamelessly getting worse and worse. M: I've read the false accounts of blood being spattered into the audience. What about the tales of audience responses to your shows? Is is true that people have fainted and thrown up? RA: That's true. I did something here a month ago, and someone I know, she fainted and threw up. It's surprising because it's usually men. Women are more familiar with blood, generally. That's just part of having a real physical experience. One of the things I really do mutilate on stage is my face, and people really can't disassociate themselves from the face. It's almost like you can beat your body to death, but not your face. Most of what I do is puncture wounds, then mutilation within reason, so I'm not jeopardizing my health, but as soon as the blood starts to flow, people get queasy. Deep threat M: Are there any S&M scenes that have gone too far? RA: Sometimes I've seen cutting that's been a bit too deep, but mostly it's an emotional negotiation that goes too far. On stage, the cast I've been using has a strict commitment to it, and it's thoroughly scripted, not improvised, so even within that script you can tell if someone's on the verge of fainting. M: There must be an incredible level of trust within your ensemble... RA: Most of them I've been working with since '90 or '91. They're usually around for the development of the piece from the beginning and see all the research I'm doing. M: It's funny when you mention sensitivity about the face. Because people also have that sensitivity about genitals. There's that scene in Sick [the documentary about the late S&M performance artist Bob Flanagan] where he hammers a nail through his penis. I looked around at the audience response to that scene, and everyone in the audience had their legs crossed and were cringing--women, too, and they, of course, don't have dicks. RA: [laughs] You're right, genitals are the other sensitive area. In the mock castration scene during one of my pieces, there's a point where the genitals are stapled. It's just a drag queen tuck, and we use the scrotum as a zipper and steel staples that are used for surgery. The scrotum tissue really isn't that sensitive, but everyone in the audience is almost crying. It's just like a quick pinch. Boxing and other blood sport M: I find it funny that there's such an outcry about S&M sexuality. Jerry Springer is on TV every day, and I would argue that's really a popular form of S&M entertainment. After all, each episode generally ends in some form of physical violence between guests--hair pulling, scratching, whatever. And the fights are generally over infidelity or some other sexual hijinx. RA: And people love it. M: It's a form of sexual ritual, no? RA: I would agree. And to go back to that Operation Spanner thing, the only clause was to allow for dangerous exhibitions, like boxing and knife throwing. They never took the pub-goers' blood thrills away from them, because those are set in place. But you know, going to watch someone get their face bashed in in the boxing ring, I really can't see a difference between that and sitting in a dungeon and watching someone get pierced. In the end, that person's in fine health when it's done, whereas the boxer is punch-drunk with a broken nose and a couple of teeth missing. M: You've described your entry into S&M as a moment when your Christian beliefs collapsed. Is this what led you into the exploration of S&M? RA: That was part of a really long journey, as to why we play with the body. It's also part of the reason why I don't have an agenda in terms of body play. I think it's too complex to say that it's healthy or unhealthy. When my belief in Christianity collapsed I felt completely disconnected from my body. I actually began self-mutilating in that classic way; if you will, Princess Di slashing her wrists. I find it interesting that that started playing itself out in different ways in my life. To sensuality and then protesting. Most of my tattoos are aesthetic, but definitely some of the ones on my face are a fuck-you statement. I've been willing to look at the roots of S&M in much of my work. Those with an agenda don't really like my point of view on it, because many of them feel S&M is a form of healing. M: Many in the S&M movement don't like the pop psychological explanation of why people get into the scene, but your story falls into the popular perception that S&M types have generally arrived there because of some childhood trauma... RA: It would tie into that. But knowing people in that scene, there are a million reasons why people are involved with it. But I still think people who've had really neutral, well-balanced lives don't go to the extremes for expression, for pleasure, for experience. The more textured you are in your life, the more adventurous you are. End of an epidemic? M: You're on the protease inhibitor cocktail now. What's your response to those who've said, as sex columnist Dan Savage has, that the AIDS crisis is over? RA: I think, as we speak and in talking to people this week even, I have a friend who was doing great on the cocktail for a year and now he has some brain disease. It's really slowed down, it's definitely changed; I don't want to cling to the late '80s and keep crying, but it's not over. I have daily opinions on it. I didn't expect to be here 12 years later. I don't know how anyone could ask for 12 more years of life, disease or not. Some people feel it's over, and unfortunately that's meant a slip-up of obsessive safe-sex practices. I don't think that's the right attitude to have, that it's that treatable. Now we're going into the hep C phase of the epidemic. Savage is right that it has changed in some ways. I can remember when I constantly knew someone who was dying. Now it's more here and there. You don't feel like you're in the middle of a war right now. M: Do you ever have contact with your family now? RA: I have contact with my father and four brothers. But not the religious ones, no. I don't want people in my life who morally judge me. I don't care if it's Christianity or Krishna, I don't need people preaching to me. Ron Athey will lecture as part of the Concordia HIV Lecture Series on Thursday, January 21, at 6 p.m. (Jazz vocals by Christina Thompson begin at 5:30pm) at the Hall Building (H-110). Admission is free. Athey will also perform a solo piece on Saturday, January 23 at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts. Admission $10. Info: 739-2301
|
Far-Right politicians, then in an anti-National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) furore, used Athey as a symbol to attack the organization for their reckless funding of questionable art. The ensuing brouhaha allowed politicians to successfully cut the NEA's budget by a further five per cent. (Ironically enough, only $150 of Athey's budget could be traced back to the NEA, and that money didn't come directly--it had been funnelled through another organization which in turn had received NEA support.)
M: In America, it seems like people always have to spend a lot of time just justifying themselves. Do you ever tire of justifying performance art itself to people?