State of the Art

Ron Athey's greatest hits

by Carly Carioli

A short list of the most painful acts choreographed and committed by Ron Athey, the 37-year-old gay, HIV-positive performance artist, in his operatic burlesques of body-art mutilation, spiritual allegory, and mythic suffering, would include the following: razor-blade scarification; the skewering of a latticework of needles through the skin on the forehead to create a "crown of thorns"; duct-tape mummification; vaginal penetration with a speculum; the nailing shut of a woman's mouth (who's then strung up and pierced with a hypodermic needle, which is in turn used to spray her own blood back in her face); flagellation in fascist regalia; dozens of instant body piercings; suspension of one's body from meat hooks; stapling the scrotum completely around the penis so as to create the image of being "neutered"; two men, thusly "neutered," engaging in oral and anal sex with a double dong; vomiting and defecating with the aid of an enema bag; bleeding profusely as the skewers are removed; inflating the scrotum with water until it swells to the size of a grapefruit.

All of this is documented in the film Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance (his "greatest hits" if you will). If Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar was a real guy -- and had done hard time in the Jim Rose Sideshow -- he might hope one day to be a pale reflection of Athey. "Just being skinny and neutered with red contacts on isn't really offensive, know what I mean?" says Athey, who will perform his first solo work, The Solar Anus, at Mobius this week, in conjunction with the local debut of Hallelujah! at the Museum of Fine Arts. "Maybe he [Marilyn] is not your cup of tea, but he's not really bleeding, he's not really putting things up his ass, he's just talking about sexual ambiguity and being a freak and trying to live a Joel-Peter Witkin tableaux via his videos."

Meet the real deal. Raised in a fundamentalist Pentecostal sect in California, Athey was preaching in snake-handling tent revivals at the age of 10; in his teen years he moved to Los Angeles, where the punk scene -- and, closely allied with it, the underground art scene -- was in full bloom. By the early '90s he had contracted a degree of infamy -- the media and Jessie Helms didn't take kindly to an HIV-positive ex-junkie bleeding on stage. He subsequently performed in a kind of exile, almost exclusively in Europe and South America. His work up to this point has been brutally autobiographical. In Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, he enacts a suicide attempt by turning his arm into a hypodermic pincushion. Martyrs and Saints (a chilling rumination on the indignity of hospitals, sickness, and dying) and Deliverance (in which the protagonists vacillate between a God-like figure and a kewpie doll, suffer horrendously either way, then are bodybagged and buried) are allegorical scenes whose scale approaches visually what Diamanda Galás's Plague Mass produced aurally.

After making an unsuccessful attempt to stage the four-year-old Deliverance in the States last year, Athey turned to his first solo work, The Solar Anus -- "minimal" as opposed to the sprawl of his previous pieces, but with subject matter that's no less challenging. Based on an essay of the same name by the Surrealist-era French historian, artist, and philosopher Georges Bataille, "it's sort of a study or a meditation on the debauchery and perverseness of Bataille. `The Solar Anus' was about the contradiction of the asshole as [being] between night and day. He's describing it as beautiful as the blinding sun, and still dwelling on the idea of the realm of where the asshole is. A lot of the piece is about that."

So what will Athey actually be doing? He chuckles: "This is where I get into trouble."

Ron Athey performs The Solar Anus April 6 and 7 at 8 p.m. at Mobius, 354 Congress Street. Call 542-7416. Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance screens April 8 and 10 at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue. Call 267-9300 extension 300.