It’s a weird layout decision then to jump directly into Athey’s published and unpublished writings first, after establishing so eloquently an argument against the centrality of the singular voice. The focus for Queer Communion, she argues, isn’t him, per se, but all of the social, societal, cultural, and feely stuff, ebbing between stage body and our receptive ones. Jones forms a nice, heady correlation between the performance body, the body of the archive, and the queer community assembled for this volume. In her breathy introduction, editor Amelia Jones makes conceptual her study of Athey through a study of his peers what is on display in many of his performances is not the simply body as voyeuristic object, but the thresholds of pain that the artist creates in relation to the complicit audience. And his papers were acquired by the Getty, but in advance of their institutional interment, they let loose in Queer Communion to have one last lewd go. The objects of his performance practice will hit the road later this year (COVID-19-willing) for an international exhibition tour. Like many artists of his generation, Athey became a victim of the housing market a few years back, and losing his rent-stabilized house meant that his garage - a.k.a. The necessity of such a collection is laid out in practical terms. The table of contents alone counts six crowded pages. Amelia Jones and Andy Campbell), is a Bible-sized tumble through its many nuances, chalking up his impact on Modern Primitive body art, HIV/AIDS activism, Los Angeles performance art, the ’90s culture wars, death rock and post-punk music scenes, independent publishing, and gay pornography.

The recently published exhibition catalog, Queer Communion: Ron Athey (eds. Just one of those things is enough to jostle the art world’s more buttoned-up, making his a legacy one that has often been written about with averted glances rather than with deep focus.Īthey’s body is a responsive one, engaging religious, cultural, and sexual climates as they ebb and shift throughout his five decades of productivity. His works incorporate bloodletting, bondage, penetration, and glossolalia. Tattooed from head to toe (and anus), for the better part of his adulthood, Athey has paraded a kind of feral masculinity. THE AMERICAN PERFORMANCE ARTIST Ron Athey cuts an imitable image.

Lydia lunch willing victim