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The perverse and the transcendent: An interview with Ron Athey
06.21.2018
09:27 am
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One of the great challenges of considering the work of a groundbreaking artist like Ron Athey is that we must consider how temporal and ephemeral his medium is.  Peggy Phelan wrote, “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” Athey’s artwork runs the gamut from actions at Club Fuck! and Sin-A-Matic to collaborations with performers like Rozz Williams and Vaginal Davis and includes multiple-hour staged duration pieces with a team. 

No documentation, audio recording or visual record could ever capture the drama or reverie achieved from actually attending a Ron Athey show but the existence of Catherine Gund’s documentary Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance (1997) is an excellent moving image tool to remind us how Athey altered the landscape of body modification, AIDS activism and performance art forever.

The Outfest Legacy Project is the largest publicly accessible collection of LGBTQ films in the world and was created specifically for the preservation and restoration of LGBTQ films. They will be screening Gund’s documentary in 35mm at UCLA this Friday in Los Angeles. Ron Athey and Catherine Gund will be there in person, as well as guest curator Zachary Drucker! Don’t miss out!

I thought this would be a great opportunity to ask Ron a few questions about his career and the film and other things he has been working on.
Please enjoy our conversation conducted via email this week.

**Heads’ up: the images contained are graphic. But they do represent some out of this world performance work, the likes of which we will probably never see again.**


 

I read an interview where you talked about growing up in a Pentecostal home in Pomona, CA and described the experience as an “apocalyptic opera.” While the links to ritualism, body focus/faith healing and automatic writing are clearly present in your various works, would it be fair to say that the romance of opera also plays a part in your constructions?

Ron Athey:I internalized all these images from the Book of Revelations and I think that even as a child I understood that they took on something else through the hillbilly gothic lens of Inland Empire revival meetings.  I had no experience whatsoever with opera as an art form until I was fully adult and out of home. But in this school program for smart ass kids, the MGM program (mentally gifted minors), I was taken to the Pantages Theater to see Timbuktu, a spectacular starring Eartha Kitt. This had a huge effect on my sense of drama.  But back to the setting of small Pentecostal meetings in storefronts, tents, private homes- the poverty and austerity of these settings was grim.  Being raised in a neighborhood that was half Chicano (the other half black), I felt the iconography and glamour of Catholicism on a very deep level. What I lacked at that age was any way to reach the rituals.

The film Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance (Catherine Gund, 1997) playing this Friday as part of the Outfest Legacy Project covers four specific works and before you began exploring solo work with the glorious Solar Anus. Can you speak to Martyrs and Saints, Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, Deliverance and Gund’s film?

Ron Athey:The torture trilogy was almost channeled material. The height of the AIDS pandemic intersecting with the intense coming of age of the body modification scene was double high energy. These were two audiences that intersected but were also very different. I understand that I experience everything important through the archetype. As soon as the sickness and death came into my reality, it personalized as martyrology. Now I knew with that level of glorification, it was important to grab ahold of the issues, the moral polarization of “good girls” vs. “nasty girls”. The distortion of Healing: understand it, not as a restoration, but as an evolution through the sickness. This led me to concepts like the trickster shaman for Deliverance, wherein Divinity Fudge played multiple faces of a Living Icon.  It was largely the same cast of performers through this era, and I work closely with Julie Tolentino. I think the staging of 8 to 25 performers wouldn’t have been possible without these skills! Martyrs & Saints was largely made of tributes of recent deaths (Cliff Diller, David Wojnarowicz) and owning that conviction to embrace the martyrology. Four Scenes was a refining of that St. Sebastian image, the Holy Woman who was largely based on Aimee Semple McPherson, and finally Deliverance, on the concept of healing and shabby shamanism.
 

 


This screening of Gund’s documentary for the Outfest Legacy Project is not the first time you have presented something with Outfest before.  In the early 2000s, you worked with Vaginal Davis and curated an event called Platinum Oasis. Would you talk about this a little?

Ron Athey: In 2001 and 2002 Vaginal Davis and myself programmed Platinum Oasis, 24 hour events at the Coral Sands Motel in Hollywood, just before its debauchery and changing times ended its reign as a crystal meth/gay hardcore sex palace. It was designed as an intervention on both the concept of the group art show, and on abject gay male space.  40 rooms, plus a stage straddling the pool and jacuzzi area.  This was a proper happening that triggered a lot of experimentation. Also the names are overwhelming and formed the repeating lineup of Bruce LaBruce, Kembra Pfahler, Slava Mogutin, Gio Black Peter, and had celebrity one offs, like Ogre of Skinny Puppy’s Japan porn room, Lydia Lunch’s tribute to the recently deceased theatre director Emilio Cubeiro, which included a slideshow of 1,000 self portraits of his own butthole taken throughout his life! Kenny Scharf drove up with his art-RV, and which happened to have members of the B-52s inside, Rick Owens designed a red toga which was custom sewn to attendees bodies in a “sweatshop” room. Ann Magnuson read from a Hollywood script that she should have gotten the part for, I could go on gushing but there was an incredible energy around this event. The hotel was donated, Outfest still had airline and hotel sponsorship, even with low artist fees we created something larger than the sum of its parts. And it was properly polymorphously perverse right up to the Sunday morning baptismal in the filthy bi-sexual jacuzzi, with Vaginal Davis in character as “I preach hate, my name’s St. Selecia Tate”.

Time and again, I seem to encounter variations of these words in reference to you and your work. What do they mean to you and how do you interpret them: Engage, Ecstatic, Extreme.

Ron Athey: How about enhance? I think, going back to the sacred, the passion play, the illustrated sermon, I don’t want to use my art time making commentary as everyday Ron Athey, about the specifics of the Trump presidency, and definitely not about the ‘art world.’ I have a deep impulse to find a higher state. Pure Immanence. Even the illusion of transcendence.  Experimenting with what sounds, sights, smells, vibrations change consciousness. I always return to that.
 

 
Growing up in Hollywood, I used to drive by Poseur and Peanuts all the time. Club Fuck! and Sin-a-matic were constantly on my radar. I know you probably have a thousand stories but do you have one story you can tell about a performance you did that was particularly inspirational to you at the time?

Ron Athey: I was lucky I was able to work through actions on these stages, for these demanding crowds. Its very different then how I see work constructed in the academy, you have to rise up. One piece I made for Leigh Bowery’s memorial event, The Trojan Whore, I kept developing. I did a version at Sin-a-matic and sitting front center were Budgie and Siouxsie Sioux.  I think it was about 1996. And it was a mummified enchanted body, corseted, bustled, boobed, and on a wheeled platform. Inside my genitals were “tucked” via surgical stapler, a two-meter strand of pearls keestered up my arse, and my lips were pieced inside out. When the pearls were removed (after I was placed in a wig and lipstick painted on the inside of my lips), the squeaky clean 2 meter double strand were looped a few times and placed around my neck. Afterwards, Siouxsie exclaimed, how on earth were the pearls so clean? Tricks of the trade.

Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Ariel Schudson
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06.21.2018
09:27 am
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The B-52s and Friends’ Art Against AIDS commercial, 1987
01.19.2016
12:25 pm
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In 1987, the B-52s produced an incredible public service announcement for AMFAR (The Foundation For AIDS Research) with the late NYC-based video artist Tom Rubnitz (best known for the “Strawberry Shortcut” and “Pickle Surprise” videos) and several of their closest famous friends. The colorful tableau vivant recreated the Beatles’ iconic Sgt. Pepper’s album cover with the flowers spelling out “Be Alive”

Along with the B-52s, you’ll see Korean video artist Nam Jun Paik, Allen Ginsberg, Dancenoise, “voguing” pioneer Willi Ninja, Nile Rodgers, Joey Arias, Tseng Kwong Chi, Mink Stole, ABC’s David Yarritu, “Frieda the Disco Doll,” John Kelly as the Mona Lisa, Lady Bunny, performance artist Mike Smith, Kenny Scharf, David Byrne and then-wife Adelle Lutz, model Beverly Johnson, NYC “It Girl” Dianne Brill and Quentin Crisp among many others.

If this isn’t eighties enough for you already, note the presence of “Randee of the Redwoods” (comedian Jim Turner) the acid-fried MTV “presidential candidate.”
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.19.2016
12:25 pm
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‘Hustlers’: Magnetic portrait series of NYC and LA male prostitutes
08.19.2015
09:18 am
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Eve Fowler‘s captivating series, Hustlers, is not your average coffee table book of photography. Between 1993 and 1998, Fowler photographed young gay men selling sex in the West Village and on Santa Monica Boulevard, to startlingly familiar effect. The project coincided with Fowler’s own coming out; her subjects are—in a way—an extension of her own identity.

The men themselves remain anonymous, and the viewer is left to wonder about their lives and personal stories. Street hustling has never been the safest way to make a living, and deaths from AIDS only stopped climbing after 1995—it could be tempting for a less humane photographer to portray her subjects as little more than gritty icongraphy, but Fowler doesn’t seem to direct these men at all. Some of them pose, others pout, and some simply smile, as if for a family snapshot. 
 

 

 

 
Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Amber Frost
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08.19.2015
09:18 am
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Unrepentant Whores: Sex worker activists fight mandatory HIV testing for prostitutes, 1982
05.20.2013
10:18 am
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Carol Leigh
Carol Leigh, Scarlot Harlot, by Annie Sprinkle
 
While most of the heroes of early AIDS activism are unsung (even now we’re more likely to associate celebrities with the fight), none get brushed under the rug quite so quickly as prostitutes.

In 1988, the panic surrounding the growing HIV epidemic produced some incredibly Orwellian “solutions,” including California Bill 2319, which would require the mandatory HIV testing for prostitutes and associated felony charges for prostitution. Aside from a gross violation of human rights, the bill would have produced all kinds of terrifying legal precedents to test anyone even suspected of prostitution.

At the forefront of the fight against the bill was Carol Leigh (also known as “Scarlot Harlot”), a member the sex workers’ rights group, COYOTE (Call Off Your Tired Old Ethics). Leigh and COYOTE were early participants in the formation of AIDS activist group, ACT UP. In addition to coining the term “sex worker” in 1978, Leigh still fights for prostitutes’ rights to this day. (Her book, Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Works of Scarlot Harlot is a treat, by the way.)

Even more heartening than seeing folks like Leigh fight the good fight, you can see all the support they get from other communities.The best part is when Leigh quotes COYOTE founder, Margo St. James, who said, “If they want to know if prostitutes are positive, they should test the Vice cops.” Learn your history, boys and girls!
 

 
Thanks to Melissa Gira Grant for the tip!

Posted by Amber Frost
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05.20.2013
10:18 am
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Art Against AIDS: The B-52s and Friends (1987)
02.23.2012
02:12 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
In 1987, the B-52s produced an incredible public service announcement for AMFAR (The Foundation For AIDS Research) with the late NYC-based video artist Tom Rubnitz (best known for the “Strawberry Shortcut” and “Pickle Surprise” videos) and several of their closest famous friends. The colorful tableau vivant recreated the “Sgt. Pepper” album cover with the flowers spelling out “Be Alive”

Along with the B-52s, you’ll see Korean video artist Nam Jun Paik, Allen Ginsbeg, Dancenoise, “voguing” pioneer Willi Ninja, Nile Rodgers, Joey Arias, Tseng Kwong Chi, Mink Stole, ABC’s David Yarritu, “Frieda the Disco Doll,” John Kelly as the Mona Lisa, Lady Bunny, performance artist Mike Smith, Kenny Scharf, David Byrne and then-wife Adelle Lutz, model Beverly Johnson, NYC “It Girl” Dianne Brill and Quentin Crisp among many others.

If this isn’t eighties enough for you already, note the presence of “Randee of the Redwoods” (comedian Jim Turner) the acid-fried MTV “presidential candidate.”
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.23.2012
02:12 pm
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Second craziest headline ever?
09.12.2011
05:17 pm
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Taken in conjunction with “Gordon Ramsay Sex Dwarf eaten by Badger” which Tara posted earlier today, it looks like the news has been getting pretty weird lately. But Tara and I have been discussing which of these two headlines are better. She still opts for the “Gordon Ramsay Sex Dwarf…”  strapline, while I still plump for this beauty from the BBC. I did some headline math, which looks like this:

Headline 1 (Ramsay dwarf) : sex/death/disability/celebrity/animal  

versus

Headline 2 (AIDS cats): implied gay sex/death/mutation/animals

So it would look like Headline 1 has it. BUT that does not take into account the “kittens” factor of headline 2 (which usually spells instant win), plus the fact that it is actually good news. I dunno, I’m torn…

What do you think, readers?

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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09.12.2011
05:17 pm
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Sexy Fingers: Very NSFW
07.26.2011
06:09 pm
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A promotional music video for a new French AIDS awareness campaign that employs a mischievous Android app and online game. This is VERY NSFW.

Directed, drawn and animated by Jean Michel Tixier. Music by Flairs. Produced by the studio ANONYMOUS.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Bongwater: The Power of Pussy

Thank you Sky Nicholas!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.26.2011
06:09 pm
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Smutley the Cat teaches us about AIDS awareness (NSFW)
03.24.2011
11:44 am
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An extremely wild Fritz the Cat style PSA about AIDS awareness set to the tune of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation.”  No animals were harmed while making this… I think.

 
(via Nerdcore)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.24.2011
11:44 am
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‘Last Address’: an elegy for New York City artists who died of AIDS
08.25.2010
05:18 pm
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Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Norman René, Peter Hujar, Ethyl Eichelberger, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cookie Mueller, Klaus Nomi….the list of New York artists who died of AIDS over the last 30 years is countless, and the loss immeasurable.

A heartwrenching tribute to New York City painters, writers and performers who died of aids, Last Address is composed of images of the exteriors of the buildings where the artists last lived. The video was shot by Ira Sachs and if you visit the film’s website you can read about the artists featured in this bittersweet poem of a film.
 

Last Address from Ira Sachs on Vimeo.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.25.2010
05:18 pm
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AIDS Came From Tigers
12.08.2009
04:43 pm
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Apparently, AIDS came from tigers. I’m not sure how to put a spin on that. I mean, AIDS. Tigers. AIDS. Tigers. WHAT IN THE

Researchers have found a strand of feline DNA in the AIDS virus, leading them to believe that the virus was incubated in a tiger thousands or millions of years ago. They speculate that the tiger may have bitten a monkey, setting in motion the viral evolution that would ultimately lead to the infection of humans. Though the research is unlikely to directly lead to treatment breakthroughs, it expands scientists?

Posted by Jason Louv
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12.08.2009
04:43 pm
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