On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century

Washed in the Blood

• • • Washed in the Blood As a boy, Ron Athey practiced Christianity in extremis, and it helped make him the tattooed purveyor of spectacular and disturbing rituals that he is today. Athey might still be best known for his brief, shining moment as a scapegoat in the culture war. The religious right singled him out in 1994 for a performance called Four Scenes in aHarsh Life after the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis funneled approximately $150 from the National Endowment for the Arts in his direction. Given Athey's background , there's a certain irony to this. He's been dealing with religious extremism all his life. "There was a thrill-seeking aspect to religion that was very easy to feed into," Athey says of the holy-rolling, chunkin'-out-the-demons style of worship he experienced as a child. His family never belonged to a particular Pentecostal church but roamed the revival tents and miracle sites of southern California, from the Golden Altar of Revelations in MacArthur Park to a woman with stigmata in a shack in the desert. Athey estimates that he witnessed a faith healing at least once a weekthe curing of cancers, the lengthening of legs. And all this was nothing compared to the apocalyptic fantasies on the home front. Athey was raised by a grandmother and an aunt who told him from the time he first had memory that he'd been born with"the Calling on his life"; he was destined, as he puts it, "for the most grandiose ministry." By age seven or eight, he was being encouraged to lie down, look at the sky, and have cloud hallucinations. At age ten, he began speaking in tongues. People laid their hands on him in services. He failed only at learning the automatic writing that came so naturally to his Aunt Vena, who regularly channeled her dead grandmother and various saints. Washed in the Blood 337 But Athey did learn that his was "the most important family in the world, chosen by God to kick off Armageddon." His aunt would give birth to the second coming of Christ, and she would then marry Elvisor so the Virgin Mary had revealed in a vision. Athey would fill the John the Baptist role, preparing the way for the Lord. "I have trouble living on Earth," says Athey in Hallelujah!, Catherine Gund Saalfield's documentary about his work. "My brain wants to live in that psychic mumbo jumbo. That's how I was raised." Athey believed the mumbo jumbo fervently until he was fifteen. Even today, though he is alienated from his family and certainly no Christian, his often grisly, sometimes beautiful performances echo a basic precept of Christianity. As he puts it, "Someone has to be put in pain for all of us." The twisted history of performance art has produced relatively few artists who ask the audience to watch real suffering. Even fewer incorporate this pain into spectacle. But in an Athey show, the artist really will stick thirty hypodermic needles into one tattooed arm, really will push surgical needles into his scalp for a crown of thorns. The controversy in Minneapolis began when he really did cut another performer's back with a scalpel, blotted the blood with paper towels, and pinned those relics to a clothesline attached to the back of the theater, so the blood prints moved out gradually over the heads of the audience. A sensational article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, written by someone who had not attended the performance, reported that HIVpositive blood dripped onto the spectators. Wrong. (Nothing dripped. And the performer who shed blood was HIv-negative.) Still, House Republican Clifford Stearns proposed a punitive cut of 5 percent ($8.6 million) for the NEA budget, demanding, "Does a bloody towel represent the ideals of the American people?" Ultimately, the budget was cut by 2 percent. Actor Jane Alexander, then the new chair of the NEA, had defended Athey. "I appreciate that some people would find this art difficult," she said. "Americans are certainly not used to seeing bloodletting, except in films." The performer whose back was cut, Darryl Carlton (a.k.a. Divinity Fudge), volunteered to participate because he embraces the practice of scarification; he wants those marks on his back. As for Athey himself, I once asked him: Is this a spiritual quest? An s&m scene? "I'm using the power of both," he replied. [3.144.252.140] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 22:04 GMT...