Since the 1990s Ron Atheys performances, which involve autopenetration, self-mutilation and the demonstration of alternative sex

practices, have been hugely influential particularly in the European

Performance Art Scene.

There is no doubt that part of Atheys

success has been because both his aesthetic and content directly
challenges dominant assumptions about the body, subjectivity,
sexuality, and gender. Nowhere is the more evident than in his 1994
contribution to the US Culture Wars 1where his performance Human
Printing Press, which he performed with Divinity Fudge at the Walker
Centre, in Minnesota, caused national controversy.

The now well-

documented moment in international Performance Art consisted of

Athey making 12 cuts onto Fudges back, using a scapel.

As the

blood transgressed Fudges body, Athey blotted the cuts with

absorbent towels where assistants then attached them to taught
lines that passed over the audience (Johnson, 2013: 66).

Whilst at the time this performance was considered by both Athey

and the Walker Centre to have been a success, it was subjected to
national reportage and debate. In an article titled Viewer Discretion
is Advised, the New Criterion

(a publication that states its pride in

being in the forefront both of championing what is best and most

humanely vital in our cultural inheritance and in exposing what is
mendacious, corrosive, and spurious

(The Criterion, n.d: Par 1),

stated that:
1 Dominic Johnson notes that Culture Wars were seven years of heightened political censure of
challenging art by right wing American Conservative senates between 1989 and 1996 (Johnson, 2013:
66).

A few years ago, the country was galvanized by Robert

Mapplethorpe's photographs of a perverted homosexual
underworld and Andres Serrano's blasphemous image of a
crucifix submerged in his own urine []. Nowadays, when
grisly sex, bodily effluvia, and pseudo religiosity have
become staples of chic artistic entrepreneurs everywhere,
the Mapplethorpe-Serrano episode seems almost innocent
(New Criterion, 1994: 1).

The Criterions issue with Atheys performance seemed to lie in three

main areas.

The first responded to the local newspaper The Star

Tribune which reported that members of the audience were

distraught and kicked over chairs to get out of the way of the bloody
towels (New Criterion, 1994: 2). The second was that Ron Athey is
HIV-positive, and Fudges status was unknown, and therefore the
blood work could have also infected members of the audience.
Finally, the third issue was that Athey received $150 funding from
the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) to perform this work.
Despite, the inaccuracy of national reports on this performance
these issues were also echoed on the Senate floor. This resulted in
the NEA receiving a heavy funding slash, and passing a law that
forbid the funds from the NEA to be used to support work that
involved human mutilation or the drawing and letting of blood
(Johnson, 2013: 87).

Arguably, the reason why Atheys performances caused so much

controversy then, and in many respects are still challenging to
watch now, is because his sadomasochistic rituals and religious
overtones elevates his bloody body in order to attack the fixity of
heteronomrative

behaviour,

relations

and

subjectivity.

His

apocalyptic performances and violation of bodily boundaries are a

nightmare for those who are afraid of transgression (Stephanous,
2011: 412). In reference to The Human Printing Press (1994), the
blood caused so much national concern not just because of the
potential for it to be deceased with the HIV infection, but also
because

it

was

deceased,

symbolically,

with

the

threat

of

homosexuality. He achieves this by using a carnal opening in the

form of cuts and penetration to challenge heterosexual, medical and
religious parameters, primarily because it plays out the heterosexual
and patriarchal fear of being penetrated, which is a gendered
position (Gallego, 2014: 74).
associated

with

When breached the male body is

pejorative

femininity

characterised

by

powerlessness, vulnerability and submission (Gallego, 2014: 77).

Whilst in Human Printing Press (1994) Athey penetrates Fudges skin

with a scalpel, in his other performances, Athey is simultaneously
penetrator and penetrated. In addition to penetrating his body with
scalpels,

surgical

staples,

and

hypodermic

needles,

he

also

penetrates his own orifices. In Solar Anus (1998), for example he

engages in two forms of self-penetration, in one scene a neverending string of pearls are pulled from his sphincter. In the second
scene he penetrates his tattooed anus with dildos attached to red
high heel shoes, in a manner that animates Monliers Mon ftiche
des jambs (1966).

For Athey, the auto-penetration of his anus

articulates an expression of defiance because as a homosexual

weapon it is a site of pleasure and is symbolically associated in

heteronormative culture as receptacle for disease (Johnson, 2011:
506-507).

Images of the penetrated male artist are important to Athey

because as Gallego argues it is the vagina that is culturally rendered
passive within a heterosexual conception of the body (Gallegro,
2014: 79). By this reasoning to be the penetrator is to be active and
therefore if breached the male body becomes associated with a
pejorative femininity characterized by powerlessness, vulnerability
and submission (Gallegro, 2014: 77).

However, it is auto-

penetration of the male body that is destabilsing, and not simply

penetration. Through this act Athey manages to challenge the
feminisation of the penetrated male body by rejecting passive/active
heterosexual dynamics (Gallegro, 2014: 80).

Considering this, one might read Atheys works as radically queering

heteronormative culture. However, in a chapter that works against
much of the scholarly writing about Athey, Fintan Walsh notes that
in many of his performance Athey has consistently produced images
that reinforce normative masculinitys access to the symbolic. The
primary argument that is presented by Walsh, and one that I expand
on through the rest of this chapter, is that Atheys works retains
many of the phallic attributes of the centred indestructible male
artist (Walsh, 2013: 142). As such, he notes that the link between

penis, phallic power and symbolic dominance is rarely questioned in

the scholarly writing of Atheys work (Walsh, 2013: 120)

In the construction of his argument Walsh focuses primarily on The

Torture Trilogy (1993-1995) although he does reference later works
including Incorruptible Flesh (1997) and The Judas Cradle (2005).
The Torture Trilogy consisted of three performances, which acted as
a pageant to and a lurid slur against classical religious imagery and
its relationship to the eternal themes of death and disease (Athey,
n.d: 1). Martyrs and Saints (1991) is fuelled by the rage and grief he
felt in the early 1990s towards the AIDS crisis, which would force
him to watch close friends die (Athey, 2013: 102). Four Scenes from
a Harsh Life (1994) whilst still focused on the AIDS crisis, looked
more widely towards drug addiction suicide attempts, Pentecostal
evangelism, and leather daddy/boy roleplaying (Athey, 2013: 106).
He notes though that Deliverance (1995) was made during a difficult
time in his life, after nine years of HIV seropossitivity he was still
mortified by the thought of dying from an ugly, AIDs related illness.
The title though does not refer to an intention in using this
performance to find god, rather it started as a challenge and a
search for mythical context to the darkness (Athey, 2013: 106).
The term then indicates the fulfillment of an epiphany and akin to an
eagerly awaited day like the Second Coming (Athey, 2013: 100).

One of the main issues with The Torture Trilogy is that the heavily
emphasised autobiographical accounts of his life help Athey to
reconstruct his world in the performance space. This ensures that
he is presented as a divine authority by directing attention to
himself and his plights.

The collaborative elements of his

performances also work towards this, in as much as the other

performers are not required to offer their own traumatic narratives.
Instead, they assist him in working through his personal and
personalized struggles (Walsh, 2011: 143).

In many respects this

would not necessarily be a problem if Athey allowed other voices to

be heard in that space. However, he centralizes his own voice
throughout the works, whereas his collaborators are on the whole
are silenced and placed on the periphery until required to realize his
creative endevours.

By focusing the performance on his own

esoteric narratives, and silencing his co-performers, Walsh argues

that the production of meaning is located only with him. If this is so,
it could be further argued that his performances act out a return to
the modernist author-God that Amelia Jones suggest that body art
attempted to reject in the 1960s (1998: ??). This might go someway
to explain why much of the scholarly literature on Ron Atheys work
echoes his own queer-inflected political and creative decisionmaking.

The control that he places upon his performers is also asserted

through the penetration of their bodies.

Gallegro is correct when

she

notes

that

Athey

problmeatises

the

boundary

between

active/passive masculine/feminine binaries through the act of autopenetration (Gallegro, 2014: 80). Male anal eroticism is destabilizing
if not usefully destructive, partly because the sphincter is soft and
sensitive, and associated with pollution and shame just as the
vagina is.

As such, by being penetrated the male has the

opportunity to experience a moment of destruction, or a loss of

control over his body.

At the same time though, this destruction

affords an erotic corporeal pleasure, and removes a privileging of

the penis (Waldby, 2002: 272). .

Taking penetration as both a literal and figurative act, Athey is

frequently penetrated either through cuts to his body, the insertion
of hypodermic needles, or as in Solar Anus (1998) the penetration of
his anus with dildos and pearl necklaces. However, in not allowing
himself to be penetrated by others, but by figuratively penetrating
his performers with cuts and stab wounds, he reasserts a
heteronormative sexualisation of the male body. As Waldby notes,
heterosexual men are so concerned with the maintenance of their
sovereign self hood they cannot tolerate the infringement of
another.

They seek instead to always be the destroyer (Waldby,

2002: 67). Whilst Athey does hint towards a desire for selfdestruction through penetration, what he also demonstrates is a
destruction that is strictly on his own terms.

Therefore, what Walsh is arguing then, is that rather than

challenging the symbolic law, which privileges masculinity, Athey
serves it by enacting its disciplinary yet immoral procedures (Walsh,
2011: 143).

That is, the violence and humiliation of castration,

which is experienced by the male subject at the hands of the

paternal law, is a necessary evil, for it is through that violence from
which gendered codes are generated (Thomas, 1994: 7). As a result
of accepting castration the male becomes subject, is granted access
to the symbolic, and is afforded the possession of the phallic object.

So, when Athey penetrates himself he enacts the alienation of the

body/self from language, quite literally his body is feminized through
this action, but at the same time he is not passive, he is actively
penetrating and therefore masculine. This paradox operates outside
of normative oppositional gendered language where the subject is
required to take on the attributes of one or the other. I view this as
an act of castration because what the male subject corporeally
experiences is not sufficiently explained through the symbolic.
There is no gendered language that one is afforded that describes
the simultaneous feeling of being penetrated, whist at the same
time being the penetrator of that same body. As such, through the
act of auto-penetration Athey is castrated through lack, which is
through the loss of meaning.

However, whilst I see Atheys auto-penetration of his anus as

castrating I do not see this it as an untroubled challenge towards

heteronormativity

and

patriarchy.

Through

this

act,

Athey

demonstrates that anxieties about castration and death privilege

the masculine subject precisely because they function to install him
as phallic subject positioned by the virtue of the promise of their
resolution (Thomas, 1994: ??). Athey demonstrates that if he can
endure the powerlessness of penetration, without losing control he
is worthy of possessing the phallus, which can be seen to be his coperformers. As such, by centralizing the phallus in his work he is not
denying power to his co-performers per se, although his actions do
result in this, rather he performs the denial of the value of
powerlessness (Thomas, 1994: 21). Therefore the signs that Athey
presents in The Torture Trilogy are indicative of a carefully controlled
theatricalized construction and mastery of the self (Walsh, 2011:
128).

Through these works then, Athey performs the phalicsized ego that
can handle itself in the face of death and castration, as death and
castration, as pointed out by Calvin Thomas, are the figures by
which

the

phalicised

ego

is

produced

(Thomas,

1994:

27).

Consequently, any trouble to masculinity that scholars claim Athey

performs is managed, if not resolved, as he builds up an image of
the male body that is capable of controlling its abject self and others
(Walsh, 2011: 145).

His apparent subversion of gender binaries

then is questionable, given that he retains many of the misogynistic

and phallic attributes of normative masculinity (Walsh, 2011: 143144).

This means then that phaloglogcentricism is the opposite of

abjection because phalogcentricism excludes with sufficient
strength the abject, powerlessness, and other devalued things
(Thomas, 1994: 22).