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Ron Athey, Bob Flanagan and the Practice of Secular Sacrifice by Jan Tumlir

1. Before it became a romantic cliché, the relation of art and sacrifice was deemed almost essential and inevitable. At the very least, artists were expected to renounce any prospect for financial security, a "normal" existence, the house and kids, etc. Such warnings were regularly dispensed to countless artistically inclined children, and this practice no doubt continues--"It won't be an easy life; you'll have to make some serious sacrifices." And, just in case none of this should matter much, or worse, that the whole point of becoming an artist is precisely to avoid these "bourgeois" trappings, then there's always the trump card of sacrifice: the possibility of losing one's sanity, of literally "coming apart," so conveniently figured in the severed ear of Vincent Van Gogh.

There are many reasons for which this motif of extreme alienation has remained so central to popular mythologies of the artist, and the practical, cautionary angle is only the most obvious. Of course, this act has been analyzed in depth and from every conceivable side; for the moment, I will limit myself to noting that he could have done, and would in turn do, worse. Clearly, no part of the human anatomy is of less consequence to the work of a plein-air painter than the one he chose to remove. Moreover, in regard to the aesthetics of disfigurement, a missing ear is far less distressing than, say, a missing nose. Van Gogh hacked off his ear because he could, to a certain extent, afford to do so. And what he could or could not afford to do might well be the central issue here, since--by current market standards, at least--it is his financial losses which stand out as truly horrific.

In his paper on "Sacrificial Mutilation," Georges Bataille transcribes from a textbook of clinical psychiatry the case of Gaston F., a young embroidery designer and Sunday painter with something of a Van Gogh fixation. One morning, while walking along the boulevards of Paris toward the famous Père-Lachaise cemetery, he was all at once overcome with the urge to bite off his left index finger, which he proceeded to do. Later, by way of explanation, he claimed to have received his orders directly from the sun. "It did not seem very hard," he added, "after contemplating suicide, to bite off a finger. I told myself: I can always do that."

The formerly pathological realm of self-mutilation is redeemed in this text through a basic economic inversion: it is not loss but gain which is here signified. The severed member is no longer treated as evidence of psychosis. It is forcefully torn from the general realm of symptomology and replaced within a sexualized and self-circumscribed theater of autonomous action.

Ron Athey speaks of his fascination with tattoos and piercing, and of his often grueling public performance of these and other practices of body modification, in much the same way--not as a form of impairment, that is, but rather a strategy of self-preservation. "Tattoos saved my life," he has stated unequivocally on a number of occasions. It is a kind of affirmation which finds its way into so much of what is written about him; the emphasis generally falling on the matter of the artist's life. Unsurprisingly, the details of Athey's immensely compelling biography have tended to provide the focus of these various articles and interviews, and as much as I try to avoid this same course here--if only because much of this material is already well known--it remains at the same time virtually impossible, and probably counter-productive, to attempt any hard and fast separation between this artist's work and his particular history.

As with the late Bob Flanagan, for instance, all of it can be understood as an outgrowth of private rituals, performed initially in secret, and out of a sense of authentic necessity. For Flanagan, the practice of masochism provided a means to aestheticize, to "put into play," the debilitating pain which had been inflicted upon him by the disease of Cistic Fibrosis, thereby allowing him to exert some sense of mastery over it. And it is undeniable that the increasingly complex and physically trying perversions he took up with such gusto had the effect of prolonging his life well beyond the early exit his doctors consistently predicted.

He purged the art-as-therapy equation of every former Me-Decade indulgence, restoring it to urgent purpose in regard to his own illness and, by extension, perhaps, the emerging "plague-consciousness" of the Millennium--and much the same could be said for Ron Athey. Indeed it is here, at this point midway between the extreme fringes and mainstream of society, that their two projects can be seen to converge for a moment, before again departing in opposite directions. Both artists have been able to mobilize a certain artworld and media attention without compromising any of their original underground loyalties. Moreover, by continually shuttling their work back and forth across a border which either side would prefer to enforce and jealously patrol, they have basically collapsed their finest points and most cherished values in the cause of something both beyond and beneath them: what might be termed "The Care of the Self."

While art has always been presumed to possess at least a modicum of therapeutic value, its particular object or recipient is here drastically reduced from a plurality of viewers to the singular term of the artist, alone. As in the late sixties/early seventies, when such programs received their most vigorous promotion and were officially implemented in schools, prisons and psychiatric wards across the country, art regains a genuine functionality here, as a kind of "alternative" remedy for individual ailment. In sharp contrast to Modernist notions of self-sufficiency, the practice of such established artistic forms as painting, sculpture and performance is redirected toward a wholly interior motive, and the yearning for objective perfection is replaced by somewhat more attainable goals of psycho-physiological well-being. Not a cult of the amateur built on the ruins of professionalism so much as a thorough leveling of these terms; the most conventional forms sit side by side with the most advanced and "avant-garde" as exchangeable options in a general course of individual treatment.

Ron Athey, photographed by Charlotte & Co., 1997.

With Bob Flanagan this self-ish end was courted without hesitation or apology. Even when he was joined onstage by his mistress/lover Sheree Rose, the primary locus of all the work's intensity and transformative drive was one particular being, and the rest were left with a necessarily diminished, vicarious experience. Every act and gesture was turned inward to form a kind of self-perpetuating circuit, before which the audience at times became an almost incidental entity. And yet it is precisely this oddly distanced exhibitionism, the fact that he did feel compelled to perform his tormented pleasures before us--whether live or via video or still photographs--that shifted their implicit kinkiness to a series of more or less aestheticized variations on the theme of the demonstration. This is how it's done: these are the sensual limits, the absolute tolerances of a particular human body--a body much like yours and mine--every point marked out with clinical precision.

Tattooing, piercing, scarification, flagellation, mummification, etc.--the ever-expanding inventory of "forbidden" acts that comprises Athey's work can likewise be seen as catering to a highly specialized, subjective demand. From start to finish, a unique set of needs is insistently pushed to the fore. Shaped by a hyper-religious upbringing and the residual craving for sublime and ecstatic experience; by a series of long-term addictions which served both to obscure and illuminate an immanent realm of counter-transcendence rooted in the truths of bodily pleasure and suffering; and finally, by the day-to-day trauma of facing down the H.I.V. virus without recourse to God or faith, only the dubious magic of performance art--these belong specifically to him. Here again, the work is enacted as a type of demonstration, but of a very different sort, because if Flanagan represents the masochistic pole of the exhibitionistic equation, then Athey must occupy the other sadistic extreme. The distinction is based on the very different sacrificial forms to which each artist adheres. For Flanagan the stake is entirely limited to his own self, while Athey projects it outward in such a way as to implicate a notion of community.

Bob Flanagan, photographed by Sheree Rose, 1983. Bob Flanagan, photographed by Sheree Rose, 1989.

2. The idea of sacrifice as such is common to most types of religious thought, although its actual practice, its ritual format and intended purpose, varies widely from one belief system to the next. A crucial distinction can be marked, first of all, between the notion of self-sacrifice and the sacrifice of an "other"--person, animal or thing. The former is generally carried out in private as a personal expression of faith through some sort of ritual deprivation or internally-oriented violence, while the latter tends, rather, to occur within a social structure, and accordingly represents the religious will of a social mass, however big or small. Another important division occurs between those sacrifices performed as gift or offering to a given deity in the aim of securing some sort of special favor, and those which spontaneously produce the desired outcome in and of themselves.

Being the most immediate and immanent option available, this last type begins to supply the motive underlying the work of both Athey and Flanagan. Because it does not necessarily distinguish between mind and matter, it is also the one classical sociology has dubbed most "primitive," and hence fortuitously unstable. The sacred, numinous realm of distanced speculation is willfully disrupted, here, by actions of an entirely secular nature. These are performance artists, after all, concerned with real-time maneuvers, the thrill of an actual "here, now." Yet even when the spectacle attains a cool, zero-degree of physicality, as in the case of Flanagan, the metaphysical flame is never completely extinguished. Instead it is displaced from somewhere outside the individual to somewhere within; no longer infinite, inconceivable, but literally pinned down, through a set of daunting but repeatable maneuvers, to the psycho-physiological root of male self-hood. Indeed, Flanagan's inaugural performance at the former Olio Club involved the pounding of a thick nail through his scrotal sack. And some years later, and with an even greater allegorical acuity, he would drive the stake right through his penis and into an underlying piece of wood.

Shades of the Grünewald altarpiece would fall upon Flanagan every time he stretched his naked body out on some bed, table or slab, to be poked, pinched, whipped, tied and pierced by his Anti-Madonna, Sheree Rose, and each violation was heightened by the glare of that white, hairless and undifferentiated physique--a sight of almost stunning innocence. When Ron Athey pushes a series of thick needles through his shaved and youthfully radiant scalp the effect is similar, even if the context is not. Athey's stage is one of elaborate artifice, shrouded in smoke, dramatically lit, a hypnotic score reverberating throughout the act. And he is generally surrounded with others, a performance troupe which replicates his actions and sometimes more. How far they will go is entirely subject to his call.

Pre-set to "Holy Woman/St. Sebastian," the opening segment of Ron Athey's "Four Scenes from a Harsh Life:" the lights are dimmed on an almost empty stage. In the foreground stands Pigpen, a naked, androgynous woman supporting herself on a crutch. Her free arm is folded over her head in a gesture redolent of art history. A series of arrows have been pushed through both sides of her torso, her arms and thighs; several seven-inch long spinal needles pierce her forehead. She stands still, eyes open wide but seemingly blank to the audience filing into the theater. The longer they take to settle down, the lower her blood-sugar drops. She begins to tremble, then shake, and her breathing becomes shallow and labored. The lights suddenly flare as Athey enters the scene--a nightmarishly disproportionate figure in the strictly corseted, bustled and padded robes of a white, billowing Victorian Nurse/Nun habit. Appearing next to the wounded figure, he begins to intone in a halting and disembodied singsong the story of a young boy born to religious "calling." He is describing his earliest experience as though quoting directly from The Book, telling of his youthful initiation into a severely skewed and unfathomable cult. In Athey's Pentecostal home/church/theater, each family member is visited daily by ecstatic visions, the voice of God bounces off the walls and every loving relation is plunged into periodic states of psycho-sexual turmoil. Like a house under the flight path, the rumbling pressures tear away at the boundaries between mothers, sisters, brothers. The father is absent but returning, continually, as the booming voice of The Ultimate Father: He speaks to them all and they in turn speak back to Him "in tongues." Speaking back, hieratic and gender roles are reversed, and here as well it is Athey who represents the Holy Woman, and the woman beside him, St. Sebastian.

This story goes on and on.

It is not long so much as anxiously protracted by the pain of the adjacent "martyr," who is by now convulsive, blinking furiously as the sweat pours into her eyes, apparently about

to lose consciousness. When at last he is done, he wipes her brow and rubs oil onto her back. Ushers lead several audience members up to the stage to be anointed with this same substance, and then back to their seats. As the last one steps down, Athey removes the arrows from Pigpen's sides; he gathers her up in his arms and walks her to a nearby tub.

He removes the needles from her forehead and washes her tenderly in her own blood.

And this is just the beginning. The ante can only be upped, the sets becoming evermore lavish and crowded: there must always be more to sacrifice. Athey's blasphemous invectives are hurled at a flickering, absent/present God-like potential, and it returns all the more invigorated for these heretical inversions. It returns as all suppressions do--as the ultimate model or master plan. None of which is unintended, of course, for Athey is enamored with the ritual, and his suppressions are a strategy, in a sense, to coax a host of specifically Christian forms into a sensual trap. Christianity is reduced to a meta-theatrical game, replete with hyper-ritualized gesture, staggered movement, incantation or pious hush, cathartic bloodletting and exorcism. It is adapted, converted, played out as a sort of clinical allegory, as though by a wholly material Christ-figure who proposes neither salvation or charity, but orchestrates his own crucifixion, and several more, for the sake of a boundless and overflowing desire.

3. Athey's excessiveness works to undermine the outward "complexity" of the Christian model by exposing its basic sacrificial poverty: because it is enacted by The One, it can occur only once, and has in fact always already occurred. Beside this Ultimate Sacrifice, those offered up by the faithful are forcibly reduced to a secondary, imitative status. At worst, the entire plethora of religious forms--the vast succession of rites, rituals, cults that Christianity comprises--is held in a state of elaborately differentiated suspension. Every difference is deployed along a line that stretches between the poles of abstraction and actuality; a line pulled taught or slackened in direct proportion to the force exerted by individual faith. At the extreme of tension, all distinctions become moot--at the intersection of any two lines, any two twigs or cracks in the pavement, there will appear not just any cross, but the cross in fact. Laxity, on the other hand, breeds a state of tranquil estrangement which slowly corrupts the enfolding system. One may relent and slip out from under the oppressive enormity of an unthinkable afterlife, allowing it to become just that--a word neither empty or full. One may choose to go through the prescribed motions for their own sake, moreover, and only because they are beautiful, ancient, intoxicating. And finally, one may risk the ultimate gambit of constructing a cult around oneself, as both Athey and Flanagan have done. To live out the story of God in real time and space, that is, in the city of Los Angeles, in a setting furnished with every available amendment.

Ron Athey, photographed by Catherine Opie. Ron Athey, photographed by Catherine Opie.

Flanagan had planned a continuous graveside broadcast of his decomposing corpse to various galleries, as though insistent to "remain in light" even after the final curtain had fallen. Ron Athey lives on with AIDS, a healthy and vigorous man nevertheless haunted by the thought of time running out, and this is precisely what keeps him producing at such a delirious pace. What both of these artists make overt and emphatic is the idea, seldom discussed anymore, of artistic production as a defiance of death.

Art here becomes the ultimate luxury: to methodically "ruin" oneself in advance of the inevitable degradations we are made to endure anyway in the course of our lives. To perform, that is, to symbolize and at the same time actualize, as narcissistically and before as many witnesses as possible, one's own death as a highly ritualized, erotically prolonged form of self-consumption. As with Van Gogh or Bataille's estranged hero, F., the process of wasting away is paradoxically drawn out, almost to the vanishing point, through this artificial quickening. An ear can be given away to a prostitute, a finger can be gobbled up greedily; a body can be defaced, punched full of holes or devoured piece by piece until there is nothing left for God to take.