Queer Communion

Shivering from top to bottom, we huddle on the narrow sidewalk outside Participant Inc. gallery on Houston Street in New York City. We are masked. As safely as we can manage from the global flows of COVID-19 (because of the virus, regulations in the city necessitate innovative solutions to the prohibition on crowds congregating inside). We are waiting for the three-part performance by Ron Athey and collaborators Hermes Pittakos, Mecca, and Elliot Reed—Performance in 3 Acts—which is staged in relation to the exhibition I curated Queer Communion: Ron Athey, a retrospective of Athey’s now over thirty year performance art career.

Toward Theatrical Communitas

The term communitas, introduced into anthropological discourse by Victor Turner in the late 1960s, returned to humanist debates at the threshold of the twenty-first century by way of Roberto Esposito. Referring to Esposito’s concept of communitas, this essay brings out the anthropological tradition in thinking about the common, which Esposito had marginalized. The present author emphasized the importance of processuality and antistructural dimensions of egalitarian forms of togetherness, along with their potential to liberate human capacities of creativity. Examining the relation between munus and ludus, she shows theatricality residing immanently in the root of communitas. Focusing on the aesthetic and creative dimensions of togetherness helps in detecting multiple forms of commonality, and indicates various models of theatrical communitas. Exploring a nonnormative, transformative potential in experimental theater (Jerzy Grotowski, Sarah Kane, Ron Athey, Krzysztof Garbaczewski), she emphasizes collective, temporal, and excessive natures of theater that eschews the market-driven economy, along with the importance of a transversal communitas where the human being is only one of many actors. Some threads of the argumentation are expanded upon in a conversation with Leszek Kolankiewicz, included as an appendix.

Bataille/Athey: Solar Anus

The subject of the article, which is a revised version of the radio segment Object of the Month at Radio Študent, is the Solar Anus, short early text of the French sociologist and writer George Bataille. Solar Anus is also the object, concept and title of the masochistic performance of the US artist Ron Athey. If this serves as an opening question of the actualization of Bataille’s text in the specific cultural context and a parallel interpretation, the article departs from the understanding of the Solar Anus as a more radical and ineradicable form of currently topical ecological, systemic and elemental thinking. In this, the concept of general economy and non-productive consumption is a crucial part along with the materialistic understanding of transgression and excess and the links between the fact of cosmic annihilation and the political-economic order.

The martyr: dramaturgies of endurance, exhaustion and confession

Drawing on the cultural tradition of the martyr as a figure whose suffering confirms the truth of his testimony to a cause, this chapter examines the precarious terms on which singular individuals are allowed – or called upon – to speak for themselves and others. Moving from live art practices of self-injury where blood is really flowing through performative renditions of endurance to works which invoke the logic of the confessional, it examines the narratives of self-sacrifice and redemption which surround martyrdom – and the contemporary works which challenge their logic. Featured practitioners: Ron Athey, Kira O’Reilly, Franko B, Eddie Ladd, Adrian Howells, Scottee.

Breaking the Surface

This book is the first monograph-length attempt at a new way to engage the past: art/archaeology. Taking as its focus the excavation and interpretation of pit-houses in Neolithic Europe, the book critiques current thinking on these early architectural constructions and then provides an original and provocative exploration of the critical element that previous work has neglected: the actions and consequences of digging as defined as breaking the surface of the ground. The work of the book is performed by juxtaposing richly detailed discussions of archaeological sites (Etton and The Wilsford Shaft in the UK, and Măgura in Romania) with the work of three artists-who-cut (Ron Athey, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucio Fontana), with deep and detailed examinations of the philosophy of holes, the perceptual psychology of shapes, and the linguistic anthropology of cutting and breaking words, as well as with the diversity of frames of spatial reference used by different communities and an understanding of a premodern ungrounded way of living. The book is as much a creative act on its own (seen in its layout, its mixture of work from many disparate periods and regions, and its use of text interruption), as it is an interpretive statement about prehistoric architecture (i.e., the pit-houses of prehistoric Europe and beyond).

A vueltas con el dolor y el cuerpo: la performance contemporánea de Ron Athey

El performer norteamericano Ron Athey experimenta en su trabajo con los límites del dolor corporal en relación con toda una iconografía y tradición religiosa. Esta combinación de ideas ya había sido empleada anteriormente, en alguna de sus componentes, por otros autores pertenecientes a grupos como el accionismo vienés, pero también por Gina Pane, Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden o Franko B. El cuerpo, soporte de la práctica artística y, en este caso, del dolor, es la vía de comunicación con el público, medio para organizar acciones de tendencia ritual y contrasexual, que esconden una fuerte crítica al orden dominante del arte y la sociedad.