Ron Athey, the pope of body art, presented in Paris on August 21st 1999 his "Suicide/Tatoo Salvation" and "Saint Sebastian/Zen gardens" and "The Solar Anus" ritual plays of suffering body. Twenty years after neo-primistim was vulgarised by the punk movement in London and after ecologist piercing fashion, certain artists continue to use their bodies as the instrument of some violent refusal expression. Shocked by his positive Aids test, Ron Athey has tried to readapt his body and the pain caused by his illness to produce ritual performances during which he is
wearing a crown made of pins, stitching his lips, piercing his cheeks or his chest and lacerating his body with razor blades.
Ron Athey's life started in December 1961 in a Connecticut naval base where his father was on active service. He had a schizophrenic mother who spent several times in a mental clinic.
"She was prone to have mystical and obscene fits. When I was 18 months she went to live with her mother and her sister and I was raised among women in Pomona, California," he told the Paris daily "Liberation".
Ron Athey first thought about becoming a Protestant minister but his grand-mother and aunt were a bit too mystical and he felt isolated with no friend forced by these mad women to prey most of the day or to fast several times during the week. "At 15 I had a girl friend to whom I would deliver my family's prophecies and she soon thought I was totally crazy. My life suddenly crumbled and I quickly lost my illusions while my relations with men intensified," he added.
Ron Athey spent his youth taking all sorts of drugs such as LSD, marijuana or PCP and frequented a Vietnam war veteran who was much addicted to drugs. "I had no barrier and when I bought a record by the Parliament/Funkadelik group my mad grandma and aunt told me there was no question of having black music at home. At 17, I met Rozz Williams of the Christian Death Punk group and became his boy friend - he hanged himself on April 1st this year. At that time I used to read books by Burroughs, Genet, Selby, Ginsberg and Gysin which gave me the strength to leave my family in 1979 and not to see it again since. In 1980, under the influence of Johanna Went who was using sexual organs and objets on an industrial music sound background I soon discovered that I did not need to play the guitar or sing to express my life's nightmare," he stressed.
Ron Athey discovered he had Aids thirteen years ago when there was no efficient cure against this illness. He saw many people die around him and found that such hecatomb had some biblical meaning. "Thus my idea of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian where I will present a new version in Paris.
I had a long relationship with pain and at the end of the 1980's I became an official martyr of the Gay cause against my will. Since then, the plays I have created are less bloody than before and if there is a still some sexual content in them, the result if not very exciting," he said. Ron Athey said that in his Saint Sebastian act he will be pierced with surgical steel arrows while in his Suicide Salvation play he will re-enact his experience of tatooing during his youth, how it appeared in one of his dreams that tatoo symbolised the possibility of reinventing one's self and body as well as his extraordinary love for life. "Solar Anus is directly inspired by Georges Bataille's Anus Solaire. The performance will start with a 9-minute film showing a woman tatooing the fringes of my anus from which I am extracting objects while some classical music is being played. It's a sensual play, full of glamour evoking the question of lifting," he added.
Ron Athey, who has been delivering articles for L.A Weekly or Village Voice, said his detoxication cures between 1985 and 1989 enabled him to find what he was searching for. "I drink coffee, I smoke cigarettes but I have not touched drugs any more. However, it's difficult for me to keep a relationship going with someone else," he said.
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