Performance
Saturday 9th June 2007
Bristol Arnolfini

"Ecstatic is a new piece designed for the context of Manuel Vason’s exhibition ‘Encounters’ at Arnolfini. Athey’s work explores the relationships between desire, sexuality, control and suffering, it challenges physical and emotional boundaries." (Arnolfini)

I feel it’s necessary to state where I’m coming from as a viewer because my own reaction to this work surprises me. I’m relatively new to performance, its history: I’ve read a couple of books, I’ve seen some iconic photographs, including one of Athey himself in performance, butt-naked and tattooed.

I vaguely knew he might do something extreme, something that took him to his limits – there was a lot of that kind of talk about – of something that would be from the ‘outsider’ place. Which in the context of that days Arnolfini’s ‘Encounters’ exhibition and symposium seemed quite like an insider place: all that power undressing; all that fierce physical control. In art, if not in life, you don’t haplessly wander up to the edges by accident.

We file into the dark theatre, dispersing across the floor around a large table. The artist crouches on the table under a warm spotlight. He is naked except he is covered in pattern and iconography, a lush severity of design. His head is bowed. He has a long blond wig on back to front, so the fringe is at the nape of his neck and the rest of the wig conceals his face. In front of him, vertical, a double pane of glass, transparent from one side but mirrored on his. A hairbrush beside him. There is an ominous low-key sound.

He began to brush the hair, quite hard. I wondered how come the wig stayed on. You still couldn’t see his face. A crouched anonymous figure, brushing its hair: strain was evident in the body, the skin of his thigh was twitching, there was trembling. The mirrors, the long blond hair, the blood which eventually poured from Athey; the pain, the strain. This particular enactment – embodiment ? – was interrupted by the Arnolfini fire alarm, which made the experience even more disorientating. When the audience returned to the performance the intensity of the action escalated, stopping, I suppose, once a limit had been reached. An assistant helped the artist from the scene, out of the light. A thick pool of blood was left on the table.

It’s what resonances with what happened (what happened?) that surprises me. When it comes to barrel-chested battle-scarred old codgers, minus the tattoos, I have one of those at home. I would not have thought to find my partner so graphically referenced in such a venue, in such a manner. Regarding pools of blood left behind in the wake of a body, well, that’s usually the result of significant transitional circumstances – woundings, deaths or births, except, of course, for every woman who wakes up on the first day of her menstrual cycle and thinks: damn. I am nonplussed and stunned that this very specific body, Ron Athey’s; a body that testifies to struggle, pain, love, representation and the self, could resonate so tenderly with what is routine and commonplace as well as what is heightened, expressionist and singular.

A drastic sacrifice; Athey takes the pain of living within himself so we don’t have to? He represents and we're the congregation? "This is my body which will be given up for you... This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, which will be shed for you and for all (people), so that sins may be forgiven." I'm getting into contested territory. I think I'd better stop. Or could it be that I’m just not getting it?

Written by Osunwunmi

For more information on the Encounters exhibition go to http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/...

for more information on the artist Ron Athey see http://www.ronathey.com/