Art is a very wide discipline and it is important to study each category of art at a time to understand its contents. For example, Fine art has always been referred to as anything which can be created, touched, and seen but has to contain some aspect of beauty. Visual art is a form of art that includes things that can be seen by the human eye and the common examples are drawings, painting and sculpture (Simon, 169). Auditory art is another form of art that consists of music, drama, and even spoken literature which is normally recited. In the modern world, there is a growing interest in a certain category of art known as performance art. Performance art can be auditory or it can be visual and, in some cases, it can have a combination of both visual and auditory arts (Simon, 215). It is on this basis that this piece of work tries to analyze and explain artistic work by Ron Athey who was a performance artist.
Ron Athey was a performing artist from the United States of America. At an early age, he was a very dedicated Christian who used to speak in tongues in order to win more converts. It is being claimed that he began to question the thoughts exhibited by extremist Christians and later ditched the Christian faith. He became addicted to drugs such as heroin but he was later rehabilitated and embarked on performing arts (Smith, 98). He had very controversial performances which included: “Martyrs and Saints” and “Deliverance”. Another very controversial performance was known as “Scenes in Harsh Life”.
During his performance in Minneapolis in 1994, Ron Athey did something that attracted the attention of the international community. During the performance, he jumped and made cuts on the back of his fellow performing artist and then placed paper towels on the wounds. He used a pulley to hoist paper towels and made sure that they passed over the heads of the people who were in the hall as the audience. It was reported that blood that had HIV infections dripped down on the audience. The media erroneously reported this incidence because the blood did not drip down on any audience. It was also known that the performing artist who was cut was HIV negative but Athey himself was known to be HIV positive. One member from the audience claimed that blood that had HIV infections had been spat on the crowd (Guillermo, 119). There was a group of politicians who were against the National Endowment for Arts and they used the action by Athey to claim that the organization carelessly funded an art which was questionable because the performance by Athey had a lot of gay content. The politicians succeeded and the organization’s budget was cut down by about 5%.
Ron Athey’s artistic work was full of body piercing and blood-letting from the human body. He tried to express his feelings about AIDS and its effects on society through his performances. He was trying to let his audience understand the differences between pain and pleasure given the fact that most of his performances revolved around pleasure and pain. The fact that Athey was HIV positive, made some people claim that he was in the best position to educate the public about the disease (Smith, 57). The media viewed Ron Athey with a lot of skepticism because his performances used a very different way to pass different messages to people from those used by Western society. Western society used science and technology combined with industrialization to provide ways that cushion the human body from bad experiences of diseases and other discomforts.
Controversy surrounded the National Endowment for the Arts (N.E.A) when it contributed some funds towards the performance by Ron Athey at the Walker Center. This was the performance where he mounted some surgical papers containing blood and made sure that they passed over the heads of the audience. It was reported in the media that blood that had HIV/AIDS viruses was spattered on the audience. The reporting by the media was erroneous because it was not true that the blood contained AIDS viruses. The blood was from Darry Carton who was also a character at the scene and he had a negative HIV status. Furthermore, the blood never dripped down on the audience. This led to the budget of N.E.A to be cut by the government. This made the N.E.A to stop funding the performances by Ron Athey. The negative media coverage ensured that Roy did not perform at any venue that was funded by the public in U.S.A (Guillermo, 129).
In conclusion, it was claimed that the performances by Athey went against the culture of the society in the U.S.A and that is why his work was suppressed by the media. For example, he displayed a naked male body in public which was not an act that was generally accepted in society. Secondly, he openly portrayed homosexuality in his artistic work and again this was a vice that was not generally accepted in American societies. Lastly, he used to portray religious iconography in very irrelevant ways and this was actually against the culture in the society where he lived. These are the factors that made the artistic work of Ron Athey to be suppressed.
Works Cited
Guillermo, Gomez. Writings on Performance Arts and Activism. Routledge, London: Woodlands publishing Company, 2005.
Simon, Williams. Live Body Performance Artist of our Times and the Controversy Created. New York: Harper and Raw Publishers, 1998.
Smith, Roberta. Legendary Performance Artists and their Impacts. New York: W.B. Saunders Company, 2005.