Queer Communion

Ron Athey

Amelia Jones, Andy Campbell, Amelia Jones, Andy Campbell

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781789380965
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Ron Athey is one of the most important, prolific and influential performance artists of the past four decades. A singular example of lived creativity, his radical performances are at odds with the art worlds and art marketplaces that have increasingly dominated contemporary art and performance art over the period of his career. Queer Communion, an exploration of Athey's career, refuses the linear narratives of art discourse and instead pays homage to the intensities of each mode of Athey's performative practice and each community he engages. Emphasizing the ephemeral and largely uncollectible nature of his work, the book places Athey's own writing at its centre, turning to memoir, memory recall and other modes of retrieval and narration to archive his performances. In addition to documenting Athey's art, ephemera, notes and drawings, the volume features commissioned essays, concise 'object lessons' on individual objects in the Athey archive, and short testimonials by friends and collaborators including Dominic Johnson, Amber Musser, Julie Tolentino, Ming Ma, David Getsy, Alpesh Patel and Zackary Drucker, among others. Together they form Queer Communion, a counter history of contemporary art.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PRELUDE
• INTRODUCTION: QUEER COMMUNION AND THE WORLDS OF RON ATHEY
• WRITING ATHEY
• Writing Athey, Athey’s Writings
• PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED
• Premature Ejaculation
• Brochure for Walker Art Center (at Patrick’s Cabaret)
• Polemic of Blood
• “Gifts of the Spirit,”
• Raised in the Lord: Revelations at the Knee of Miss Velma
• Deliverance: Introduction, Foreword, Description, and Selected Text
• The Catholic Envy of Vena Mae
• “Trixie Assigns Ron Athey Essay Questions,”
• “Ron Athey’s Dissections: A Tribute to Griffith Park
• Ron Athey’s Dissections: Split Personality, or So Many Men
• “Ron Athey’s Dissections: Flirting with the Far Right,”
• Rozz Williams, 1963-1998”
• Ron Athey Interview
• The Violent Disbelief of Ron Athey
• “totally Rad experience with in a totally Rad Party
• Untitled [“Day Two of the 10 year cycle of. Remission. Dual-diagnosis ”],
• I’m with the Band: Sound Design at the Intersection of Sex Clubs, Drance, and Electro
• UNPUBLISHED
• Miscellaneous notes, handwritten performance script, and sketches relating to performances
• “I hate everybody when I feel like I’m on the outside,”
• “Angry Pain,” handwritten diary page torn out of pad
• “Letter #1 / to a pubescent Holy rolling Ronnie Athey,”
• “There used to come that point… a lump of numb meat,”
• “The Perfect Gentleman,”
• “Radical Artists and Hardedge Hardcore Queers… Dyke women, they ground me,”
• “After years of deep depression
• “In the midst of my inevitable self destruction,”
• “I started off on a destructive binge…,”
• “Stations of the Martyr,”
• “Here’s the laying out of the symbology, a dissection, of a Ron Athey performance,”
• “My life is going by so quick,”
• “There’s so many ways to say hallelujah,”
• “There’s so many ways to say Hallelujah/ The dominant male evangelist,”
• “Walker,”
• “Once in a while I realize that most of the world hates faggots,”
• Miscellaneous typed pages of Judas Cradle script
• “Queen Mary Artist Lecture,”
• Gifts of the Spirit scene sketches (1-3) and sheets of automatic writing collages (4-13)
• “1. Psychic Death / 2. Where is the soul?.... Why did you come here?,”
• REFLECTIONS
• The Alchemist
• Anatomy of a Revival
• The Right to Bleed in Public: On Premature Ejaculation
• “A Poetry of Meaningful Experience”: Miss Velma Jaggers’s Stagecraft, Fisting, and Ron Athey’s Miraculous Acts
• Ron Athey Rolls Deep
• The Beauty of the Dork
• big brother/big sister
• AIDS, Athey, and Culture War
• An Unruly Archive By Each of Us Towards Each of Us
• Father Daughter Love
• Athey-ism
• Divine Fire: Ron Athey in Europe
• The Light of Night
• OBJECT LESSONS
• Codpiece
• HIV Lifecycle Model
• Honcho
• “Rod ‘n’ Bob” (Arrested Intimacies of the Flesh
• Leigh Bowery Cape
• Resonate/Obliterate (or, Untitled [Dear Ron])
• “Raised in the Lord”
• GENERAL CHECKLIST
• Religion, Speaking in Tongues, Family/ 1961-1980
• Music and Queer Club Scenes, Los Angeles and Beyond/1976-1983, 1990s
• Body (as) Art, Performance Art/1980-present
• Art and Martyrdom: Performance, AIDS, the "Culture Wars"/1990s
• Literature, Opera, Theater/1990-2018
• Communion: Friendships, Caretaking, Love, and Loss/c. 1961-ongoing
• RON ATHEY TIMELINE
• INDEX
• Back Cover