Penetration in Live Art and Video: a lecture by Ron Athey

How will it work?

Please RSVP by booking through eventbrite. The booking link will be closed 60 minutes prior to the lecture starting. Shortly before 7.30pm you will be emailed a link to join the lecture.

All LADA’s events are free, but please consider donating in support of the Black Lives Matter and movements for racial justice.

About Ron Athey

Ron Athey is an iconic cultural figure who started in performance in the early 1980s in context of L.A.’s underground music scene as a duo with Rozz Williams of Christian Death. In 1990 during the AIDS pandemic, he started showing individual and group works at art spaces like LACE, PS122, Highways, Randolph Street Gallery, and ICA London. Three major works comprising The Torture Trilogy were AIDS memorials about the nature of healing—tapping into the historical archetypes of religious painting and deity worship. The content of this work looked at the dead at what healing could be. These works toured worldwide throughout the 1990s, with themes such as Christian martyr saints, putting forth philosophical questions about the nature of identity, and questioning the limits of artistic practice. A monograph of his output was published in 2013: “Pleading in the Blood”, edited by Dominic Johnson; “Queer Communion“, a new book edited by Amelia Jones and Andy Campbell, was published in 2020.

In 2005 and 2018 he collaborated in experimental opera projects with soprano/musicologist Juliana Snapper, and Sean Griffin, opera composer. In 2018 he premiered Gifts of the Spirit, an opera made from automatic writing in layers leading up to real-time, made possible with a Mike Kelley Foundation Grant and the Broad Museum, held in L.A.’s 19th century cathedral of Vibiana. In November 2018 he premiered a new solo work in PSNY’s Posthuman series, “Acephalous Monster,” inspired by the Georges Bataille-led secret society of Acephale, a group of intellectuals that were using magic ritual to unseat fascism. A new collaborative work by Athey, Cassils and Arshia Fatima Haq premiered December 2018 at the Biosphere 2, entitled cyclic, presented by MOCA Tucson.

Coming up in 2020 is a survey of his output, curated and organized by the Art Historian and Roski chair, Amelia Jones, set to show at Participant, Inc. NYC; and other venues nationally, which will include set pieces, costumes, and photographs.