EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

Remember grandma’s junk that you couldn’t give away ten years ago and ended up sending to the Salvation Army or the dump? Just look at the prices they’re charging for it now that it’s become “collectable.”

Some of us who are a little older may even have seen a revival in popularity of the fads and fashions of our youth. Anyone for disco, bell bottoms, platform shoes, lava lamps, mood rings?

There are a lot of things in life like that somehow come full circle. Assuming you live long enough, it’s bound to happen to you too.

Piercing as a performance medium isn’t anything all that new, come to think of it. Just how many hundreds of years have Indian sadhus been working some dusty street corner, a skewer through their cheeks or hooks in their flesh, begging a few coins from passersby?

While today’s performers may not be doing anything new, there can be no doubt as to the great range and variety of imaginative ways in which they are incorporating piercing into their acts.

Some of this issue’s featured performers use their piercings to perform amazing feats of strength or endurance to entertain and astonish their audience. Take, for instance, the Torture King or Mr. Lifto (shown here). This tradition has roots among traveling circus sideshow acts: human and animal freaks, fire eating (see Chuk’s story in this issue), and sword swallowing, to name a few. In this type of performance, the body and its limits tell the whole story. We are compelled to watch these variations on the human condition, to find bits of ourselves in the “Other.”

Piercing as metaphor is often used in more high-concept performance art. Stelarc, Orlan, and David Wojnarowich are among the many high-profile artists who make statements using temporary piercings and/or body alterations. In this issue Justin Chin explores the notion of immunity and transmissible diseases by “infecting” himself with his own blood. Dave Tavacol gives us a glimpse into an unpleasant but not so far-fetched future, putting a piercing-related twist on cultural disapproval suggestive of The Scarlet Letter.

As many of us know, piercings can project one into an altered state of consciousness. The feats of Amazonian shamans, Indian fakirs and sadhus, and the grand spectacle of a tribal rite of passage all bear historical testimony to this tradition. Mr. Fab is one of a growing number of exponents of the neotribal performance path, using piercings to share these ancient experiences with the audience.

Drag queens are some of the most elaborate performers of all, using familiar paraphernalia to subvert our comfortable understanding of culture, gender roles, and socially acceptable behavior in a theater of the absurd. As Trauma Flintstone, Cirus, Mark Pritchard, and Fennel explain, piercing can be one more theatrical prop. Fennel’s performances play out a particularly astute perspective on a common breed of nihilistic club performance currently much in vogue. In classic drag oneupmanship, he gets even by beating them at their own game.

Many of the performance artists who appear in this issue have been a part of the Ron Athey show. These include Crystal Cross, Julie Tolentino Wood, Marina Vain (Spike), and Paul King. They utilize piercing as metaphor, crude spectacle, punishing absurdity, powerful, bitter humor, and panache to make strong statements about AIDS, gender, homosexuality, religion (especially Christianity), fetishism, and outsider status. Their ever-expanding international audience bears testimony to the fact that piercing and performance are a naturally matched pair, centuries old and yet still fresh, with the power to move the viewer to another state of awareness.

—Michaela Grey & Jim Ward