Piercing in Performance:

Recollections from Five Artists

The artists will discuss some highlights of their ca- reers and look back at thematic arcs and motivations for their use of the body in performance.This evening’s event is in three parts: Allen Falkner, Steve Joyner, Lukas Zpira and then Ron Athey with Darryl Carlton. (Open to All)

Speakers:

Ron Athey was born in 1961. Self-educated (not to mention schooled) in the Westcoast punk and exper- imerimental music scenes, he started  making  noise  and body-based performance work with his partner Rozz Williams in 1980, under the name PE. Ron Athey & Co.’s ‘90s work is known as the torture trilogy; it was often a direct or esoteric response to the AIDS pandemic, bodMod, the queer body, the polemics of blood. Solo work and operatic collaborations include Solar Anus, The Judas Cradle, Sebastiane, and the automatism opera, Gifts of the Spirit. Athey is a visiting lecturer at Roski School/USC, teaching a seminar on the history of California-centric countercultures, and periodically facilitates immersive performance art workshops.

Lukas Zpira is a body modification artist, nomadic performer, documentor of the contemporary fringes, and one of the major figures of the contemporary un- derground.

His works, closely related to nouveau realism, dif- fered in style to his writing and photography, which were far more influenced by surrealism and Dadaism, notably Duchamps and Man Ray’s rayographs. It was in 1993 that he took on the name Lukas Zpira, an anagram inspired from the surrealists. Multiple experiences and various exhibitions still left him unsatisfied, and he felt he had quickly reached the limits of his medium. He left the collective in 1995 to turn towards body art.

Soon after, Lukas opened Body Art/Weird Faktory in Avignon, the first studio in France dedicated to body modification.

In early 2004, in Japan, Lukas Zpira developed and wrote the body hacktivism manifesto, an artistic and political movement that asseverates the corporal biodiversity facing beauty standards imposed by Hollywood. More inspired by the bestial extra-terrestrials of Star Trek than the tribal references of the modern primitive movement, this activism of a new genre asserts the heritage of science fiction in the battle for body autonomy.

Additional Speakers:

Darryl Carlton, Allen Falkner, and Steve Joyner

Body Probe:

A History & Theory of Piercing in Performance Art

Since the late 1960s, performance artists have challenged the limits of art—and frequently courted controversy—through practices of strategic wounding or self-injury. Piercing the skin has been a core technique for testing the performing body’s capacity for pain, pleasure, or endurance—alongside controlled cutting or scarification, repetitive, or sustained action over prolonger durations, sadomasochistic techniques, or the appropriation of medical technologies, including surgery. This lecture will survey a range of uses of piercing in performance; and situate the use of piercing among a broader range of uses of pain, endurance, and body modification in art and performance. I will then proceed to distinguish piercing as a distinct technique or technology in performance art, by teasing out what might be uniquely meaningful in the probing and puncturing of skin, and the spectacle of the permeability of bodies. (Open to All)

Speakers:

Dominic Johnson is Reader (Associate Professor) in Performance and Visual Culture in the School of English and Drama, at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture (2012); Theatre & the Visual (2012); and The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art (2015). He is the editor of five books, including most recently Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey (2013); and (with Deirdre Heddon) It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells (2016). From 2005 to 2012, his frequently bloody performances (solo and in collaboration with Ron Athey) were shown around the world, including at festivals of performance and live art in Copenhagen, Ljubljana, Rome, Toronto, Vienna, Zagreb, and elsewhere, and throughout the United Kingdom, including most notably at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow, and at the National Portrait Gallery in London as part of ‘Gay Icons’.