Posts tagged Performance

Point 83: The Body Piercing Archive Presents: The Perforated Body: An Exploration of Piercing Performance

This year, the Body Piercing Archive (BPA) is celebrating performance artists that have pierced their bodies from the past to present. In our exhibit we examine the methods and motivations which utilize perforation as an element of powerful performance. See the Conference schedule for free guided tours led by artists and scholars.

Kris-Canavan and Manuel Vason Collaboration, London, 2003
Tolentino and Fila It Will All End in (Ultra Red) Tears 2013

EXHIBIT HOURS:

Tuesday 10 am–6 pm Wednesday 10 am–6 pm Thursday 10 am–6 pm Friday 10 am–1 pm

RECOMMENDED TOURS:

TUESDAY
  • 10:00 am–10:30 am Tour Guide: Paul King
  • 12:00 pm–12:30 pm Tour Guide: Steve Joyner
  • 2:00 pm–2:30 pm Tour Guide: Dr. Dominic Johnson
  • 4:00 pm–4:30 pm Tour Guide: Lukas Zpira
WEDNESDAY
  • 10:00 am–10:30 am Tour Guide: Dr. Julian Carter
  • 12:00 pm–12:30 pm Tour Guide: Allen Falkner
  • 2:00 pm–2:30 pm Tour Guide: Lukas Zpira
  • 4:00 pm–4:30 pm Tour Guide: Ron Athey & Darryl Carlton
THURSDAY
  • 10:00 am–10:30 am Tour Guide: Ron Athey & Darryl Carlton
  • 12:00 pm–12:30 pm Tour Guide: Dr. Dominic Johnson
  • 2:00 pm–2:30 pm Tour Guide: Allen Falkner
  • 4:00 pm–4:30 pm Tour Guide: Steve Joyner
FRIDAY
  • 10:00 am–10:30 am Tour Guide: Paul King

Point 83: Conference Performance Art Highlights

Ron Athey Portrays St. Sebastian with arrows and a hypodermic crown of thorns. From his work in progress “Martyrs and Saints.”
The photo first appeared in issue 49 of Piercing Fans
International Quarterly, 1996

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

Still image of David Wojnarowicz from his film,
A Fire in My Belly (1986–7).
Photo from issue 49 of
Piercing Fans International Quarterly, 1996.

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’.

Point 83: Point of View

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

Left: A carnival or
circus performer from the 1890s
The amazing Mr. Lifto performing with the Jim Rose Circus.

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

The Point – Issue 83