Incorruptible Flesh:
Messianic Remains
Arches, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
Death has been shadowing American performance artist Ron Athey since he tested HIV positive in his mid-twenties. He's now into his fifties, his ornately tattoo'd body - which we see naked, here - looks more than healthy: toned and fit. Death, however, still triggers Athey's creative impulses and in the works he has tagged Incorruptible Flesh, it shadows his explorations into religious mysticism, ritual and belief, and the sanctity of saints, whose bodies remain untainted by decay, as if embalmed by their own purity.
In Messianic Remains, Athey is laid out, naked, on a raised metal grid, reminiscent of the ones used to barbecue martyrs in centuries past. He is, however, accoutred like a pharaoh, with a perspex head-dress gripping his brow and cheeks, and the ceremonial phallic-like beard on his chin echoed by the shape of the baseball bat protruding downwards from his rectum. Pain, imposed and endured, is never out of the picture with Athey.
We are invited to anoint him. To don white rubber gloves and slather his immobile limbs with Vaseline until they glisten. In itself, it's a potent image that questions what - and how - we reverence totemic forms in art as well as religion but when Athey rises and then speaks, he becomes more ancient priest than enshrined ruler.
Donning a black cape, and a cross between pharaonic crown and bishop's mitre, Athey swirls amid smoke while intoning poetic-pentecostal lines about the nature of divinity and of the late Divine who remains, as it were, alive in the annals of performance. No blood was shed on this occasion, but Athey - performing as part of Glasgay! - still cuts deep into the fleshy observances of voyeurism.
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