Ron Athey’s performances present bloody religious tableaux, explicit sex, and self-harming actions. Deeply disturbing and profoundly moving, these performances have garnered critical attention and generated controversy since the 1990s, when Athey’s Torture Trilogy (1992–95) became the focal point of Congressional culture war debates. The ideas and aesthetics embedded in Athey’s artworks reflect his complex, overlapping identities, both past and present: Pentecostal child prodigy, punk adolescent, heroin addict, S&M club performer, HIV-positive patient, tattooed man, avant-garde performance artist. As the first book to focus on Athey’s work, Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey addresses these and other facets of his art, presenting a retrospective of performances from the 1980s to the present. The book compiles a remarkable collection of archival performance photographs, rare preparatory drawings, artist’s texts, reflections by peers and collaborators, and scholarly analysis that explores the historical contexts, knotty issues, and significance of his work. The twenty-one essays in the book elaborate specific artworks—such as Martyrs and Saints (1992), Judas Cradle (with Juliana Snapper, 2004), Incorruptible Flesh (Dissociative Sparkle) (2006), and others—along with broad themes (sex, affect, AIDS, and more).

In one contribution, Athey collaborator Juliana Snapper observes, “Ron showed me that performance at its most powerful is . . . a living critical discourse that listens and responds” (205). Pleading in the Blood enacts this intersubjectivity, interspersing Athey’s writings with other authors’ rigorous and deeply personal meditations on the experience of viewing, participating in, writing about, and otherwise responding to his performances. The dialogic project of the book is particularly relevant in the context of practical and theoretical challenges to archiving Athey’s work. Dominic Johnson, editor of the volume, explains how the nihilistic environment of the AIDS crisis and the no-future mantra of punk contributed to the artist’s “eschewal of cataloguing and archiving his work” (38). As performance collaborator Julie Tolentino writes, “Along the deep cord of our irreplaceable bodies, we reckon with the faint imprint of memory, (scarcity) of photographs” (117). The skins of Athey and his collaborators carry the marks of their performance history; Pleading in the Blood seeks to visualize this indexicality for a broader audience, and it will serve as a crucial resource for continuing scholarship on Athey’s artworks.

Three autobiographical texts by Athey, previously published and usefully collected together here, constitute the backbone of the book. “Gifts of the Spirit” outlines the artist’s Pentecostal upbringing and details his spiritual experience. “Deliverance: The ‘Torture Trilogy’ in Retrospect” describes the religious, aesthetic, and historical influences on three linked performances of the 1990s; and “Raised in the Lord: Revelations at the Knee of Miss Velma” recounts his adolescent loss of faith and a visit, years later, to Miss Velma’s Universal World Church, a site of spiritual significance for his former, devout self. In response to Athey’s written body of work, Tolentino articulates the attitude of many longtime readers: “Ron’s writing is visceral” (110). Crafted with stark honesty, rough affection, deep mourning, and hilarious juxtapositions, Athey’s texts feel both intimate and immediate. They serve as important companions to his art production. His writings have been substantially revised and expanded for Pleading in the Blood. As the title of his piece on the Torture Trilogy makes clear, Athey returns to these texts to rewrite them “in retrospect,” from his perspective at age fifty. He drafted some of these texts quite early in his career—he began “Gifts of the Spirit” when he was eighteen—and his revisions grapple with the aftermath of survival, the experience of living an unexpected future, by tempering the explosive content of the original articles.

Compared to these original articles, details of his unusual autobiography—including stories of his dysfunctional family; its distinctive, improvisational practice of Pentecostalism; and Athey’s traumatic experiences of domestic violence and abuse—have been moderated and in a few cases excised. Further, Athey’s language has shifted. The tense has evolved from present to past, “is” transformed into “was.” Sentence fragments, which lent urgency and emphasis, have been resolved into complete sentences. The resulting revised prose offers more explanation, more historical framing, more reflection—and more distance. As a result, these texts are more accessible for new readers, and they provide important new insights into Athey’s current stance on his life and work. However, serious scholars of Athey’s work will want to track down the original, unrevised texts and read them as historical documents in tandem with these new ones. The book’s extensive bibliography includes these and other hard-to-find citations.

In addition to collecting key artist writings, Pleading in the Blood contributes to art-historical and performance-studies scholarship by elaborating the historical contexts that shape Athey’s work. In “Introduction: Towards a Moral and Just Psychopathology,” Johnson argues that Athey’s performances must be understood in terms of the AIDS crisis, and he details Athey’s experiences of HIV and the unrelenting deaths of loved ones during the “plague years” of 1980s and 1990s Los Angeles (24). Johnson’s research is complemented by the painful reminisces of Catherine (Saalfield) Gund, whose “There Are Many Ways to Say Hallelujah!” illuminates the extremity and rawness of living with the constant presence of death during this time. These chapters clarify how lost friends and lovers—Lawrence Steger, Cliff Diller, Brian Murphy, and many others—haunt the pages of Pleading in the Blood. In a related essay, Johnson analyzes Athey’s role in the National Endowment for the Arts controversy in 1994, sparked by a performance supported by the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Johnson’s well-researched account examines this conflict in terms of conservative legislators’ persecution of sexual minorities in the 1990s. He notes the lack of attention to this incident in museum-studies discourses and in broader histories of art and censorship: “The event’s relative marginality in art history reflects its resistance to recuperation in simply formal terms, and its refusal of liberal humanism platitudes about the ways that art can or should contribute towards a superficially defined social good” (66). Amelia Jones’s essay “How Ron Athey Makes Me Feel: The Political Potential of Upsetting Art” explores the alternative values, or social goods, presented in his work. Jones excavates the political implications of the affect generated by his performances: “Experiencing Athey’s elegantly suffering body is potentially upsetting and moving because one is made to take the role of empathetic—or disapproving, disgusted, punitive, angry—witness, rather than distanced spectator” (176–77). For Jones, this affective form of witnessing creates the potential for politicization.

These and other contributions to Pleading in the Blood suggest a rich set of questions and new territory for further discourse, from exploring issues of process and collaboration to excavating the impact of recovery and religious communities on Athey’s work. The book includes firsthand accounts of Athey’s collaborations with artists across media: Gund on filming Athey for her documentary, Catherine Opie on working with him to produce her series of Polaroid photographs, Bruce LaBruce on Athey’s acting role in the film Hustler White, Snapper on generating music and sound with Athey for Judas Cradle. These accounts, and images of preparatory drawings and storyboards, raise questions about the relations among and across media in Athey’s performances, the centrality of collaboration in his performance practice, and the specifics of his performance process. In addition, the texts in the book suggest fruitful directions for exploring the cultural contexts and subcultures that shape Athey’s work. For example, narratives of addiction and recovery appear in several contributions. Communities of recovery and sobriety shape members’ interpersonal encounters and everyday decision making; how might these structures inform the collaborative dynamics of Athey’s performances and participants’ experiences?

Furthermore, Athey’s emphasis on the importance of his Pentecostal background invites serious research into this religious context. A generalized religious sensibility permeates the book—religious terms like “sacrament” and “sanctity” appear throughout its pages—but authors (other than Athey himself) tend to employ these concepts without historical specificity. Attention to the particular, late twentieth-century Pentecostal character of Athey’s work could illuminate the forms and meanings of his performances. The book’s title itself references Pentecostal worship practice: for Pentecostals, “pleading in the blood” is a familiar fragment of prayer, a powerful phrase that announces a petitionary prayer for protection or deliverance, introduces an intercessory plea for the healing of others, or signals the beginning of an ecstatic experience of speaking in tongues (for more on the role of blood in early Pentecostal prayer, see Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture, Boston: Harvard University Press, 2003, 88). This title frames the gathered texts of the book as a boisterous, intense form of prayer, a cacophonous collection of other-directed dialogues among and beyond individuals within a community of faith. Pleading in the Blood insists on the crucial role of this kind of boundary-crossing, intersubjective dialogue; in this first history of Athey’s work, archiving takes place in community and in collaboration, through listening and responding.