Photography: Mat + Kat Styling: Aleksandra Koj & Kristina Koelle Makeup: Laramie , Production: Kendall Thompson
HANS ULRICH OBRIST I wanted to begin with the beginning. I wanted to ask you how it all began, how you came to art, or how art came to you?
RON ATHEY I'd say that the music scene in Los Angeles had a lot of crossover with the art scene—being part of the late '70s, early ‘80s punk scene, and post-punk scene. I saw the work of Johanna Went, and experimental, mutated, classical groups, like Fat & Fucked Up. I always wondered how I could work this into performance. So, I always thought of the live image from the beginning. A punk show is an unlikely place to see a performance artist. And, I know there were parallel scenes in different cities.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST And was there an epiphany, or as you would call it, a dissociative sparkle?
RON ATHEY Yes. [laughs] The first performance in 1980 with my partner, Rozz Williams (founder of Christian Death)—as soon as it started, I felt this kind of trance. I never had questions, like, why am I doing this? What am I going for? It had logic right away for me. It was the right fit because I could expand within that framework. It’s an enhanced state. So, that's what hooked me in—looking for that state again in different ways.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST You read Octavia Butler's “Parable of the Sower,” set in a very dystopian future where she starts channeling a new religion. And that's what you're obsessed with, channelers, and the messianic complex. And that moment the pressure hits; the critical point. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, this idea of channeling a new religion? Because of course, you had a very strict religious upbringing, which I suppose continues to be present.
RON ATHEY It does. And while I use all of that language, I am a little bit more like Nietzsche about that. I think that we have to remake new celebrations and maybe even try to call it something different, but I'm not afraid of still understanding that on some level I'm a Christian, because I'm wired as a Christian. I still visit churches. I still go to Orthodox Easter when I'm in Thessaloniki. I'm still curious all the time about what that impulse is and the belief, particularly the more mystical and metaphysical chapters of that.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST I would like to hear more about your current relationship to theology. And whom are you reading right now?
RON ATHEY Right now, I'm reading the writings of Vampira. There’s a new book her niece put out. When she was still alive, she gave readings at clubs near my house called “How to dig your own grave with your mouth.” And I’m reading Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which has the essay about Wagner, but then it goes into the broader forum because I'm working on a concept about the Asclepeion and about healing chambers, dream chambers, the baths—in a fictional way, or as a starting point, anyway.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST I was wondering about who your influences and inspirations might be, but maybe it's actually not so much influence. I read this extraordinary book, Dub, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It's about Silvia Wynter and this idea that she has not so much been an influence on Gumbs, but rather that Gumbs has been thinking with Sylvia Wynter. So, I was wondering, who are the artists from the past and present you are thinking with or working with?
RON ATHEY I think my dilemma when I was a teenager was that I had this kind of angst that could have destroyed me. I went down a real Francophile channel. It started with Jean Genet, and eventually went to Bataille, but I had to understand that in history, ideas out of sync with the dominant culture existed, not just the gay, but also the pervert, or the abject. So, I was kind of looking for answers to exist. And within that, the poetry of Our Lady of the Flowers (1943)—I read all the plays, the five novels—and screamed when Prisoner of Love (1986) was released because of what it really contained.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST And you are self-taught. Can you speak a little bit about this idea of DIY in relation to art? I learned about artists by doing studio visits. I never studied art history. I studied economy and ecology. It came out of conversations, and studio visits, and seeing artists work. So, if you could talk a little bit about this DIY thing, of being self-taught,.
RON ATHEY I do feel fortunate. I had that DIY aesthetic really ingrained in me, so I don't fear somebody who is a master at a certain skill. It's more of how it butts together. An early person I worked with is Julie Tolentino—when she was doing choreography and dancing with David Roussève’s company [REALITY Dance and Theater Group founded in Los Angeles in 1988]. I really learned about movement and the connective tissue within a piece, and also how to structure grandiosity. I worked with the opera singer, Juliana Snapper, and Opera Povera director, Sean Griffin, who I still collaborate with. At first, I wanted an opera singer in a piece and she was like, “No, stand in the nook of the piano.” And we spent two years helping me have opera strength, even if I don't have opera talent. We made a duet called The Judas Cradle (2004-2005). I think fearlessness and doing the research is important. I spent a lot of time in the UC San Diego music library, which has a massive musicology department. Diamanda Galás comes from there as well. The curve ball on these classical arts is so inspiring. And you know, when I lived in England, if someone got the Arts Council grant, they made the piece. If they didn't, they'd be like, you know, I’ll wait for the next cycle. I would never wait for money. Never wait to be curated, never wait to be shown. If you have a burning concept in you, find the place and produce it yourself, I still do that. I'm doing it right now. I made a video about the myth of Acéphale and I did a fundraiser for it, selling t-shirts. I successfully did all of it in two weeks.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST What’s on the t-shirts?
RON ATHEY The Solar Anus, which is based on the Pierre Molinier mandala.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST Before we look at the recent work, maybe a few questions about the older work. You mentioned the dissociative sparkle—the epiphany of 1980. But between 1980 and 1998 you had eighteen years of touring with a troupe of people, and then you became fatigued. Before we talk about this ‘98 epiphany, as you call it, the dissociative sparkle of the Solar Anus, I wanted to ask you about two or three moments between 1980 and 1998, where you felt a particularly striking dissociative sparkle.
RON ATHEY Let’s skip to ‘94, which is when the idea to make solo work came together—the piece Four scenes in a Harsh Life (1994). There's a scene called Suicide Bed, Tattoo Salvation. And it's a little story about compressing ten suicidal moments into one, and then a dream I had that my tattoos were finished. I put, like, 28 needles in my arms. Looking back on that video, I was kind of rattled by it. So, it was the first time I actually looked at something from the outside and experienced it instead of just experiencing it from being in it. That changed the way I started thinking about documentation—maybe I had to be more purist about it—it had to be the live experience.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST And the fatigue led you to this first solo piece, the Solar Anus (1998), and that was inspired by the 1931 Georges Bataille essay (“The Solar Anus,” 1931), and also the action photographs of Pierre Molinier.
RON ATHEY I first saw Molinier at a festival in Nantes, just in a booth there, in the early ‘90s. So, I pursued seeing shows of his whenever they would pop up in that era. I had read the Bataille essay a bit earlier and it was very visual, so I connected with it. I still think that sometimes when you make a piece, it just comes together, which was the case with Solar Anus. I made it in two weeks, even the crown and the shoes. Then, I brought all of that stuff to Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, which is the first place I did it. It was embodying this kind of twisted Sun King, which has a little bit of the legends and Dietrich [von Bern] in it too. Somehow, it was all of these characters coming to create a new one.
It’s very different trying to control something that's closer to theater—trying to control ten people on stage. You know, I don't use a script, but I do have an outline of the order that things go in. It was the most present performance piece. The dissociative sparkle, like when I first started using that term was with Incorruptible Flesh. I only did two durational pieces that were six hours, one in Glasgow as a challenge from Nikki Milliken who curated The National Review Of Live Art. Basically, people could touch me for six hours. And I went to hell and back, and hell and back, and hell and back. It's not my medium to work in, but because I committed to it, I did it twice, and it was interesting.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST In “A Polemic of Blood” in 2015, you said, “Suddenly the topics were extreme beauty, finding context for a live (self) sex action, and deeper exploration into using hypnosis via soundtrack and movement articulation.” How exactly did these different topics come together?
RON ATHEY I started working with a hypnotist in the mid-nineties, just to synchronize the cast, and also to find a pace that wasn't like holding a magic wand prop, or wasn't related to butoh. It wasn't related to something else. I learned how to do that in every piece—using hypnosis to do automatic writing, to establish choreography, and then work with a musician so that it's embedded in the soundtrack for me. Then, there was just this truth that no matter what my intentions are, the polemic of the day overrides—this blood coming over the audience in the heat of the AIDs pandemic. I needed to own that it wasn't only my personal experience with HIV, with my own blood—it also carried the power and the phobia of that time.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST And now, you're actually preparing your first big retrospective called Queer Communion at Participant. It's curated by the historian Amelia Jones, who also is the co-editor of the catalog. Can you tell me about this exhibition and what it means to look back? This is a retrospective of dissociative sparkles as one could call it. It would be great to hear about how you work on this, because it obviously also brings you to your archive and I've always been very interested in archives of artists. Your archive is costumes, there is, of course, documentation of your performances and soundtracks of the performances, so it's not only the visual, it's also the sound. And as you said, the archive is a shifting layer of identity politics, body art, sex acts, archetypes, the AIDS pandemic, the “polemic of blood,” deconstructing memoir and automatism. Interpreting esoteric traditions excites you more than ever. So, what is your arc of organizing, how do you work with these shifting layers, all these things, and then, if you deconstruct the memoir, you somehow also deconstruct the notion of the retrospective, I suppose?
RON ATHEY Yeah, well, maybe that's the battle with the art historian as well. There are the vitrines telling the dry story. And then, there's the things like costumes that have to come back to life, and for me, they also have to have a relevance with each other. I have such a solid archive because I always lived in the same house with a giant detached garage and I just put everything in it, but not with so much strategy. And there were a few interventions to organize my archives by The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, which also did the giant Polaroid project with Catherine Opie and me. So, that was the time when my paper archives started being organized by UCLA. And then, finally this time, I received an Owner Move-In eviction, so I had to move all this stuff. But Amilia Jones kind of intercepted it before. So, I have the Judas Cradle, which is like this huge wood prop that scaffolds costumes from every show since the early '90s. I’m also making two books with Intellect Books. I had bought some of the negatives back from '80s photographers, so I have been gathering materials since say, 2013.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST An archive always hides another archive. It’s not just one archive, it’s many.
RON ATHEY Right. There are about four rooms that go through Family, Club Years, Torture Trilogy is the AIDS years, and that will have a little tiny Jesse Helms talking. So, of course I have Senate records from the Freedom of Information Act. I have everything from different hearings, correspondence with Jane Alexander when she was the head of the National Endowment for the Arts. Opera, sheet music, pieces that I made in collaboration with a psychic outside of Manchester, like an automatic writing planchette that he made for me.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST You mentioned club culture. Last week, I had a long conversation with Honey Dijon and we talked about many different topics. In her work, there are so many layers—from the DJing, to her own music, to the fashion brand, to the activism. And one thing, which was really striking, is that it's all based on what happened in the clubs between the late ‘70s and 1983. As Honey told me, it was one of these moments when all the disciplines came together—it had to do with a community of people from many different backgrounds, many different fields. I wondered if you could talk about that, if you see it the same way?
RON ATHEY I feel like a good analysis of scenes is England's Dreaming (1991) by Jon Savage, where he analyzes the Sex Pistols, and how punk managed to remain authentic on the West Coast for nine years. And the answer is because no one cared about it. It didn't become saturated with branding and co-option. It stayed in its ghetto for so long. So, that scene was my foundation. Also, my first boyfriend was Rozz Williams—so what preceded goth in America was death rock, and that is when I started making performance, in those years. I also had some rehab years, and then back to 1989, 1990, when tattooing and piercing was sort of hitting a pitch—techno dance coming out of Detroit, Chicago, and some bands in England, like Sheep on Drugs was this new sound that became hard techno later. So, that was a very public sex kind of time, like go-go dancing—out of a long shutdown period. I wouldn't claim it as one period, even moving to London and being a part of Kaos when it was at Stunners, like there are still spots where you feel a scene and people being transformed by the scene every week that they come. Their look starts shifting and their reality cracks open. So, I wouldn't give the glory day one thing, it's just that everything cuts and pastes, and regurgitates, and comes back together.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST And one thing I also wanted to ask you—that goes back to this Kembra Pfahler interview, which I did for the last issue. Kembra talks about you quite a lot in that interview. When Kembra talks about the beginnings of the performances, you know, inspired by Butoh, by Katzuo Ohno—when the transition happens, from drawing to performance quite early on—she told me it has to do with gender politics. Kembra said that “many of us felt gender fluid, but there wasn't a language for it.” And then, Kembra says “a language was born.” This idea that a language is born—it is incredibly important. Then, she says your generation—you, Bruce LaBruce, Vaginal Davis—would then find ways to articulate it. So, I wanted to throw that question back at you and see if you agree, and could you maybe give a response to Kembra?
RON ATHEY I think those were less defensive times. We were just doing our thing and creating a bit of a family around that. We all curate each other and do our own events. Me and Vaginal Davis co-curated events for fifteen years. And so Kembra and Bruce would almost always be a part of that, and sometimes other artists like Slava Mogutin. But I feel like Vag and Kembra were the linguists. They would play with words and phrases, and sometimes it would be derogatory and they would keep doing it until it refined into a new description. So, I think they are the lingual geniuses there, but there are things that then suddenly everybody needs an answer for, so you become articulate about it. I care a lot about context and logic and often go deep down those roads before I do something.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST And you have also written. Can you talk about the practice of writing? You've written manifestos, you've written texts, can you give a few examples and maybe talk about what the writing means within the practice?
RON ATHEY I think I write in a formal thesis way for myself, as I'm researching and I keep adding to it. I've also worked as a journalist and I try to write about other artists as part of my practice. I'm going to edit a book of the work of Johanna Went, a monograph, so I'm working on that right now. There's never been a book on her. She's included in Cynthia Carr’s book [On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century, 1999], and Meiling Cheng’s In Other Los Angeleses (2002) and early on in the first Re/Search books, like Industrial Culture Handbook (1983), which placed her with Throbbing Gristle, and Survival Research Laboratories, even though she did more actionist performances. For ICA London, I often wrote for their brochures, like about Marcellí Antúnez Roca, in that moment where everyone was obsessed with cybersex. I think it's an opportunity to do research. I had a column in Honcho Magazine for two years where I could write about fucking suburban guys in Orange County, or I happened to be at the Venice Biennale for two weeks and I'm going between the nude beach and the Pavilions. They gave me freedom to write about anything. I enjoyed writing that column for those two years.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST And besides writing, does drawing play a role? I was looking at the Viennese actionists, like Schwarzkogler or Nitsch—I’ve interviewed Günter Brus a few years ago, his actions all came out of a very intense process of drawing. And I was wondering about the drawings in your practice.
RON ATHEY Mine is more storyboarding and writing. I'm more of an essay writer. But I only draw in the presence of the person I'm trying to communicate with—using a sketch.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST And do you still sketch?
RON ATHEY Yes. I’m also doing more collaging than usual on the next concept.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST The retrospective is also a moment to think about documentation of live situational art. Tino Sehgal, for example, doesn't want his pieces to be photographed. There is a whole discussion about the documentation of live situational art, how a performance that is not documented is materially ephemeral, but it may stay with the viewers through memory. You have not rejected photographs, but it's part of your collaboration in a way, part of your community, one can say maybe a modern collaboration. And I suppose that would also play a role in the exhibition—featuring these photographers. So, I wanted to ask you about the relationship to these photographers and to photography.
RON ATHEY Photography was kind of like a mirror for me. Like another way of looking at the work. And finding the patience to stage a performance for the camera didn't come easy for me at first. I thrive on the audience, or you could call it witness feedback. So, to be alone with one person, I'll only go so far. When I did the giant Polaroids with [Catherine] Opie, there were like forty people in the room sometimes, so it felt like a performance. I have a long running relationship with Manuel Vason—I've shot with Steven Klein and Herb Ritts. And, you know, I'm a ham, I like it more as I get older, to challenge myself to still make work for the camera that way. I welcome the mediation of photography in my work—that there's something that captures some kind of perfection. Because the entire live experience isn’t perfect, but there are some things that can't be caught on camera. That's still the number one thing that drives the concept. I don't have a concept for a photograph, I have a concept for an action, and sometimes that action makes a perfect photograph at some point.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST And if you have a concept for an action, how much is it scripted, and how much does improvisation and chance enter the picture? How would you describe that relationship in the performances?
RON ATHEY I think what I'm scripting is a frame. And there's always these big windows left open. It can't be like a perfect play for me. Like each space, each city, each mood has to have room to express itself. I do think it's different every time. And that's why I have to do a piece for at least three years to feel like I nailed it.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST Rereading your texts, “Getting It Right … Zooming Closer” (Art Journal, 2011), you say, “Performance documentation, performance-for-the-camera, performance image for the camera, to get it right—all are editing, reducing, retouching, mediating, specifying, forcing the gaze, and not the full experience, which can essentially lie, enhance, mislead. In the 80s and 90s, I only understood how performance went off by how it felt during, and how it sat with me after. Video and photo documentation showed me that and something more… I had to adjust to the flattening. But something about what the cameraperson focused on actually made the representation more extreme because the context of setting and the sequence in which the image appeared could be removed. Zooming closer than the audience could ever get in most performances sometimes was beautiful and sometimes vulgar.” It’s a great text. So, I want to ask you about that shift in perspective, and then actually about the process, and the way in which you started seeing yourself, and your performances differently through documentation.
RON ATHEY I think I could also include critical reviews in there—being able to see in a way that I couldn't see before. I think some of it was considered the most violent work in the '90s, like men on hooks. If the camera went into the detail of the flesh tearing on one person, it would make someone sick—if you're watching live, you could always gaze somewhere else. Video, especially of a multidimensional piece is manipulative; someone's always choosing the money shot. So, I still argue that nothing's better than the live experience, but I'm aware of how ephemeral that is. I didn't want the same few people to see my work. And I do love the meditative quality of a photograph, of being able to just stare at it.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST I want to ask you about two very important people in your life. You already mentioned Catherine Opie whom you've been collaborating with since the early ‘90s—for almost thirty years. And you've also done this incredible Polaroid series with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS. So, I wanted to ask you—tell me, and tell our readers about this very special relationship you have with Catherine Opie, and then particularly about this Estate Project for Artists with AIDS project.
RON ATHEY Sometimes it's hard to back up to a period before [AIDS]. Well, right at that moment, there was the grief people were living with. But until then, a lot of people around me were kind of holding on, they didn't want me to get sick and die. With Catherine so inside the scene, you know, all the dykes with mustaches are my crew forever, and they've all transitioned into different people since then, but it really was this strong moment and time both in inner relations, but also in coming into the light together. It was a strong time to make a statement about who you were. And yeah, that language didn't exist. It was just sometimes fun, sometimes it was clubby. They had a biker gang called the Hell's Belles. You know, it was cheeky. By the time we got to the thirteen images that we recorded on Polaroid, we had been talking about documenting, I guess you could say, the iconic image from each performance that we both agreed upon.
So, it would be the Solar Anus, then she wanted to add a sex act, so we added a fisting one—with a little prompting to up the ante. But, to actually cull it down to one image, there was this back-and-forth prompting and deciding what it would be mixed with to create the ultimate image. Will it be the crowned look or the beads coming out of the ass? It was an amazing durational thing over two days. The last one was the really bloody Saint Sebastian. Because it would be hard to back down and do something clean after that.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST And there's actually another question I had about that because when you worked on these large-scale Polaroids, you said that they were an attempt at restaging scenes from your performance history. One way of documenting performance is by photographing it or filming it. Another one is by not doing that and having it in people's memory. But the other one is by redoing it. I've been working on this project, “Do It.” I have been inviting artists to write instructions and then people can Do It, and interpret it. It’s inspired by Fluxus, but also by the autoprogettazione design of Enzo Mari, who asked how you can actually transmit knowledge through these instructions. So, I was very interested in this kind of dimension of restaging. And also, in you saying that the photos were not true to the reference. The only one that was true to the reference was Saint Sebastian. So, it’s kind of no longer a remake, but it's sort of like an essence—of Sebastian Suspended or Solar Anus. I would love to hear more about this.
RON ATHEY Well, I think if we talk about Solar Anus, I lived it as a performance when I was making it, but I felt like when it's put away, that it was an opportunity to give it another life—by refining it as a static image. So, I didn't see it as I'm in the middle of this action—it was a proper formal portrait. And also, the nature of that camera was how long we had to stay in the dark—how to have an expression in the dark and not change it when a hot flash hits your whole body. So, it took this kind of building up of how to work that hot flash coming at me. Some of the images are two different performances meshed together.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST For example, there is also “Suicide Bed.” Can you talk to me a bit about “Suicide Bed” and “St. Sebastian”?
RON ATHEY “Suicide Bed,” as I've said earlier, was the first performance experience that made me realize that a solo performance could be as, or more powerful, than a group extravaganza. For the Catherine Opie portrait, because of the shallowness of the focus of that Polaroid camera, we had to go almost vertical with the bed. So, it was almost like “Suicide Bed” suspension. It never felt like that in the performance. Also, I was being held up by the needles for much longer than I did in the performance—it didn't have the authentic melancholy that the performance did. For “St. Sebastian,” I think everything was building up in everyone by that scene, you know, it's an atrocity exhibition in a way. It's beautiful, it is poetic, but it also looked like a piece of liver on the floor from so much blood pouring off of me, and two liters of saline in the scrotum, so there’s this disfigurement. That’s another Vaginal Davis-ism, sexual repulsive.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST I saw the great interview with you and Lydia Lunch. Generosity is a word that often comes up in relation with Lydia Lunch. And generosity is such an important word, such an important medium. It should be the medium of the 21st century. In a post-medium condition, generosity should always be the medium, in art, in curation, in museums, and I think in a way, generosity in your work is very important. It's interesting that in the press text of the show, Queer Communion explores your practice “as paradigmatic of a radically alternative mode of art-making as queer communion—the generous extension of self into the world through a mode of open embodiment that enacts creativity in the social sphere through collective engagement as art.” I wanted to ask you about generosity as your medium.
RON ATHEY Wouldn't it be better to help develop a scene that you would want to live in, or that you would want to learn from? There's an often repeated and not quite true thing that I formed a new religion after leaving religion. And I’m lucky I have Nietzsche for that. Like, yes, I do something, but I don't want to just be alone in doing it. So, you have to find the reason why you do it and nurture people around you. I think of generosity in terms of interaction with people, it's hard for me to use that word within the work itself. Because I don't know another way to approach how I work.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST I wanted to ask you about censorship, and unrealized projects, because, ultimately, we know a great deal about architects’ unrealized projects because they publish them. But we know very little about artists' unrealized projects. Now the range of unrealized projects can be very wide or broad because there are projects that have been too big to be realized, too small to be realized, or maybe too expensive to be realized. Or too little time to be realized because of our lifespan. There are also forgotten projects. Then there are projects that are unrealized because of self-censorship. Your work for many years has been banned or censored by museums. Today, there is a new form of control, of censorship through social media. So, I wanted to ask you about this whole kind of idea of the unrealized project, and maybe also then in the second part of the question, self-censorship, or censorship.
RON ATHEY I was a teenager before the Meese Commission Report (Final Report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, 1986) in the States. So, I could go to discos until six in the morning when I was fifteen. Then, there was Operation Spanner (investigation into same-sex male sadomasochism across the United Kingdom in the late 1980s) in England while there was a war on culture in the States. So, I know how different the world is on different sides of this line. And then, to think you can thrive in an underground or a counterculture that you build, and you're very happy within that. But then, the commercial world starts absorbing your culture. So even that doesn't exist. I think it's a challenge to carve out your space and also expand and not be used up. I have to be aware of that and I'm also somebody who is a bit phobic of popular culture and celebrity culture because of that. I think it cheapens everything. I have a willfully ignorant ability to stay in my lane. I certainly have a grandiosity in me, so ever since I thought operatically, to collaborate with an opera singer, there's never enough of a budget. I mean, give me a hundred thousand dollars, I’ll need two—and those are lower in budgets. So, I will go to the next way of making it. I wouldn't call those unrealized projects, but they didn't reach the potential that they could have reached. Sometimes I'll take that as a nod to work in a different way, to work in duets, or work with four people or less if it's company work, or work in a way where you invite people to perform their own work within yours, like in a happening. I did that in Naples at the Madre [Museum], which was a fantastic experience.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST So, what’s too big to be realized? An opera?
RON ATHEY Yeah. I’m trying to work on it in pieces right now, but it is the Asclepeion. And I would like to stage something in ancient ruins—something massive and multi dimensional, more immersive, and less of a show. It's more of a monster installation.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST A monster installation in ancient ruins.
RON ATHEY Yes, it could be in Africa, it could be in Greece.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST I've also got a question from our mutual friend Parma Ham. Ham wants to know about rituals. And I often ask this question about rituals, because Tarkovsky said, “We're living in a time bereft of rituals.” We need to reintroduce rituals, and that's definitely something you have done for more than forty years. But his question is, what are rituals today? Queer communions?
RON ATHEY I think there's the archetype of the ritual—and it resonates through time and space, but the context or the way it looks has to change. And so, I think for myself, that's what I'm always doing—to push the body and spirit. It has to be boundary-pushing. It can't just be offering flowers to a statue.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST It has to be boundary-pushing?
RON ATHEY Yes. There has to be a sacrifice to have a ritual.