“And there it is…” Sage Charles smiled as he deftly inserted the business end of a baseball bat into the supine body of Ron Athey as part of the initial preparations for “Messianic Remains,” the latest installment in Athey’s “Incorruptible Flesh” performance series. The series, begun in 1996 with Lawrence Steger (who died of AIDS-related causes in 1999), addresses Athey’s own HIV+, post-AIDS survival and identity. In addition to the anal penetration of the bat and the injection of saline into his scrotum, a series of hooks were attached to Athey’s eyelids, forehead and cheeks, then secured by rope to the metal frame of the platform he lay on, stretching his face into a grotesque, grinning mask. While these aberrations appear, on the one hand, comical, they also denote sexual pain and pleasure, and illustrate a body in crisis.

The Performance Studies international symposium at Stanford University is an annual mega-conference of academic panels and lectures on the theory and history of performance art, as well as a series of live performances by contemporary artists. There are often notable tensions and a degree of wariness between “those who do” and “those who write about” art, each being unsure of the other’s approaches to communicating performance art. These tensions were palpable in the hesitation of some academics in the audience as they attempted to engage with Athey’s performance. In my role as Athey’s production manager for this tour, I did my best to help find a balance between scholarly distance and the visceral necessity that the piece demanded—all within the surreal, Logan’s Run utopia of the Stanford University campus.

In the first of the two acts of the performance, the audience was invited to directly interact with Athey’s invaded and engorged body by applying grease to his skin (latex glove optional). The torquing of Athey’s face and genitals provided a violent contrast with the beauty of tattoos and scars stretched across an aging yet vivacious frame. Many hands stroked or held his arms, legs and chest with silent curiosity and compassion, while others stood back and observed, perhaps already figuring out how to further their careers by using Athey as a case study in their next treatise on “The Relevance of the Post-AIDS, Post-Punk Body in Late-Capitalist Performance Art.”

In the second act, Athey was joined by Sage Charles and Llewyn Máire, who attended Athey’s transition from living corpse to otherworldly spirit by cleansing his body and creating a Crowlean thelemic ritual circle, a kind of ethereal portal. A recording of Athey reading the scene of Divine’s death from Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers provided narration as, donned in faux Egyptian headdress and cape, he processed around the circle. The parallel of magickal imagery and the story of Divine’s haunting of her own funeral, set against the biography of Athey’s own continued survival, was both camp and melancholy. The piece ended with his body disappearing within a fading cone of light.

Like Prometheus, Athey’s tormented body rebuilds and heals in order to perform again. Perhaps this is a pre-emptive method of repeating and revisiting his possible deaths, generously bringing the audience in as witness to a life and a body that will no doubt, one day, refuse to go to the grave quietly.

Athey, on a promotional book tour in the U.S. performed in June at Stanford, and in July at Human Resources in downtown LA and Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, NY.