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He became socialised at 15 after living in extreme, familial isolation. Few people have had interesting enough lives to write about them at such a tender age, but Athey had. Athey will sit at the séance table, with a hypnotist and other “readers”, and will recite extracts from his memoirs to the waiting scribes, all of whom have been hypnotised.Īthey wrote his memoirs at 18.

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Down the sides there will be rows of typists on old fashioned manual typewriters who will write up and edit what is being scrawled on the paper. Two huge bolts of paper will be unfurled in a cross shape on the floor with writers scattered at either end, pens poised. The Old Science Museum, a cavernous warehouse space, will be taken over by Athey for the event. It is called Gifts of the Spirit: Automatic Writing and will be a “séance machine” made up of 30 people. “Suddenly I’m an old man and I thought I was going to die when I was in my twenties.”ĭue to perform at Birmingham’s Fierce Festival this Saturday, his next piece is something of a departure for Athey. It’s like a cruel joke,” he says, laughing gruffly. The despair of being “a living corpse”, diagnosed at a time when there was no treatment and people were dying everywhere, manifests in his artistic abuse of his body. The terrible burden of having been diagnosed with HIV as a 26-year-old, but having lived nearly the same amount of life since then, informs his latest work.

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The one covered in tattoos with the teardrop drawn under his eye.” At 50 he has the energy of a much younger man, talking quickly, full of gesture, his eyes a magnetic pale blue. When he arrives at The Independent’s offices for this interview the receptionist whispers to me: “Your guest is the man over there.

He is a striking individual in many ways. It is an ability borne out of the contrast in his own life: a polarisation of strict fundamentalist childhood and reckless abandon in adulthood. It is this talent for finding the borderline between horror and desire, harnessing the fear/curiosity paradox and our innate morbidity, which characterises Athey’s art. Not having braved an Athey performance myself, but having read the reviews, it is clear that his terrifying self-violence is so compelling that the audience doesn’t cover their eyes from the spectacle, as you might expect, but are transfixed.

He quite literally rubs his open wounds with salt.

He pierces himself with spikes and needles, cuts himself with scalpels, allowing blood to spurt wildly forth from his head. It is impossible to describe his work without it sounding sensationalist. American performance artist Ron Athey is famous for masochism.

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