In 1994, the Walker presented artist Ron Athey’s Four Scenes in a Harsh Life at Patrick’s Cabaret. The infamous performance, which involved ritual incision, sparked a national debate on art and censorship leading to the slashing of the National Endowment for the Arts budget, the near-complete elimination of individual artists’ grants, and a powerful chilling effect on controversial artwork. Twenty-one years later, Athey reflects on how, and if, the needle on creative freedom has shifted in a discussion with former Walker performing arts curator John Killacky and art historian Jennifer Doyle. Moderated by feminist/queer theory scholar and art historian Lauren DeLand.
A Different Kind of Intimacy: Performance and Protest in the Era of HIV/AIDS
A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995, a research exhibit recently presented in the Walker’s Best Buy Aperture, drew upon the history of radical and queer performance programed at the Walker Art Center to explore various ways artists responded to the AIDS pandemic, conservative censor, and homophobia. Exhibit curator Gwyneth Shanks argues that when confronted with AIDS’s mounting death toll, the "liveness" of performance took on newfound urgency and meaning for artists. To be in embodied co-presence was a means of asserting the political imperative of proclaiming one’s life—one’s liveness—as valid.
Ron Athey’s 1994 Minneapolis Performance and the Anatomy of a Media Scandal
In a carefully researched dive into the archive of press materials surrounding performance artist Ron Athey's 1994 Walker performance, queer scholar and art historian Lauren DeLand explores how the narrative around his work that came to dominate the national stage followed a set script. People believed to have AIDS became scapegoats for a nation gripped by fear. While DeLand addresses the artist's visceral and moving performance practice, she offers a cogent look at how his work fit into a larger narrative of fear, anxiety, and homophobia that drove press coverage of HIV and AIDS in the early 1990s.
Performing Lesbian Care and Enthusiastic Consent: An Interview with Lisa Sloan
In the wake of the culture wars and the AIDS pandemic that ripped its way through the US in the 1980s and '90s, affecting largely gay communities, artists took action, drawing upon this sociopolitical and biopolitical climate to inform their work. The primacy of these fights and the devastation the disease wrought on gay men meant that--at the time and also in retrospect--much of the work of the era has been defined through men. Lesbian and feminist artists, though, were an important part of the arts ecosystem, and created work that reflected on their own care labor to friends living with HIV and on the shifting political stakes of the feminist movement. In a wide-ranging conversation, queer scholar and community activist Lisa Sloan discusses the era through the impact of lesbian performance.
Queer Art and the Importance of Community: An Interview with Eleanor Savage
In the wake of the culture wars and the AIDS pandemic that ripped its way through the US in the 1980s and '90s, artists took action. The stage became a space to reflect on the political and collective imperatives of asserting one's identity, to rail against homophobic press and policies, and to present acts of love and intimacy. Live performance also revealed the body's frailty, as artists living with HIV/AIDS insisted on still performing, insisted on the urgency of performing and performing now. In a wide-ranging interview, civic-minded, anti-racist artist and organizer Eleanor Savage discusses the era and its impact on performance and activism with Gwyneth Shanks, curator of A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995.
Sean Metzger on Queer Desires, Community Building, and Performance
First documented by the CDC in 1981, it took nearly five years for the Reagan administration to publicly acknowledge the AIDS pandemic, which by then had killed more than 5,000 people, the vast majority of them gay men. By 1995, over half a million people had been diagnosed with AIDS in the US; 62 percent of them had died. As queer theorist and performance scholar Sean Metzger discusses in this new interview, AIDS indelibly marked queer and artistic communities across the country, producing a deep urgency to affirm life, presence, and the importance of community in the face of the disease's devastation and the federal government's inaction.s.
Hovering in the Impasse: Reza Abdoh and the Uses of Blackness
From the coffle and the auction block to the whipping post, the lynching tree, or nightly news looping the moving images of Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, or Stephon Clark approaching death, the United States is consumed by consuming the scene of antiblack violence. Performance studies scholar Joshua Chambers-Letson argues that, as race, class, gender, and sexuality radically shape a viewer’s perspective on and experience of the world, the question of who is watching such violence and what they see is of critical importance. It is this question that hangs in the air for Chambers-Letson as he discusses the work of theater, performance, and film artist Reza Abdoh, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1995.
Patrick Scully on Performance, Protest, and Queer Politics
This wide-ranging conversation between Patrick Scully and Gwyneth Shanks, curator of A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995, a new installation in the Walker's Best Buy Aperture, explores the performance practices of the era. Shanks recently sat down with Scully, a longtime performer, presenter, curator, and activist in Minneapolis, to discuss his collaborative 1995 performance piece Unsafe, Unsuited, his role as the founder of Patrick's Cabaret, and the broader aesthetic and political landscape of the US in the early 1990s, as the cultural wars and the HIV/AIDS epidemic raged.
