Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey

Ron Athey is an iconic figure in the development of contemporary art and performance. In his frequently bloody portrayals of life, death, crisis, and fortitude in the time of AIDS, Athey calls into question the limits of artistic practice. These limits enable Athey to explore in his work key themes including gender, sexuality, S&M and radical sex, queer activism, post-punk and industrial culture, tattooing and body modification, ritual, and religion. Now in a second edition, Pleading in the Blood foregrounds the prescience of Athey's work, exploring how his visceral practice foresaw and precipitated the central place afforded sexuality, identity, and the body in art and critical theory in the late twentieth century.

"Pleading in the Blood offers a remarkable and enduring contribution to literatures on performance and contemporary art. . . . The potency of myth in Ron Athey's work is the problem tackled by this formidable new book." --Contemporary Theatre Review

Dominic Johnson is a senior lecturer in the Department of Drama at Queen Mary University of London and the author of Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture.