After a two-hour drive from downtown LA and arriving slightly late, we entered the dark and crowded locale in Riverside that had probably once been a restaurant, but now had black plastic sheets covering the windows. On the old bar, an oiled-up bodybuilder was standing and trembling in a miniscule swimsuit and a splash of light. She was trembling, I guess, because she held the poses so hard and long. Heather Cassils, artist, stuntman and bodybuilder, uses Fluxus and guerrilla theatre in her work, but in the elevated and living object-like aspects of Study of Power, something else was in play. Through its relations between dark and light, between stillness and movement (where the trembling was produced by the ambition to be very still, or very still and very hard), an intense photographic or filmic effect was produced. The toning of the body, the complete absence of fat, and the accentuated muscles seemed like an analogy of photographic sharpness, as well as an efficient way of mixing a critique of the gendered body with a very specific form of biopolitics, an intense examination of spectatorship and power, and a way of presenting the artwork as process (or physical process of the body proper). The attention, thick in the room, was in no way fading as Cassils was helped down from the bar and led backstage, and there was hardly time for the applause to die out before we, the audience, were being ushered to the next room and the next performance.

Resonate/Obliterate I.E., a one night program (Saturday 21 Feb 2009) curated by the legendary performance artist Ron Athey, was the last act in You Belong to Me, a two week series of events curated by Jennifer Doyle, Associate Professor of English at University of California, Riverside. In a compelling insistence on not only performance but on the whole event as a time-based genre, the four performances of the night all followed each others’ heels. After Cassils, Julie Tolentino gave a dance-like performance, with a rope wrapped around her head being untwined. When the rope eventually disappeared from her head and the moaning body stopped spinning, Ron Athey entered the performance in a grey business suit but without a shirt, tie, shoes, or socks – as an exaggerated symbol of masculinity – and started to lift, drag and abuse Tolentino.

Next, the audience was led back to the first room where Zackary Drucker was lying on a podium with his face covered, but like Cassils almost naked and in bright light in a dark room. A voice-over (presumably Drucker’s own) described the male body and its efforts to attain female features, mocking the “deformed breasts”, the vanity of the project, and the cruelty of biology – all this while the spectators were urged to grab one of the many tweezers and help remove the not yet fully grown back hair on the chest, stomach and legs. Drucker was motionless despite the pain. I felt straight, stupid and horribly privileged as Drucker eloquently refused to inflict pain on himself – a pain he would experience only from being transgendered – and instead left that part to us, the audience, the spectators, or, perhaps, the larger society.

At last, then, the grand finale. In Ron Athey’s Self-Obliteration #1, Ecstatic and Julie Tolentino’s The Sky Remains the Same: Julie Tolentino Archives Athey’s Self-Obliteration, Ecstatic, Athey and Tolentino sat on their knees, naked except for huge blond wigs, on two wooden constructions that looked like abnormally high tables. One after another (Athey first, then Tolentino, “archiving” it), they started brushing their hair, theatrically, apparently in pain. Then, by lifting the wigs a little and releasing a number of large needles from their temple veins, they let blood drip or even pour onto two big glass panes, which finally were stuck together to create one huge blood sample each. The amount of blood was overwhelming: some people left the room, others screamed out loud when it was over; I caught myself waiting for a smell of blood that never came. To some extent, this was of course an experience of Athey’s work on religious iconography, self-flagellation and physical suffering (which a part of me can’t help but see as a little old-fashioned, along with the piercing, the tattoos, the nakedness, and the Barbie doll drag: like a transgression that needs its boundaries a little too much, or like an old notion of the avant-garde that assumes too much of a connection between social/physical transgression and artistic transgression.) But in this performance, it was perhaps not the overwhelming part that overwhelmed. In relation to both Athey’s and Tolentino’s previous work on HIV/AIDS, the act of self-mutilation and bleeding seemed fully inferior to the status of the blood. In a quite distinct figure, the oversized blood test overwrote the image of the bleeding artist with meanings of bigoted fear, stigmatization, discrimination, as well as protest, pride, and collective strength. And as the taut, anonymous soundtrack of the self-obliteration ended, so did a very interesting night of performance.