In Conversation: tjb and Ron Athey. In: The Phenomenology of Blood in Performance Art

This conversation between performance artists tjb and Ron Athey explores the role of blood, endurance, and queer phenomenology in performance art, emphasizing how bodily extremis challenges fixed notions of identity, corporeality, and cultural hegemony. Both artists have used their bodies as sites of radical inquiry, engaging with themes of trauma, spirituality, gender, and survival in ways that provoke critical discourse on the intersections of art, politics, and lived experience.
Athey, a pioneering figure in extreme performance art, reflects on how his early experiences with Pentecostal religious trauma, HIV/AIDS, and homoerotic iconography shaped his artistic practice. His work employs ritual, martyrdom, and bodily endurance to confront taboos surrounding sexuality, illness, and violence. Through performances such as Self-Obliteration, Athey uses bloodletting as both a visceral and symbolic act, revealing the tension between suffering and transcendence. He considers blood to be a site of revelation—an intimate and political medium that disrupts cultural narratives around disease, mortality, and abjection.
tjb, whose practice engages with performance, queer phenomenology, and trans+ identity, examines the evolving significance of blood in their work. Initially using self-inflicted wounds to explore notions of presence, intersubjectivity, and the deconstruction of the essential self, prior to coming out as transgender, tjb’s relationship with blood has now transformed through their gender transition. Blood, once a symbol of trauma and endurance, now represents liberation and renewal, particularly in the context of medical transition and tjb considers if she will return to the use of blood in performance in the future. Her endurance piece CHTHONIC (2019) served as a ritual of rebirth, marking a liminal space between past and present identities.
Both artists reflect on the role of queer phenomenology in disrupting normative frameworks of embodiment, visibility, and power. Through their discussion, they articulate how performance art functions as a mode of survival, resistance, and self-reclamation, demonstrating that the bleeding body is not merely a spectacle but a site of profound ontological and political significance.