The Monster in the Night of the Labyrinth (2007) - Ron Athey and Lee Adams-Erotica Films

24/04/19

The Monster in the Night of the Labyrinth (2007) - Ron Athey and Lee Adams

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The Monster in the Night of the Labyrinth

Contemporary Live Art Reflections on the Dark Vision of Georges Bataille

Documentation from a major contemporary Live Art event curated by performance artists Lee Adams and Ron Athey and produced by the Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, London, as part of the exhibition Undercover Surrealism.

Contributors: Lee Adams, Ron Athey, Stav B, Ernst Fischer and Helen Spackman.

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A major contemporary live art event curated by performance artists Lee Adams and Ron Athey

Produced by the Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, London, as part of the exhibition Undercover Surrealism.

The Monster in The Night of The Labyrinth featured a special re-mounting of Ron Athey’s seminal performance The Solar Anus, inspired by the same-named Georges Bataille essay, The event also featured a reworking of my own performance installation The Language of Flowers, a new work by Stav B; Realising the Marvellous in the Mundane and several short meditations by Ernst Fischer & Helen Spackman. Photograph’s courtesy of Regis Hertrich and Dominic Davies

Documentation from this event, described by Dominic Johnson in Western European Stages as “...an esoteric tour de force of unseemly erotics, half-mad splendour, beautifully morbid spectacle and florid, sumptuous excess” is available from unbound, the Live Art Development Agency bookshop

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"A brutality of erection so terrifying that I cannot imagine the enormous anal fruit...other than as an ignoble skull that I would smash with an axe blow, a rattled grunt deep in my throat."

--Georges Bataille

"Anal penetration [...] creates an opening, so to speak, to a conceptual realm beyond binary opposition (i.e. male/female)."