Body art can appropriate Christian iconography to explore martyrdom.

Evidence

With his face set in a mask of concentration, Ron Athey allows his head to be pierced with a six-inch needle just above the eyebrow. You watch, transfixed, as the needle snakes along beneath the skin like water pulsing through an empty hosepipe. A droplet of blood wells up at the point where steel meets scalp. This is the first spike of Athey’s crown of thorns—a body piercer’s tribute to the power of Christian iconography, an ex-junkie’s flirtation with the needle, and a gay man’s defiance of infection with HIV. … By the time the macabre ‘sketch’ is finished, Athey is encrusted with needles, garlanded with wire and oozing blood, in what appears to be a parody of the crucifixion. Ah, but is it a parody, defined in the dictionary as ‘an imitation so poor as to seem a deliberate mockery of the original’? Or is it—as Athey’s supporters would claim—an exploration of the nature of martyrdom, as manifest to a worldwide gay community in the era of Aids? — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 592

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Posthumous martyr images of ordinary victims can unite a divided public — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 215