"TAVIA NYONG’OIT SHOULD BE ASTONISHING that the artist Ron Athey has received his first retrospective, at New York’s Participant Inc, only now, in 2021. But the steadfast alterity of his aesthetic has made this extreme belatedness, although unacceptable, perhaps understandable. Since his rise to prominence in the early 1990s, Athey has generated a series of unforgettably transgressive tableaux and received backlash and been blacklisted on two continents for his pains. It is always a challenge to curate performance art for gallery and museum spaces, but Athey’s particular stripe of excess has led"