The night I attended Corentin JPM Leven’s Birds of Ill Omen on January 11, 2026– presented by Out-FRONT! Festival, a production of artist-run organization Pioneers Go East Collective– I knew three things: Birds of Ill Omen fell somewhere in the lineage of HIV/AIDS art, the show was one night only, and– speed-walking up Broadway in impractical shoes– I was running late.
In 1994, Ron Athey and two assistants walked Divinity Fudge to a weight-lifting seat-cum-medical table before slicing his back open with a scalpel nine times. Mopping up the blood, the performers placed the paper towels on a clothesline that they flew over the audience. Athey’s staging of this performance art piece, entitled four scenes in a harsh life, at The Walker Arts Center, garnered national outrage. A vocally HIV+ performance artist, Athey’s provocative use of blood and its attendant signifiers made prejudices and disinformation about HIV/AIDS transparent, stoking fears among audience members; one attendee reported to state health officials that he had been subject to risk of infection.1
The moral panic inspired by Athey’s performance, as well as by the works of performance artists including Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, ultimately resulted in a proposed amendment by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms to ban the NEA from funding art that involved “human mutilation”, “invasive bodily procedures”, and the “drawing or letting of blood.” In defense of his proposal, Helms stated,
If homosexual or otherwise perverse mentalities want to produce such garbage, they are free to spend their own money and their own time doing it…If a poll could be taken, I suspect that the vast majority of America’s taxpayers would be totally opposed to subsidizing that figurative human cockroach masquerading as an artist.2
Athey’s performance is hard to watch. Later in the show, he sticks twenty hypodermic needles in his arm before lacerating his face. Grappling with the utility of violent art, Maggie Nelson, in her book, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, challenges writer and performer Antonin Artaud’s premise that shock value unveils a more honest morality in artwork. But Nelson, even so, doesn’t reject the premise that cruel art does something. About Athey’s work, she writes: “It could be argued that there is, quite simply, no substitute for the visceral unease provoked by such bloodshed, either in representation or in reality, or in any smash-up of the two.”3 The audience’s lack of information about how the HIV virus is transmitted, as well as about Divinity Fudge’s HIV status informed the critical response. In the end, the mere association of an HIV+ artist and the appearance of blood was enough to cause panic. Athey’s piece, and Divinity Fudge’s the performance, remains a powerful testimonial to the self-hatred that attended Athey’s diagnosis.
Much has changed in the public imagination about HIV/AIDS since Athey’s premiere, since Sontag penned AIDS and Its Metaphors, or Arlene Croce’s New Yorker piece labeling Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here “victim art.” Global deaths as a result of HIV/AIDS have, since reaching their peak in 2004, decreased by more than half.4 Innovations in therapeutic technologies– which make HIV viruses hiding in white blood cells visible– have offered new hope for a possibility of a complete cure.5 More importantly for our premise, attitudes surrounding HIV/AIDS have shifted tremendously since Helms’s testimony, as evidenced by the nearly 15,500 peer-reviewed studies examining the effects of stigma on health outcomes for HIV+ individuals.6 If today, calling artists whose work examines HIV/AIDS and queer issues “human cockroaches” is a less ubiquitous viewpoint, does such a cruel approach to art about AIDS remain relevant?
To say that this question was circulating, fully formed, in my head as I entered Judson Church that evening, to see Corentin’s work, would be vastly overestimating my knowledge of performance art history. Premiering in 2022 at Black Box teater in Oslo, Birds of Ill Omen is a collaboration between Leven, scenographer Ann Mijam Vaikla, and choreographer Ulf Nilseng, who together generate a powerful meditation on HIV+ identity, performance of queerness, and internalized shame.
I snuck into the church, assisted kindly by curator Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, and settled into a transformed Judson. At the center of the stage, Leven stands in stark side lighting, clothed in translucent plastic, like a body bag without the modesty. Slowly making tender contact with his body, scraping his legs and torso. Soft fabric forms surround him; I think of my partner, who as a child, would assemble his pillows in a fortress around his mattress, soft defenses. A lonely IV line drips into a glass container downstage left, positioned in front of a low table cluttered with shot glasses. Leven navigates these set pieces throughout the performance like stations of the cross, or stages of grief.
Stepping downstage, Leven falls upon a pile of clothes. Lights begin to flicker as he retrieves and slips into a piece of clothing that looks like a binder, then a corset strapped around the belly, calling to mind Michaela Stark’s bulging forms. He puts the garment on with effort and care, knees childishly knocking together. He then straps on a pair of thigh high stiletto boots, a silver party hat, and two eye patches adorned in plastic flowers. Stumbling to center stage, he raises his fist, his stance both defiant and off-kilter, before backbending to the floor, an aborted death drop.
Throughout the performance, Leven undresses and redresses, chameleonically transitioning between fantastical costumes and bare human body. Toward the end of the work, emerging slowly from towering, waxy slabs of fabric that look like Abakans, or freshly excised steaks, an image of a fly is projected onto his body. In human form, Leven dresses as rot: a still-moving corpse, an open anus, a rotting piece of meat. But, in creature form, Leven appears angelic. Standing in the center of the space, draped in stiff linens and face obscured by a cylindrical cone, he begins to sing, a sweet aria issuing forth from a sentient pile of laundry. The song is shocking in its beauty, it sounds like the last act of a dying and unclassified animal. In each of his creature-forms, Leven is blindfolded, gesturing at the possibility that seeing oneself as beautiful could take place only when the world goes dark.
Profanity exists in the work as well, although never more acute than when directed at the self. Mid-performance, Leven demolishes the fourth wall, and proposes a toast. Vamping as he prepares shot glasses filled with Bailey’s and whipped cream from a can (“This is not for the lactose intolerant!” he proclaims cheerily), he proceeds to pass out shots to eager audience members. There’s a kind of sauna-friendliness to his performance as he waltzes around the space, nude and hospitable. He commands us to wait until the shots have been distributed, and then raises his glass. “I am the pervert, I am the number, I am the average,” he chants. He excoriates his sexuality and desire. Then he tells us to drink.
But for all the references to depravity, no one in the audience leaves, faints, or– to my knowledge– reports him to local health authorities, as they had for Athey’s performance. The tenor of AIDS art, from David Wojnarowicz’s polemical “Fuck You F*ggot Fucker” to Felix Gonzales-Torres’s ethereal “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” – opened up a dialectic of mourning; the angry, confrontational and obscene carefully lensed against a kind of weightless grief. Leven’s Birds of Ill Omen lives somewhere between these poles. As Leven crawls on the floor, ensuring but not insisting that the audience have a full view of his asshole, he touches the obscenity that his forebearers used to fuel their work. But there is a kindness to his confrontation, a softer edge allowing for a mid-show drink.
If Birds of Ill Omen shies away from the explicitly violent, Nelson might argue that this is a necessary evolution of Artaud’s legacy. Artaud’s desire to shock audiences out of spectatorship, to “leave the spectator subsumed, possessed, dissolved,” by showcasing violence onstage rings false in a media landscape where you can watch beheadings in bed on your laptop. “In the end,” Nelson writes, “the irony of Artaud’s theater of cruelty may not lie in its legendary inapplicability, but rather in the fact that our age may have given the lie to its dream of the destructive, regenerative, revolutionary power of the spectacle.” Bereft of the belief that cruelty might bring about social change, we are forced to consider the possibility that Leven’s approach – a more welcoming approach to revealing the less beautiful parts of the self – could be just as revolutionary. What remnants of shame, long after politicians have concluded their polemics, remain, burrowing their ways into our psyches and shaping our identities? Birds of Ill Omen offers a glimpse into a legacy of mourning and stigmatization, far from over but also distant from its peak as a moral panic.
Although I would call Leven’s work nothing less than a brilliant and sensual approach to a pressing systemic issue, I left the theater with two nagging questions. What does it mean for a white, European body to perform this work in the United States? What is the value of tender approaches to violence that emanates from capitalist imperatives, what Slavoj Žižek might call “objective violence.” A 2024 Centers for Disease Control report demonstrates that racial minorities in the US make up 70% of new HIV infections, despite representing only 30% of the general population.7 As Leven himself reported in the post-show talkback, healthcare for HIV+ people in his home country of Norway is superb– “Over 95 percent of people living with HIV are diagnosed and over 95 percent of those receive treatment” a 2025 article from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health reports.8 Far from a straightforward call for less violent approaches to art-making, it is perhaps worth considering who can afford to make art less violent. Whose voices need to be strident and unbearable, and who can speak softly?
Photo by Steven Pisano.
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