Forget the moment's annoyingly overhyped zombie craze and dig in with the one and only Ron Athey, a man whose self-proclaimed status as “a living corpse” is anything but facetious shtick. The internationally acclaimed performance artist was diagnosed with HIV back in 1986 — a presumptive death sentence at the time. His inevitable fixation with death has produced an extraordinary series of extreme performance pieces. The latest of these, Incorruptible Flesh: Messianic Remains, promises to deliver a compelling, startling and insidiously intellectual mixture of ritual and symbolism that's based, in equal portions, on Athey's singular psychosexual aesthetics and old-school, All-American carnival sideshow shock-and-awe. That's a delicate recipe. But Athey, who was groomed to be a holy-roller child preacher before he defected to an amphetamine-fueled spree as a Hollywood death-rock provocateur, isn't just interested in shock value. His no-one-under-17-will-be-admitted presentations are strikingly crafted, offering penetrating examinations of the human condition, the temporal nature of existence and that mad, thin, psychic line between terror and arousal. Human Resources, 410 Cottage Home St., Chinatown; Wed., July 10, 9 p.m.; ticket price TBA. (213) 290-4752, humanresourcesla.com.

Wed., July 10, 9-10 p.m., 2013

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