[RADIOLAB INTRO]

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: So this is a blood that's made in Europe that I really enjoy.

JAD ABUMRAD: This is Christien Tinsley. He's a bloodsmith.

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: It's ...

ROBERT KRULWICH: Like a fine wine.

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: It is like a fine wine. I found this blood, and I used it on the film Passion of the Christ. And I loved the color of it and the consistency of it.

JAD: What's it called, by the way? What's ...

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: Well, this one is called Bloody Real Blood. Bloody Real Blood.

ROBERT: [laughs] That is not the most imaginative title.

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: They don't get creative.

ROBERT: Bloody Real Blood.

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: We have another one ...

JAD: Christien pulled out a few more.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: For example, you got a couple bottles right here.
ROBERT: By the way, we visited him in his special effects warehouse.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: Right here in Hollywood.
JAD: What are these right here?
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: This one right here is called Dried Blood Dark.
JAD: Pretty self-explanatory.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: And then we have one that's called Drying Blood Fresh. And this is made by a completely different company. They all have their advantages. Some are really good at color and flow consistency. There's different viscosities in the blood. And ...
JAD: We went through all of it with Christien, how sometimes you want to make the blood a little ...
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: Thicker, so it flows out of the skin a little bit slower.
JAD: Sometimes you need it to splash around, or sometimes you need ...
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: More opaque blood, black blood, clear blood, green blood, vibrant blood, dark blood.
ROBERT: Do they have catalogs?
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: There are catalogs for blood.
JAD: And how, you know, if you can't find what you need in a catalog, you can take someone else's blood and tweak it.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: We might throw a material called Methocel into it. It's a thickening agent, very similar to what they use in jelly donuts. We use silicas.
JAD: And at a certain point, as we were talking through all this stuff, it just felt like we weren't even talking about blood anymore.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: Everything is synthetic.
JAD: It's just a bunch of chemicals that had nothing to do with the inside of a human body.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: Yeah.
JAD: But then, a funny thing happened.
JAD: Now when would you use, say, the condom full of blood here?
JAD: Christien had walked us over to a table where he laid out a bunch of his tools.
JAD: When would that come into ...?
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: Well, yeah. What you're seeing here is you're seeing a table full of tricks. We have the bladder on the knife.
JAD: And he showed us this trick knife. Super dull, but on the back of it, it had this little tube.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: And the tube runs along the back end and around the edge of the knife.
JAD: Hidden from view. And how the trick works is you make like you're slashing someone, and right at that moment, you squeeze this little syringe full of fake blood that then goes through the tube and onto the blade of the knife. And I must say, it's the chintziest trick I've ever seen.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: But it's a classic approach. Somebody gets cut on film, you're doing ...
JAD: But I thought, "Let's just try it."
JAD: Can I ...
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: A surgery scene, where ...
JAD: Can I slice Robert across the face?

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: You certainly can. So what we'll do ...
JAD: So he fills the syringe with Bloody Real Blood. I get in position, holding the knife.

JAD: It's not because I hate you right now.
ROBERT: I know.
JAD: It's because we're doing a ritual. We're gonna be blood brothers. Okay, ready? Here we go. One, two, three.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: You got the camera?
ELLEN HORNE: Wait, wait.
JAD: And this is the fakest trick I have ever seen. I think I've said that already, but it's worth repeating. It's so fake. And yet ...

CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: There we go. Give it a good steady squeeze. Okay?
JAD: ... when the Bloody Real Blood comes out ...
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: And that's basically ... [laughs]
JAD: Oh, that was thrilling and terrifying. I feel ...
JAD: And I was like, "Why am I getting woozy?"
JAD: Oh my God. My hand is shaking.
ROBERT: Did you feel anything?
ELLEN: I feel light-headed when I see it.
JAD: Ellen, too.
ELLEN: I guess you can't be very ...
JAD: Okay, now I really am feeling light-headed. That ...
JAD: I actually had to sit down.
ELLEN: Reactive to ...
ROBERT: Oh wow!
JAD: Oh my God.
ROBERT: It really looks real!
JAD: And it was like, whatever. But it just didn't make any sense.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: If we want a continuous flow of blood, what we might do is we might just do a slow release. And the blood is continuously flowing.
JAD: Today on Radiolab ...
ROBERT: Continuously flowing information about ...
JAD: Blood.
ROBERT: Real Bloody Real Blood.
JAD: Royal blood.
ROBERT: Bad blood.
JAD: Young blood.
ROBERT: And blood money.
CHRISTIEN TINSLEY: You know, it's business.
JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. Let's get bloody!
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I never thought I would become a terrorist. [laughs] That's what I became. That's what they called me.]
JAD: So we're gonna start with a story about that guy you just heard.
ROBERT: His name was Barton Beneš. He was an artist working in New York in the West Village in Manhattan in the '70s, '80s and early '90s. Pretty successful.
JAD: And famously social.
JOE LOVETT: Oh my God.
JAD: Not by any means your normal terrorist.
JOE LOVETT: I mean, he was just the most charming, welcoming, open, beguiling person you could possibly imagine.
JAD: Although given the story we're about to tell, he was also a bit of a prankster.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I deal with fear, people's fears.]
JOE LOVETT: And he was nuts, which was a lot of fun.
BARTON BENES: And by the way, that is Barton's best friend, Joe.
JOE LOVETT: Joe Lovett, director and producer. We were very, very close friends. We talked almost every day.
JAD: And Joe says they actually began most days by calling each other up and hurling insults.
JOE LOVETT: Until we were laughing hysterically.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: You going?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Lovett: Yeah.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: Really?]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Lovett: Really.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: Am I that lucky? [laughs]]
ROBERT: The basis of Barton's art was stuff. He would find stuff, and then describe it or mount it. Actually, he had an enormous collection of stuff in his apartment.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: Hey, welcome to the catacombs. My 10-room mansion. This is the cabinet of curiosities.]
JOE LOVETT: It was a magnificent place. I did a film on it, actually. When you walk into it ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: My African collections.]
JOE LOVETT: It was filled with drawers of spiders.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: A bowl from Pamplona.]
JOE LOVETT: Voodoo totems.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I even have an outhouse here.]
JOE LOVETT: Desiccated animals, beaded pieces of bears and wolves and birds.
JAD: In one drawer, he had human ashes. In another ...
JOE LOVETT: And ...
ROBERT: Fat from a liposuction.
JOE LOVETT: Yeah.
JAD: Old poop.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: 25 million year old feces, fossilized.]
LAUREL REUTER: I mean, anything he could find that was weird.
ROBERT: That's Laurel Reuter, one of Barton's friends.
LAUREL REUTER: That was taboo.
ROBERT: For example, in another cabinet he had Adolf Hitler's teaspoon.
JAD: A severed human toe?
JOE LOVETT: Someone had been walking across—it was either Brooklyn or the Williamsburg Bridge.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: And he called me up and he said, "I found a toe."]
JOE LOVETT: And they thought, "Well, Barton would be the person to give it to."

JAD: [laughs]
LAUREL REUTER: He mummified it and kept it.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: People do bring you things.]
JOE LOVETT: Oh, people sent him Madonna's underpants.
JAD: What?
JOE LOVETT: Yes. People sent him Nancy Reagan's lipstick on a napkin from Texas, I think. Somebody sent him Sylvester Stallone's urine.
JAD: Ooh!
ROBERT: How did they collect that?
JOE LOVETT: They cared so much about Barton that when Stallone peed in this urinal in a restaurant and didn't flush, they went and got it.
JAD: And although his apartment was filled with every different taboo, button-pushing, weirdness that you could imagine ...
ROBERT: The one area he didn't touch, at least not at first, was the thing that haunted his life the most.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I never knew what to do about AIDS. It was a hard subject for me. You know, I was positive and my boyfriend had died, and it was something I couldn't deal with. I couldn't make art about it.]
ROBERT: But then one day ...
LAUREL REUTER: One day, he was in his kitchen cooking. He was a good cook, and he always cooked when we came to visit.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I was in the kitchen cutting parsley, and I cut a piece of my finger.]
LAUREL REUTER: He cut himself.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: And blood went all over the kitchen.]
LAUREL REUTER: And he went into this huge panic.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: And I was so freaked out.]
ROBERT: The story goes Barton immediately thought ...
LAUREL REUTER: Oh my god, I'm gonna get AIDS!
ROBERT: But then in the next blink, he thought, "Well, wait a second."
LAUREL REUTER: Oh, I already have it. It's my own blood. It can't hurt me.
JAD: Wait, what?
JOE LOVETT: He sort of forgot that he had it himself.
JAD: But wait. I don't understand that, though. So he had AIDS.
JOE LOVETT: Oh yeah.
JAD: He knew he had AIDS.
JOE LOVETT: Oh yeah.
JAD: Still, the sight of his own HIV-infected blood, his own blood, was so viscerally terrifying to him that he ran out of the room.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I went and got rubber gloves and bleach. And I thought, "This is nuts. This is my blood. My kitchen." And I'm going through all this craziness. And that's when I thought, "If I have this fear, you can imagine what other—the fear that other people have."]
JOE LOVETT: You know, this is the very, very beginning of the epidemic. In the early days—we were just talking about this last night, as a matter of fact—we had a friend who was hospitalized at New York Hospital. You know, they left his tray at the door. The medical people wouldn't go in.
JAD: They were scared to go in?
JOE LOVETT: Terrified. Everybody was terrified.
ROBERT: And I remember they used to have these things on the door.
JOE LOVETT: Mm-hmm.
ROBERT: "Beware."
JOE LOVETT: AIDS contaminated.
ROBERT: Because of the blood.
JOE LOVETT: Yeah.
JAD: It's hard to overstate just how frightening blood was in this moment.
JOE LOVETT: Nobody knew what anything was going on. There were conspiracy theories. There were thoughts that people were being poisoned.
JAD: All anyone knew was that people were dying, and it was because of something in the blood.
JOE LOVETT: You'd hear about it happening to someone, and then you'd hear about it happening to a friend of a friend. And then it would happen to a friend, and then it was your best friend. And then it was your other best friend, and your other best friend, and your other best friend. Unbelievable. We must have lost easily half of our gay friends. Easily half.

JAD: So Barton ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I never knew what to do about AIDS. And it was something I couldn't deal with.]
JAD: ... when he cuts his hand open in the kitchen, sees the blood, freaks out, and thinks, "Wow. There is a strange power to this blood." Just the sight of it.
ROBERT: Well, he has an idea.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: And I start making these weapons.]
JAD: The idea sounded simple.
JOE LOVETT: A series of works called Lethal Weapons.
JAD: Except they weren't very lethal-looking.
ROBERT: Like, he took a little toy gun.
LAUREL REUTER: A child's squirt gun.
ROBERT: One of those candy yellow toy guns.
LAUREL REUTER: And he put his own blood inside of the squirt gun.
JOE LOVETT: He had pacifiers with blood. Baby pacifiers with blood. Nursing bottles with blood.
ROBERT: One of those clown lapel flowers that squirt water? Well, his squirted blood.
JOE LOVETT: Atomizers, perfume atomizers with blood.
JAD: You can go ...
JOE LOVETT: Yep. Exactly.
JAD: Now you couldn't really squirt yourself with his HIV-infected blood, because the work was put in these glass boxes, but the invitation was clear: squeeze me!
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: I deal with fear. People's fears. [laughs]]
JOE LOVETT: And this one is what he called a Poison Dart.
JAD: Joe has one of the Lethal Weapons in his living room.
JOE LOVETT: What it is, is it's a hypodermic needle.
ROBERT: Very thin and long.
JOE LOVETT: That had been filled up with his blood.
ROBERT: And then he put these delicate little ...
JOE LOVETT: Feathers from an African bird.
JAD: On the back of the needle to make it look like one of those poison darts from an old James Bond movie.
JOE LOVETT: Right. [laughs]
JAD: So Barton initially shows the work to Laurel, who mounts an exhibition at her gallery in North Dakota. And then ...
LAUREL REUTER: Then the show, it was—it went to Sweden.
JAD: And that's where things got interesting.
INGER TORNBERG: It was extraordinary. [laughs]
ROBERT: That's Inger Tornberg. She ran the gallery in Lund, in Sweden, where the Lethal Weapons landed. And she says within a day or two of the show opening ...
INGER TORNBERG: The authorities were here telling me to close the doors. That by law ...
JAD: They had to.
INGER TORNBERG: For the safety of people coming into the gallery. We felt ashamed.
JAD: She thought, "This is Lund. We're a university town. We should know better."
ROBERT: Well, wait a second. Did you know for certainty that their fears were ridiculous?
INGER TORNBERG: No. I mean, HIV, the virus doesn't go away that quickly. In the beginning, we were scared, but we can't avoid fear in the world.
ROBERT: So she told the authorities ...
INGER TORNBERG: Take it easy. Don't do anything.
JAD: No one's gonna get hurt. The blood is behind glass.
INGER TORNBERG: But the other thing that happened is after the ban, flyers came out saying that we were selling HIV-contaminated blood by the liter.
ROBERT: [laughs] Whose flyers were these?
INGER TORNBERG: The morning and evening newspapers.
JAD: Wow!
INGER TORNBERG: We didn't know where the information came from. Must have come from the health authority.
JAD: But suddenly, she says, the whole town of Lund exploded. She had people coming into the gallery, yelling ...
INGER TORNBERG: This is not art.
JAD: ... "How dare you?"
INGER TORNBERG: And you sell it for money? What is this? We were overwhelmed.
ROBERT: So they struck a deal with the health authorities.
INGER TORNBERG: A compromise.
JAD: They said, "All right. Here's what we'll do. We'll take the work, any of the work that sells, and we'll stick it in ..."
INGER TORNBERG: An oven. Heat all them up.
ROBERT: At 160 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours.
INGER TORNBERG: And thus kill everything possible.
JAD: That's—can I just say that's awesome? That's ...
ROBERT: Weren't you worried that the paper would curl? Or the glass would ...
INGER TORNBERG: Well, the plastic would melt in the oven.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barton Beneš: And then each work had a certificate saying it was safe to sell. I never thought I would become a terrorist. That's what I became. They called it The AIDS Horror Show.]
JAD: All right. So the interesting thing—I don't know if you felt this way, but over the last few decades, AIDS has become a little bit less horrible.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Just a little.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: So you would think those Lethal Weapons pieces, like that poison dart that we saw in Joe's living room, that it would lose its punch a little bit.
ROBERT: After all these years.
JAD: Yeah, because that's what happens to a lot of political art. After you take it out of its moment, it just kind of fizzles.
ROBERT: Right.
JAD: But weirdly that that doesn't happen with that piece.
JOE LOVETT: I still think it's an extremely powerful piece. And I think all those blood pieces are. They're really shocking.
JAD: Well, what's the power now?
JOE LOVETT: Well, I think blood is powerful. And so when you look at Barton's blood pieces, whether they're AIDS blood or not, they're still blood. It's tinkering with a life force.
JAD: I mean, he's right. Like, you see that blood, that's a man's viscera. It's not just art. And that guy's gone, so it's kind of ghostly in a way.
LAUREL REUTER: We had a wonderful goodbye.
JAD: That's Laurel again.
LAUREL REUTER: He said, "I'm dying, and I wish my friends would stop trying to manage it. They tell me I have to—can't drink, and I can't do this, and I can't do that." And someone sent him a scale because he'd gained too much weight, and he was furious. And so I said, "Well, let's have a bottle of wine." And we drank a bottle that night, and we talked about everything, saying goodbye, but mostly laughing.
JAD: Laurel says that even at the end, when he was in really bad shape ...
LAUREL REUTER: He—he was still like a little child. His point of view of the world was full of glee and delight.
JAD: And that's kind of maybe the thing that sneaks up on you in the end, is that as you're looking at the blood, it's scary, and then suddenly, it's hilarious. You're like, "Oh, no, no. He's making a joke." But then it's also scary. It's a scary joke, but it's funny. And scary.
ROBERT: As if the thing that scares you most is also so absurdly frightening that you laugh at the same time.
JAD: Yeah. As Inger Tornberg put it, Barton had kind of made himself ...
INGER TORNBERG: Sort of skinless, in some way.
ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Hmm.
INGER TORNBERG: It's a very generous offer to anybody who is receptive enough to take it.
ROBERT: So the man himself melts away, and all we've got left is a patch of his blood that says, "Boo!" And, "Come laugh with me."
JAD: Before we go to break, big thanks to Kelsey Padgett for production help on that piece.
[LISTENER: This is Chad Kaneky calling you from my living room in Cincinnati, Ohio. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation, and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks.]

-30-

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.