Sunday, 20 September 2009

ART AND AIDS

'AIDS art' is essentially an American invention. It has now manifested itself in a large number of different locations, but is almost invariably based on a model of artistic activity that evolved in the United States - one which that was a response to the impact made by the epidemic on sections of American society. This means, among other things, that the best-known artworks connected with AIDS have nearly always had homosexual themes. The social and economic effect of heterosexually transmitted AIDS in Africa has, by contrast, played a distinctly minor role. AIDS art enterprises in Africa - for example, in South Africa with embroideries made by Zulu women; in Togo with t-shirts printed with messages addressed to young people - have inevitably seemed like paler copies of things that had already been done in the United States. They have also, much more than is the case with their American exemplars, seemed like bourgeois enterprises with no lasting social impact at any deep level. This was not so in the United States, where artists, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s, did undoubtedly call attention to things the government of the time was attempting to ignore.

In America, art about AIDS was from the beginning didactic, and also from the beginning polemical. It tried to enlighten the public about the true nature of the epidemic. It protested against prejudice and sexual stereotyping, and at the same time it tried to put pressure on a reluctant Reagan administration to do something both to help victims of this new and deadly disease and to provide resources to find a cure. At a secondary level, it was also an act of mourning.

The rise of AIDS art coincided with the rise to power of the so-called 'rainbow coalition' in the American art world. While it was the German artist Joseph Beuys who originally discovered the effectiveness of museums and large exhibitions of contemporary art such as the Cassel Documenta as platforms for minority political causes, it was the United States, with its penchant for single-issue political agitation, that made the fate of minorities a dominant theme in the world of contemporary art. This development culminated more than a decade ago, with the 'politically correct' Whitney Biennial of 1991. A prominent feature of this was an 'AIDS timeline' devised and presented by the radical artistic group General Idea. However, AIDS was by no means the sole theme of this exhibition. In addition to art that tried to deal with AIDS, it presented work by feminists, by African Americans, and by Latino artists.

The timeline was not something that appeared spontaneously. It was the culmination of a relatively slow process. The disease was first reported in 1981 and there had already been plays and films about it by the time the radical homosexual group ACT UP created an AIDS emblem, with the slogan "Silence = Death". In the same year, 1987, an offshoot of ACT UP created an installation entitled "Let the Record Show" in the window of the New Museum of Contemporary Art on Lower Broadway - the first really visible link between the growing protest campaign and the world of contemporary art. This was not, however, nearly such a publicity-grabbing manifestation as the debut of the Names Project Quilt on Capitol Mall in Washington, which took place in the same year. The Names Project, where victims were commemorated by individual squares sewn by friends and relatives, eventually grew to nearly 11,000 items by the time of its second Washington showing in 1989. It was significant that it was a largely populist, amateur effort, rather than something generated by professional artists.

1989 also saw the first really significant AIDS art exhibit - "Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing", at Artists Space in New York. The catalogue featured an angry essay by the artist David Wojnarowicz, himself an AIDS victim, attacking the role of the Catholic Church. As a result, the National Endowment for the Arts withheld, but then was forced to reinstate, a grant promised to the exhibit.

In the same year the photographer Mapplethorpe died. Mapplethorpe's retrospective exhibition, held at the Whitney Museum in 1988, though not officially an AIDS event, in many ways functioned as such, since the photographer was already widely known to be suffering from the disease. His final 'Self Portrait' , which shows him ravaged by AIDS, holding a walking stick with a an ivory skull for a knob, is one of the best known images linked to the early years of the epidemic.

This portrait is in artistic terms very conservative. It borrows its composition from Old Masters such as Van Dyck. What made it seem radical were the circumstances surrounding it. This is something that is often true of photography in general. It is also something that tends to be true of separatist gay art. What I mean by this is art that, like the drawings of Tom of Finland, addresses itself very directly to the gay community through its emphasis on homoerotic content.

In a sense, one of the things that the AIDS epidemic did was to pull art with openly homosexual content towards the centre - to break down the wall of the ghetto that had hitherto contained it. Part of Mapplethorpe's own artistic ancestry can be found in this area - not only in the photography of George Platt Lynes, but in images made by the gay soft-porn studios that flourished in Los Angeles during the 1940s and 1950s - Bruce of L.A. often foreshadows Mapplethorpe, and so does Bob Mizer of the Athletic Model Guild [who was also a source for David Hockney].

Many of the most affecting and effective of the artworks that refer to AIDS are based on on standard Christian archetypes, which is somewhat ironic, given the longstanding quarrel between AIDS activists and the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and their equally bitter quarrel with the leaders of a number of Protestant Fundamentalist denominations. Examples are two series, one American and one Swedish, based on the iconography of the Stations of the Cross. One, made up of paintings, is the work of the New Mexico-based artist Delmas Howe. The other, created by the Swedish lesbian photographer Elizabeth Ohlson, and one of the few really striking instances of AIDS art produced in Europe,consists of carefully staged photographic tableaux. Ohlson's 'Ecce Homo' series, completed in 1998, is peopled by members of Stockholm's gay community. A touring exhibition in Sweden was seen by more than 250,000 people. One venue, at the invitation of the Archbishop, was Uppsala Cathedral, Sweden's premier church. The presence of the exhibition at Uppsala led to the cancellation of a proposed meeting between the Archbishop and Pope John Paul II.

Howe's series, completed in 2001, has recently been the subject of a documentary film, and his images, like those by Ohlson, are easily available on the Web.[1]

Both Howe and Ohlson put particular stress on the image of the Pietà - in their versions the Christ-figure becomes a universal symbol of those suffering from an incurable malady, who are at the same time scorned by much of the world for their misfortune.

Homosexual artists are not the only ones to have turned to established archetypes of this sort in recent times. They have also, for example, been employed by feminists, for rather similar reasons. The archetype, placed in a gay or feminist context is both familiar and shocking: it communicates meaning with unrivalled efficiency.

Artists making reference to the AIDS epidemic have also tried other strategies. Both the British dup Gilbert & George and the American painter Ross Bleckner have employed imagery derived from science - samples of blood or sperm seen through a high-powered microscope. Bleckner has also made use of a slightly unspecific imagery of chalices and flowers, with connotations of exaltation and mourning.

There is also the purely Conceptual approach adopted by the Cuban-born artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who succumbed to AIDS in 1996. Many of his installation pieces were made in memory of his lover Ross, who died before him.  A typical example of his work is 'Untitled: Placebo', a piece where sweets [candy to Americans] are spread out on the floor and the public is encouraged to take them one at at time. The gradual diminution of the candy symbolise the gradual, inexorable diminution of the life of someone suffering from AIDS.

The trouble with this, as with Bleckner's chalices, is that the imagery requires just a little too much explanation to be really effective. In an interview given very shortly before his death, Gonzalez-Torres spoke about the pleasure he got from a showing of 'Placebo' at the Hirshhorn Museum, and institution more generally associated with figurative painting and sculpture:

" When I was at Hirshhorn and saw the show, there was one particular guard who was standing with the big candy floor piece Untitled (Placebo), and she was amazing. There was this suburban white, middle class mother, with two young sons who came in the room and in thirty seconds, this woman - who was a black, maybe church-going civil servant in Washington, in the middle of all this reactionary pressure about the arts - there she was explaining to this mother and kids about AIDS and what this piece represented, what a placebo was, and how there was no cure and so on. Then the boys started to fill their pockets with candies and she sort of looked at them like a school mistress and said, "You're only supposed to take one." Just as their faces fell and they tossed back all but a few she suddenly smiled again ad said, "Well maybe two." And she won them over completely! The whole thing worked because then they got the piece, they got the interaction, they got the generosity and they got her. It was great."[2]

A touching story in itself - but also, in my opinion, one that gives the game away by demonstrating how inert the artistic element in all this actually is. It is the relationship between the museum guard and the group of visitors that is dynamic. And of course, what was actually there, what Gonlez-Torres contribution to the occasion, could easily have been the subject of a large number of other, quite different explanations.

While AIDS art currently struggles with, and here it is on a footing with many other varieties of contemporary art, is how to manage content - how to communicate both facts and emotion without at the same time surrendering its claim to avant-garde originality. This is one reason why essentially amateur enterprises, like the Names Project Quilt, often seem more effective than the work produced by professional artists.