Activism, Art and AIDS

Artist Ross Blecker emphasized the importance of politicizing art, not only in order to give it relevance and staying power, but also to “make it speak to his own movement”. The time is the late 1980s and the movement is AIDS. Once considered, depicted and categorized as a socially undesirable homosexual epidemic the work of activist group ACT UP sought out to change the language of AIDS. A language plagued by society, government and the depressing, elegiac and all too personal accounts portrayed in art by such artists as Robert Mapplethorp and Ross Blecker. ACT UP began a campaign of information and mobilization in order to expose the social crises surrounding the epidemic such as the stigma, discrimination, lack of government support and the violation of fundamental human rights. A campaign, that reconstructed the idea of AIDS as a universal issue and not an issue subjected to race, gender, sexual orientation or class: “AIDS intersects with and requires a critical rethinking of all of culture: of language and representation, science and medicine, health and illness, sex and death, the public and private realms…even “ordinary” heterosexual men will have to learn that AIDS is an issue for them, and not simply because they might be susceptible to “contagion””(Crimp 148).

These three posters are just a few examples ACT UP and the later formed Gran Fury’s Activist Art. Engaged art that was meant to shock and appall, but more importantly, to educate and spark a revolution not to transcend the epidemic but to end it. (Crimp 144). I am in full support for act activism and cultural activism and its pragmatic, urgent and in-your-face knowledge to advance the importance of a movement, but when does this ‘art’ become too much? Gran Fury explained their approach: “To be heard above a roar of misinformation and in the face of so much indifference, shouting may be necessary. The goal is not to produce museum masterpieces but to save lives, by whatever means at an artist's disposal. Humor As a Catharsis” (Kimmelman), I can’t help but equate Gran Fury’s exploitation and urgency to the propaganda art 1960’s. The question here is when does art cross the line from practical and informative over to slander and disrespect? Or does it even matter, is the point of activist art to demolish any sort of boundaries in order to confront the social practices and crisis and demand a universal social movement to reconstruct a language and save lives.

· Crimp, Douglas. “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism.” Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 141-149.

· Kimmelman, Michael “Bitter Harvest: Aids and the Arts” New York Times. 19 March 1981. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/19/arts/bitter-harvest-aids-and-the-arts.html?pagewanted=1

· Daily Serving: an international forum for the contemporary visual arts “ACT UP and Harvard Art Museum” 15 December 2009. http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://dailyserving.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Gran_Fury_2.jpg&imgrefurl=http://dailyserving.com/2009/12/act-up-at-harvard-art-museum