By Jude Jones
To commemorate World AIDS Day 2024, GAY45 Acting Editor-in-Chief Jude Jones reflects on the history of HIV/AIDS art and reflects on what it means to live through the “end of AIDS”, what it means when we say the AIDS crisis is still beginning, and what it means for us to live with the ghosts of HIV’s lost generation.
Simulation of Gregg Bordowitz, “The Aids Crisis is still beginning”, 2001, at the Palais de Tokyo.
Defiant, AIDS activist Gregg Bordowitz’s 2001 banner declares, “The AIDS Crisis Is Still Beginning.” I saw it for the first time at the Palais de Tokyo’s Exposed exhibition in Paris in 2023, a ruminative assembling of art from artists who had lived with, and often times died from, HIV/AIDS.
But Bordowitz’s mantra arrived at a different time from much of the work on display. Whereas many of the exhibition’s heaviest hitters – Derek Jarman, Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Félix González-Torres – had been producing their works during that period we most often bracket the AIDS crisis into, from around the start of the 1980s to the early 1990s, Bordowitz was writing at a different time with a new, millenarian logic. He was writing after the medical introduction of AZT, combination therapy, and other medical treatments that pacified some earlier anxieties, prolonged the projected lifespan of those living with HIV/AIDS. After, too, the ceaseless efforts of HIV/AIDS activists had diffused vital knowledge about safer sex, clean drug use, and other preventative methods. AIDS was no longer the death knell it was once, no longer the uncontrollable killer of its earlier years.
HIV, combined with international apathy toward its proliferation, had created an apocalyptic tone for many earlier artists. Sometimes, this apocalypticism was experienced as an individual confrontation with death, such as that staged by American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in his 1988 Self Portrait. Gaunt-faced and unflinching, the photographer – once so renowned for his beauty – stares at observer’s intrusive eyes, clasping a staff headed with a small metal skull, that classical, Christological signifier of death and Judasian betrayal.
This apocalypticism was often expressed in collective and societal terms too, especially foregrounded in a genealogy of American-Jewish AIDS activists – most notably Larry Kramer (The Normal Heart, 1985) – who described the pandemic as a holocaustic event.
David Wojnarowicz represented the moment through subtlety and metaphor. Untitled (Buffalo) (1988-9), one of his most famous prints, would simply clip a museum diorama of buffalo being herded off a cliff, reflecting the way he believed the US government had wilfully let gay men – as well as other marginalised populations – tumble into the void, had indeed pushed them toward it. ‘IF I DIE OF AIDS,’ read the back of a pink-triangled denim jacket the artist once famously wore, birthing a motto appropriated by activists for generations to come, ‘FORGET BURIAL – JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA.’ A couple years later, he made a similar musing in his memoir Close to the Knives (1991): ‘I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend, or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to Washington D.C. and blast through the gates of the White House […] and dump their lifeless form on the front steps.’
Robert Mapplethorpe, “Self Portrait”, 1988. Credited to Tate Copyright and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
David Wojnarowicz, “Untitled (Buffalo)”, 1988. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York.
Wojnarowicz photographed in his famous “If I Die” jacket, 1988.
Keith Haring, “Apocalypse II”, 1988. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.
Others moved more directly to the point. Street art icon Keith Haring drew on his childhood spent in the evangelical Jesus Movement to incorporate a Christian dimension to his visions of doom. Translating William S. Boroughs’s poem Apocalypse into a visual silkscreen of the same name, he depicted devil-headed sperms, nuclear clouds, and demonic figures evocative of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights to represent the quagmire of contemporary queerness.
British artist Derek Jarman also used theological messaging to condemn both state and church in his artwork. His 1986 film The Last of England, which depicted a dystopian, post-apocalyptic vision of Margaret Thatcher’s anti-queer Britain, was followed in 1990 by The Garden, in which he reimagined the biblical New Testament as a tale of two HIV-positive gay men’s persecution and eventual crucifixion.
Righteous anger was another emotional undercurrent of these cultural products. In his painted works, Jarman would score and scratch his painted canvases to kinetically perform his rage as he slowly lost his eyesight and vitality to illness. Activists would transmute their anger into public statements that blurred the lines between protest and performance. Most famously, ACT UP New York held “die ins” across the 1980s, which saw activists populate the streets will their prostrate bodies, holding signs saying they were “killed by the FDA” or “killed by the system.”
Performance artist Ron Athey translated this anger into transgressive rituals of self-mutilation and self-harm, literally baring his HIV-positive blood for the world to see on stage. In 1994, he provoked the art establishment by using blood, a cultural signifier of AIDS transmission, as his medium, suspending (HIV-negative) blood-drench paper towels over an audience at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Centre. The piece was intended to challenge the hysteric cultural stigmatisation of HIV-positive blood, however became the heart of a controversy over what art the US government chose to financially support and was attacked by right-wing Christian senators.
Still from Derek Jarman, “The Garden”, 1990
An ACT UP “die in” in 1985, photographed by Tim Clarey. Courtesy to him and AP.
Ron Athey performing his piece “Self Obliteration” in 2007, photographed by Thierry Ehrmann.
Athey gave his performance right during those years of transition, when medical advancements were relaxing the earlier dread of the AIDS crisis. Artists now felt more broadband to experiment with and challenge stigmas that were constructed in AIDS’s worser years. American artist Barton Lidice Beneš took cues from Athey with his Lethal Weapons series (1992-7), in which he filled quotidian objects – perfume bottles, water guns – with his HIV-positive blood.
However, there was also a celebratory tone to much of the mid-90s, as gay men took back to their nightclubs and dancefloors and cruising spots, hedonistic spaces that the AIDS crisis had robbed from them, right as the post-Stonewall political lot had started to normalise them to a degree. ‘It was like the gay community was putting a big middle finger up to AIDS,’ photographer Stuart Linden Rhodes said when I spoke to him about the phenomenon earlier this year, ‘[And] that was my job, taking pictures of people having a good time.’
What had, to Kramer or Jarman’s generation, seemed an apocalyptic and holocaustic event was, by the mid-90s, turning into something with liveable solutions and a foreseeable end. In France, HIV-positive author Guillaume Dustan wrote about his entry into Paris’s gay nightclubs and circuit party scene, taking drugs and having endless sexual encounters in this ‘wonderful world where everybody had slept with everybody.’ The euphoric, joyful mood was an important one in response to the existential dread that had, for around a decade, had defined how gay men lived their lives. However, as activist groups and other commentators were swift to point out, medical progressions did not mean the end of AIDS at all. ACT UP Paris went so far to publish a scathing, anti-Dustan op-ed in their press releases for his epicurean politics, calling him the leader of a ‘risk-taking religion’ growing in the gay community.
Barton Lidice Benes, “Lethal Weapons” (1992-7). Courtesy of the artist.
Stuart Linden Rhodes, “Untitled”, 1993. Courtesy of the artist.
A poster circulated by ACT UP Paris in 1999, denouncing Guillaume Dustan. Translation: “Fucking Without Condoms Makes You Cum?”. Courtesy of ACT UP Paris.
It is at this burgeoning nexus point that Bordowitz artistically intervened. A lifelong activist, he had attended ACT UP’s first demonstration in 1987 and was a devoted member from that point onwards, helping launch the association’s video programme, DIVA (Damned Interfering Video Activists). In 1993, he released the experimental film Fast Trip, Long Drop, in which he spliced archival footage from ACT UP’s activities with recordings of his campy alter ego Alter Allesman (Yiddish for “old everyman”) hosting the late-night talkshow “Thriving with AIDS.” ‘Some people are living with AIDS,’ Altman declared with a tangible fury, ‘and some people are dying from it.’ ‘I identify as my illness. The knowledge of my infection coupled with the careful monitoring of the state of my immune system forces me to face a simple fact: I will die.’
Bordowitz inherited from his earlier activistic pursuits the righteous anger, the political urgency, that observers reckoned was lost in gay activist circles once HIV had been “defeated.” He also objected from a philosophical perspective. As a student of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, he rejected eschatological and progressivist forms of historicism, instead proposing a metaphysical interpretation of history as messy, intwined, and overlapping. Just as philosophers from Benjamin and Bloch’s school had objected to Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of the “end of history” after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in that same decade, Bordowitz philosophically objected to the “end of AIDS” some seemed keen to declare by the mid-90s.
One glaring problem with proclaiming the end of AIDS was the gaudy Western-centrism of such a position. If new medications ameliorated living conditions for people living with AIDS from the 1990s onwards, the people able to access such treatments predominantly remained a White, male, middle-class, and metropolitan bunch. And even then, the rollout was not perfect. In 1991, French bourgeois writer Hervé Guibert had written of his perils acquiring AZT in his autobiographical The Compassion Protocol, in which he steal prescriptions from a dead dancer in order to survive, then travels to Morocco for last-ditch pseudo-medical treatment.
Still from Gregg Bordowitz, “Fast Trip, Long Drip”, 1993. Courtesy of the artist.
Still from Gregg Bordowitz, “Fast Trip, Long Drip”, 1993. Courtesy of the artist.
Still from Hervé Guibert, “Modesty and Shame”, 1991. The documentary-film is considered the sequel to his book, “The Compassion Protocol”. Courtesy of the artist.
Today, as developed Western countries optimistically prepare for the endemic eradication of HIV/AIDS, many other countries are still being left behind. Today, while only 2.3million people in Europe and North America are living with HIV, this number more than doubles when analysing cases in Africa and Asia. For people living in countries such as South Africa, Eswatini, Lesotho, and Botswana, where HIV prevalence rates among adults remain at around 20% or above, it feels difficult to proclaim the pandemic’s end.
Artwork has sparsely responded to these inequalities. At the Palais de Tokyo’s Exposed exhibition, one featured art collective was the Bambanani Women’s Group who presented their “Body Maps”, pieces made by South African women living with HIV/AIDS and confessionally documenting the illness’s effects on their bodies. The results are sombre reflections on motherhood and remembrance from a group often doubly kept out of AIDS art history as both residents of the global South and women. ‘She died on April 1999 […],’ reads one, reflecting on the loss of the artist’s infant daughter to HIV, ‘she was found positive. And me too […] I felt so badly […] because I had breastfed her because I was ignorant about my status.’
Queer South African photographer Zanele Muholi is one contemporary compatriot who has also captured, if sometimes unspokenly, the ongoing consequences of the pandemic in the country. Their series Only Half the Picture – intimate portraits of bodies intertwined, a sort of contemporary equivalent to Nan Goldin’s earlier pandemic-era series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – counteracts negative narratives around people living with HIV to show their humanity and beauty, the other half of the picture.
Bambanani Women’s Group, “Body Map” (unspecified date). Courtesy of Bambanani Women’s Group.
Bambanani Women’s Group, “Body Map” (unspecified date). Courtesy of Bambanani Women’s Group.
Zanele Muholi, “Only Half the Picture”, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.
Such work shows how the AIDS crisis is still beginning in a global way, how its stories are still alive in much of the world. However, if the notion of the “end of AIDS” is proven flawed in this literal way through a widened, decolonial perspective to AIDS art, there are also more metaphysical dimensions to consider too.
In 1993, French philosopher Jacques Derrida – like Bordowitz, a student of Benjamin and Bloch – published perhaps the most influential response to Fukuyama’s End of History, his Specters of Marx. Arguing for a perspective of history that is not linear but palimpsestic, that is sensitively informed by the ghosts of the past, he cultivated a non-linear politics of memory and hauntedness, whereby we live entangled with our spectres.
Much art from beyond the nominal “end of AIDS” has treated the subject with a similar sensibility, finding ways to live with the pandemic’s stolen generation. As early as the 1990s, Félix González-Torres had established a potential paradigm with his installation Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) (1991), in which he transformed the body of his deceased lover into a pile of wrapped candies, inviting museum-goers to take a single candy, a small piece of Ross, as they passed through. As such, Ross’s body slowly shrivelled with each guest’s coming and going, allegorising not only the physical effects of AIDS, but the psychic effects of death, too: a loved one’s memory slowly fading, the struggle to remember as the saccharine taste of life gradually dissipates from one’s tongue.
American artist Shimon Attie would reproduce some of this with his 1998 Untitled Memory images, in which he fleetingly projected photographs of old friends and lovers onto intimate spaces, such as apartments and bedspreads. Manhattan countercultural icon Agosto Machado made memorialisation and loss something more material in contrast, creating shrines to those he loved and lost by assembling photographs, personal objects, and other various mementos together in sacred union. Yet Machado, by living with his dead, simultaneously transforms death into a metaphysics, something spiritual rather than physical, biological, and finite. ‘The most positive things are the wonderful times we had together. I do not grieve those awful experiences of death… I can witness the transition with celebration because you’re moving onto the next life.’
Fé1lix González-Torres, “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)”, 1991. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.
Shimon Attie, “Untitled Memory (Projection of Axel H.)”, 1998. Courtesy of the artist.
Agosto Machado, “Shrine (White)”, 2022. Courtesy of MoMa and the artist.
Tino Rodriguez, “Eternal Lovers”, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.
There is something of this to much of contemporary AIDS fiction and artwork, finding ways to transform the memory of death and community loss into a positive and celebratory act. Mexican artist Tino Rodriguez has drawn on some of the same motifs as Machado to choreograph his painting Eternal Lovers (2010), in which Mexican epistemologies on death as beautiful and vitalistic replace those of the West to depict two skulls kissing one another, composed of luscious blooming flowers.
On the individual level, Patti Smith’s 2010 memoir Just Kids – one of a small bounty of AIDS work to enter the literary mainstream – also explored these dialectics. Recounting her personal relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, it was written not as catharsis, but to ‘fulfil my vow to him’ and show the fullness of Mapplethorpe’s life. In France, leftist writer Mathieu Lindon similarly penned Hervelino in 2021, a reflection on his friendship with Hervé Guibert and an attempt to resist narratives that flattened the author merely to victim status. Guibert, incidentally, has perhaps been one of HIV’s most haunting ghosts, conjured elsewhere in American writer Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead (2021) or Canadian photographer Moyra Davey’s photographic comment on the American healthcare system, To The Friends Who Saved My Life (2013).
Because, the truth is, the AIDS crisis is still beginning. It never ended. Neither in the global South, where its realities still ravage, nor in the “post-AIDS” West, where its memory still haunts, its ghosts are still lived with. Especially in the wake of another recent pandemic, it feels as though its ongoing life is more immediate, more intentional than ever. And finding ways to live with our spectres as a community practice, as well as to stand in solidarity with those beyond our Western borders, will be an important part of the ongoing project to eradicate AIDS and inequality, and an important way to compassionately inform how we respond to pandemics and crises future.
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