After Silence and Cell Count Book Reviews

))) BOOK RE VIE W After Silence: A History of AIDS through Its Images. By Avram Finkelstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018; pp. 272, $27.95 cloth, $27.95 ebook. Cell Count. By Kyle Croft and Asher Mones. New York: Visual AIDS, 2018; pp. 116, $10.00 paper. We live at a moment of great interest and reinvestment in the history of AIDS activism in the United States, Canada, and Europe. These histories are undergoing a storytelling process through which certain accounts begin to take canonical form. This process of canonization may make AIDS activist histories more available to those who did not experience them firsthand, but this process also leads to the occlusion of complex and lesser-known aspects of the histories at stake. These AIDS activist histories are being solidified through new autobiographies, memoirs, and massive art retrospectives, such as the 2015–17 touring exhibition “Art AIDS America,” and recently produced historical dramas, television movies, and activist documentaries, most notably the Oscar-nominated films How to Survive a Plague (2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), and 120 Battements par Minute (2017). Media and cultural studies scholars like Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr, Jih-Fei Cheng, Nishant Shahani, Alexis Shotwell, and Marty Fink among others, have been troubling this narrative distilling process alongside Finkelstein for a decade now. Finkelstein’s latest contribution, however, digs deepest into the images associated with ACT UP/New York that have become internationally recognizable. Part personal mémoire, part activist history, and part theoretical musing, Finkelstein’s After Silence is a poetic intervention at this peculiar moment in the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He makes clear this work of nonfiction is his story alone, a memory-work informed by firsthand experiences, diaries, and primary documents now thirty years old. What’s most fascinating in this contribution to HIV/AIDS historiography in the United States is its candor and self-awareness. The images of the Silence = Death collective and the propaganda arm of ACT UP/New York known as Gran Fury have gained mythical status as exceptionally designed and gloriously executed visual works. Museums like the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC, and the New Museum in New York City 247 This work originally appeared in QED, 6.3, FALL 2019, published by Michigan State University Press. 248 ( Book Review clamored to exhibit these works recently, as nostalgia for 1980s and early 1990s cultural production has reached a fever pitch. What is so useful in After Silence is the demystification as to how the images came to be, who made them, under what conditions, what motivated the image-makers’ process, and inevitably how they came to circulate in the world. Finkelstein’s early reflections on the work of the Silence = Death collective, a small group of friends that came together out of fear and isolation to figure out how to survive the epidemic together, is surprisingly quotidian. These friends, all gay Jewish men living in New York in the mid-1980s, did not come together with the explicit goal of making museum quality cultural interventions about the biggest health crisis of a generation. Yet they were still responsible for the now-iconic Silence = Death graphic with the upturned pink triangle. The group’s purpose was humble, the design process was decidedly collective, and the outcome was nothing short of world-changing. As a road map for future activists to learn from, which Finkelstein often indicates is in part the purpose of his text, After Silence’s best quality is its humility and sincerity around how some of the most significant cultural activism of the twentieth century came to be: organic, collective, mutually sustaining, and politically precise. The book, much like a museum exhibition, takes the reader through numerous works that Finkelstein describes in detail. He illuminates for the reader the collective processes that produced well-known graphics like Kissing Doesn’t Kill, Read My Lips, Art Is Not Enough, The Government Has Blood On Its Hands, and of course, Silence = Death. What is missing from the text though, are the failed graphics. As an HIV/AIDS activist and scholar I would be curious to learn more about the images that never made it into the world, or the images that fell flat upon public reception. In particular, I am left wishing for a reflection and history of Gran Fury’s 1992 Je Me Souviens graphic that was produced in French and distributed in Quebec at the height of Quebec separatism. The image, appropriating a slogan popular with the Quebec Sovereigntist movement was tone deaf, and ignorant of the specific political complexities of the United States’s French-speaking northern neighbor. It seems ACT UP/New York learned very little since their bullish behavior at the Fifth International AIDS Conference in Montreal in 1989 where local activists from Réaction SIDA felt bulldozed. The oral histories recorded by the Ottawa-based AIDS Activist History Project of which I am a part speaks to this tension between local activists and ACT UP/ New York. Hearing Finkelstein’s take on both the Montreal AIDS conference and the failed Je Me Souviens graphic would be fascinating. Finkelstein also uses nearly a third of his pages to discuss the genocide and Holocaust metaphors that were deployed by the Silence = Death collective, Gran Fury, and other cultural workers in the United States. Although Finkelstein offers This work originally appeared in QED, 6.3, FALL 2019, published by Michigan State University Press. Book Review ) 249 a firsthand account about struggling with these metaphors among the Silence = Death collective, he doesn’t place them in a longer art historical context that structures the period during which they were working. These artists were also contending with the ongoing historification of the Holocaust punctuated at the time by the Broadway production of Martin Sherman’s play Bent in 1980, which examines the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, as well as the release of Claude Lanzmann’s epic nine-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah in 1985. Furthermore, if one situates the AIDS genocide/Holocaust analogy in relation to longer view of queer history, it is easy to see how Holocaust and Nazi references came to occupy such a large place in gay liberation consciousness even before the AIDS crisis. Historian Jim Downs has mapped this out in his 2016 book Stand By Me on gay liberation newspapers where he demonstrates how common discussions of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals was. This history allowed readers and fellow writers to draw analogies between their lives to the lives of an imagined gay community of the past, setting the stage for the explosion of genocide/Holocaust metaphors the next decade as the political crisis of HIV/AIDS emerged. In the final chapter of After Silence Finkelstein reflects on his recent work with flash collectives and the recent uproar over the role of history in presentday HIV/AIDS cultural production and activism. Finkelstein’s analysis of the debate along generational lines and between positive and negative HIV status is intriguing, but doesn’t fully capture the complexity of the moment when nostalgia was wielded as a conceptual slur to rebuke others. Of course After Silence cannot resolve such complex questions in its epilogue, but it has made a critical contribution to the ongoing debate about the role of history and memory in ongoing social movements. Cell Count is the catalogue from the Spring 2018 Visual AIDS exhibition by the same name at La MaMa Galleria in New York City that ran from May 1 through June 16, 2018. The exhibition featured nearly twenty artists from the United States and Canada whose work demonstrates the incommensurability between health and criminalization in the context of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic. The exhibition takes as its target the legacy of medicalization, surveillance, and incarceration of marginalized bodies that together coconstitutes the present-day crisis of HIV criminalization and the criminalization of HIV nondisclosure in particular. In coordination with this exhibition was a Visual AIDScommissioned broadsheet by Avram Finkelstein that debuted at the New York City Pride March on June 26: YOU CARE ABOUT HIV CRIMINALIZATION (YOU JUST DON’T KNOW IT YET). The curators’ fastidious essay walks the reader through the works of the exhibition, unpacking each cultural intervention’s social, historical, political, and/ or economic implications. From Chloe Dzubilo’s pen and ink drawings of trans This work originally appeared in QED, 6.3, FALL 2019, published by Michigan State University Press. 250 ( Book Review sex workers staring down police harassment and Barton Lidice Beneš’s playful mixed media mockeries of the AIDS monster myth, to Jordan Arsenault’s pithy poster on stigma and disclosure and Muhjah Shakir’s community-based quilt project about racism and medical violence, this exhibition and accompanying catalogue intricately weaves together a number of thematic threads at the heart of HIV criminalization. Che Gossett’s catalogue essay draws these threads together through a prison abolitionist lens that foregrounds the implications of HIV criminalization for black, queer, and/or trans people. Gossett provides critical historical analysis while celebrating the resistance of groups like ACT UP/ Philadelphia and queer AIDS activists of color Kiyoshi Kuromiya and Gregory Smith. Public programming accompanies the exhibition and activist commentary and report backs from activist campaigns populate a third of the publication. Although this combination of art, activism, and scholarly writing is dynamic, powerful, and convincing, I wonder about the rhetorical ground the role of cultural production cedes to scholarly writing and activist work in broader social movements. Ted Kerr and Risa Puleo’s catalog contribution “Curation Will Not Save Us”—an argument no one is making—is a particularly clear articulation of the uncertainness of art’s role in broader social movements for cultural change. We rarely hear anyone talk about how activism, in this case the highlighted legal changes to HIV nondisclosure legislation, is not enough. We must not confuse legal victories for culture change. We can trace some of these sentiments back to Gary Fury’s iconic 1988 poster that states bluntly, “With 42,000 Dead, Art is Not Enough.” I am in complete agreement, yet my concern lingers on how cultural work, in the case of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic in this instance, is always framed as not enough while biomedical, social science, and legislative work somehow escapes similar scrutiny or self-reflection. The inclusion of Canadian artists is also praiseworthy for a U.S. exhibition and publication, as all too often the United States is figured as the center of all cultural activities. Unfortunately, the text fails to fully contextualize the substantial differences between HIV-specific laws that criminalize HIV exposure and nondisclosure in the United States and the sexual assault laws used to criminalize HIV nondisclosure in Canada. In fact, the Canadian context offers a cautionary tale to any jurisdictions where HIV-specific laws are being reformed or have never existed. The use of sexual assault law to nullify consent in sexual interactions when there is an instance of HIV nondisclosure in Canada proves that we must be vigilant against the misuse and abuse of the law even in places free from heinous serophobic HIV-specific laws. In 1992 black British cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall noted that the AIDS crisis demonstrates how marginal critical intellectual interventions are for This work originally appeared in QED, 6.3, FALL 2019, published by Michigan State University Press. Book Review ) 251 creating change in the face of assured death, but he also argued that we must persist in the tension that arises when we do make theoretical interventions about HIV/AIDS to learn what cultural studies can and must do in the face of crisis. Together these two texts, both filled with vivid and thought-provoking images from the recent past, are an indispensable addition to this tradition of cultural studies scholarship on HIV/AIDS Hall deemed so critical. And as equally important, they are new tools for engaging more people in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Ryan Conrad York University Canada This work originally appeared in QED, 6.3, FALL 2019, published by Michigan State University Press.