When Political Art Mattered
When Political Art Mattered
When Political Art Mattered
Magazine
When I first saw the poster, I didn't really know what it was.
Everything was being demolished back then. In 1987, voids seemed to pop
up daily in the New York streetscape, just as they had been popping up in gay
men's lives since the beginning of the decade. If the human loss constantly
threatened to engulf us, the holes where buildings once stood could at least be
covered over; temporary walls of plywood, often painted blue, were flimsily
erected to prevent people from falling in. It took but a night for so-called snipers
to plaster any such wall with a thousand ads and provocations. As a result, my
neighborhood, Greenwich Village, was a giant bulletin board of notices no one
noticed.
Still, this poster managed, by a purely aesthetic force, to breach the flimsy
blue walls of my own defenses. A fuchsia triangle hovered in the middle of a
black square; the equation SILENCE=DEATH, in an ominous condensed
typeface, anchored the composition. I recognized the triangle as the symbol of
homosexual victimization by the Nazis, but this triangle pointed up. Did it
suggest supremacy? And the phrase itself, with its diabolical math, lodged in my
imagination. Did it suggest conspiracy? Because of the word ''death'' I supposed
it was about AIDS; had I noticed the tiny type at the bottom, which for a time
included the instruction ''Turn anger, fear, grief into action,'' perhaps I would
have been sure. In any case, like good abstract art, it was powerful without being
specific. I wondered if it might be the work of Jenny Holzer, whose ''Truisms'' --
bald, slightly gnomic statements like BAD INTENTIONS CAN YIELD GOOD
RESULTS -- had, since the late 70's, been appearing on the streets and in
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museums. But Holzer's saws never disturbed me for more than a moment,
whereas this one kept hacking away at me for days, the way a good play or book
might. For days and for years.
Those questions constitute a hornets' nest of contention, but let's just say
that if something made by artists is art, this was art. The poster was created by a
group of six gay men -- a book designer, two art directors and others -- who,
after meeting for several months over potluck dinners to discuss their feelings of
helplessness and anger in the age of AIDS, eventually decided to do something
about it. Their goals were expressly political: to incite discussion about the
plague and thus change government policy. ''We didn't want it to be rarefied,''
Avram Finkelstein, one of the six, told me recently. ''We didn't want it to be in a
museum.'' But their method, their whole ethos, was artistic. They tortured
themselves, as only designers can, over the wording (which evolved from ''gay
silence is deafening'' to ''silence is death'' to its canonical version), the font (the
''witchy'' Gill Sans Bold Extra Condensed), the kerning (at first, some people
read the tightly packed letters as SCIENCE=DEATH), the paper stock (heavily
coated) and everything else. As people in the midst of a mortal and moral crisis,
they were loath to admit that any aesthetisization was going on, but guilty
secrets eventually come out. ''If you have an art training or make art,'' said
Finkelstein, who now runs an online T-shirt company, ''you can't escape the way
you communicate. Everything is aesthetisized.''
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The same question can be asked of many other major works of art made in
the early years of AIDS. The SILENCE=DEATH poster was not the first to
address the disease. By 1987 there had already been, onstage, Larry Kramer's
''Normal Heart'' and William Hoffman's ''As Is''; a few independent films like
''Parting Glances''; and the television movie ''An Early Frost,'' which was
probably seen by more people than all the others put together. The AIDS quilt,
then consisting of a mere 1,920 panels, had its debut on the Mall in Washington
in October of that year; Keith Haring's safe-sex doodles were appearing
everywhere; and, of course, many novels, paintings, photographs and dances
had begun to incorporate, or take advantage of, the inherent drama of young
death. Still to come were some of the most visible (and rewarded) mainstream
works, the works that would begin to define for history what AIDS had been
when it started: ''The Ryan White Story,'' broadcast by ABC in 1989; Craig
Lucas's ''Longtime Companion,'' made originally for public television; ''Angels in
America,'' Tony Kushner's monumental two-part ''gay fantasia on national
themes''; the Off Broadway musical ''Falsettoland'' and the still-running
Broadway musical ''Rent''; and Jonathan Demme's 1993 movie ''Philadelphia'' --
essentially the only Hollywood release on the subject until ''The Hours,'' based
on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, came out last year.
If these works, among others, were helping to inscribe the story of AIDS,
they were telling radically different (and sometimes untrue) versions of that
story. Why that happened and what it means seems especially worth asking
now: tonight, HBO will begin showing a $60 million adaptation of ''Angels in
America,'' directed by Mike Nichols, and early next year, the first major New
York revival of ''The Normal Heart'' will play at the Public Theater. It was the
coincidence of the return of these two plays -- one of them perhaps the most
political drama ever written, the other perhaps the most lyrical polemic -- that
started me thinking again about SILENCE=DEATH and its descendants. There
was a great deal of silence, and a great deal of death, undeniably, but I wondered
if the converse hadn't also been true. Had noise equaled life? Had art, at last,
made a difference?
more kindness. But could the accountants have organized and responded to
their crisis the way some gay men eventually did, using their professional skills
to alter policy and in the process change their culture? Would we have, as a
result, a fabulous trove of new accountancy procedures?
But AIDS made its debut among a very cultured group of people. Many
were artists who, devastated and enraged, turned their professional skills to
protest. The design collective Gran Fury was founded in 1988 after the New
Museum offered Act Up a window to do with as it pleased; soon other museums
nationwide were draping their paintings and scheduling protests on Dec. 1,
which became the annual Day Without Art. But even those gay men who were
not culture mavens by trade were knowledgeable amateurs; hiding, encoding
and image management were a fundamental part of every homosexual's
sentimental education. In short, the dying, and their friends, knew how to
convey a message in the language of their times.
For Larry Kramer, it was that ''art'' -- the street theater, the protest graphics
-- that mattered. ''It was the only thing we had, the only way we could get any
attention,'' he says. The image-starved television news shows could not be
bothered to cover claims that a drug company was overcharging for
medications, but let a bunch of black-clad young protesters chain themselves to
that drug company's headquarters, and the cameras were there en masse. How
to get across the idea of governmental guilt in promoting a blood-borne disease?
Bloody hands, of course, stenciled everywhere. Some of the street actions I saw
in the late 80's were better produced than Off Broadway shows, complete with
smartly edited scripts, disciplined chorus numbers and gorgeous accouterments.
Act Up's greatest artwork -- furtively covering Jesse Helms's Virginia home in a
giant custom-made condom -- made the crucial point that prejudice is as
insidious a danger to society as H.I.V. But, formally speaking, it was pure
Christo.
''We were a bunch of gay people; this is what we knew how to do,'' Kramer
says. ''We knew how to pretend. We knew how to make things pretty.''
When I ask him about the other kind of art -- the kind he produced in more
traditional formats -- Kramer gets impatient. ''Airy-fairy,'' he says, waving his
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hand and scowling. ''If Jerome Robbins, whom I yelled at for not doing so, had
done a ballet about AIDS, I think that would have been art. For me, it's too
grand. I'm just a message queen.''
Art (good and bad) had, of course, been used toward expressly social ends
(good and bad) before. Many historians credit ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' with helping
to turn the tide against slavery in the United States. A more immediate
precedent would be 60's antiwar pop music, but in that instance, beyond a
general wish to end American involvement in Vietnam, no particular agenda
was advanced. Starting with ''The Normal Heart,'' however, art about AIDS,
whatever its genre, tried to do very specific things about a very specific situation
-- not the virus (which was insensible to aesthetic arguments) but the medical
bureaucracy and homophobic culture that in essence harbored it. If art had
often tried to protest prejudice, encourage compassion and console the grieving,
it had never tried to provide safe-sex information, lower drug prices and
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I remember thinking, early on, that this was not only unseemly in some way
but also too much of an agenda for poor little art to shoulder. Kramer seemed
naïve to me. He doesn't disagree; he ''honestly and sincerely'' believed that once
''The Normal Heart'' was staged, the world would change overnight and Ronald
Reagan would ''do something.'' That didn't happen, of course, but something
else -- far stranger -- did.
If Kramer aimed to shock the elites into demanding change, ''An Early
Frost,'' which was shown on NBC in November 1985, a few months after ''The
Normal Heart'' opened in New York, had an entirely different aim -- and
audience. Until that point, there had been no major artistic treatment of AIDS
meant for Americans who lived outside its cultural enclaves. Nor was there any
leadership instructing them how they should think about the subject. (Reagan
had not yet used the name of the disease in public, let alone enunciated a policy
about it.) Into that vacuum rushed the worst possible images; on television, a
man with AIDS was most frequently seen as a leper or worse -- a murderer
infecting heterosexual women.
Given the many distortions that needed correcting, it's surprising that the
makers of the TV movie were able to put together anything that even resembled
a work of art. But ''An Early Frost'' is coherent and affecting. In it, a Chicago
lawyer played by Aidan Quinn must tell his conservative New England family
not only that he has AIDS but also, in the process, that he is gay. His mother is
supportive; his pregnant sister is scared; his authoritarian father is, well,
Reaganesque in his denial. Indeed, the script can be seen as a primer, for an
America lacking principled leadership, on how to face the disease. Several
possible routes to sympathy are demonstrated, and none are blocked (for long)
by difficulties like ingrained homophobia or pesky matters of race and class.
That our hero has contracted the disease because of his lover's infidelity is
meant to paint a bright halo of ''innocence'' over him; this is an expediency but
not necessarily a falsehood. (Many men were presumably infected in this
manner.) That he is soulful and terribly handsome goes with the TV territory.
The problem, from a historical point of view, is that the hero's story is so
sanitized as to make his disease and especially his gayness (he does not appear
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to have any gay friends) almost nonexistent. Which is exactly why it worked.
What do I mean when I say it worked? You have to clear some rhetorical
space in the woods even to discuss this topic. For one thing, AIDS is not over; as
far as the world at large is concerned, it has probably barely begun. (Some
experts have essentially written off as unsavable the millions of Africans infected
but not treated.) Even in the United States, many people cannot afford the
miracle medications or do not respond well to them. Still, we can without
embarrassment note that something good happened and as a result of it many
thousands of people who would otherwise have died are alive. Neither ''An Early
Frost'' nor any other single work made this happen. But ''An Early Frost'' began
the process, as Kramer says, of ''putting a human face'' (a handsome, white and
not-too-gay human face) on the disease for middle America. In turn, the human
face evoked a change in social attitudes that enhanced the success that activists
and artists were having on other fronts. And did so, in my judgment, with
acceptable losses to truth and history.
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The AIDS ribbon was more than the kitsch (or, indeed, the victim art) that
some activists derided it as. I consider it an artwork -- not only because it was
made (initially) by artists but also because, as a visual symbol with various
possible meanings (I have AIDS; I demand action about AIDS; I care about
people with AIDS; everyone else cares about AIDS), it used the codes of visual
design (color, line, texture, etc.) to represent a response to reality. For that
reason, it was quite valuable during its prime, establishing among a highly
visible elite a baseline attitude from which you deviated at your own risk.
Compassion (in name if not in fact) became normative, which obviated the need
for the ribbon in the first place. This idea was taken to its logical extreme with
the AIDS quilt. Begun as a local San Francisco phenomenon, it eventually got
too big to be seen. Along the way, it changed its meaning: not for the individual
quilters who sewed panels in tribute to dead friends and lovers but for the
people who experienced it. A private act of mourning became a public
consolation, and part of what it consoled the public for was its failure to care in
time. Like most activists, Larry Kramer says he hates the quilt for that reason;
we do not deserve to be consoled so easily. But insofar as consolation is part of
the humanity we want to preserve in ending AIDS, I find myself willing to let
that pass. What the quilt did was what quilting as a folk art had always done:
bind the individual to society in the necessary acts of remembering and
continuing.
If, as I have said, these highly visible early works about AIDS seemed, on
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balance, to justify their falseness with their effectiveness, sometime in the early
90's, not coincidentally around the time advances in drug treatment were finally
beginning to offer hope, that began to change. As the restrictions on what could
be discussed relaxed, some of the stories told about AIDS became even more
untrue, or untrue in more insidious ways. Perhaps ''The Ryan White Story'' and
even ''An Early Frost,'' appearing at the dawn of the disease, could not
accurately be about gay people responding to AIDS, but the movie
''Philadelphia,'' released in 1993, could. In outline, it actually was: a gay lawyer
played by Tom Hanks discovers he is ill, is fired from his white-shoe firm and
sues for wrongful dismissal. But a crucial change was introduced into the script
while the writer, Ron Nyswaner, and director, Jonathan Demme, were hashing
it out. At the ''suggestion'' of a studio executive, they had the gay lawyer hire a
raging homophobe to represent him. Meant to invite resistant audiences into
the story by providing a main character they could supposedly identify with, the
homophobe, played by Denzel Washington, became the hero of the movie. What
seems infuriating in retrospect is not so much that it made a potentially serious
story somewhat ludicrous but that at a time when something bigger than
compassion could have been expressed, the movie reverted to clichés and
distortions. It seems to say that the story of AIDS in its early years was the story
of straight people coming to gay people's rescue.
Much as I dislike the film, I think he's right, though not primarily about
AIDS. A huge and unanticipated side effect of the disease was that by virtue of
those ''Philadelphia''-like substitutions in popular culture, the image of gay
people, and their place in American society, changed significantly. They became
welcome company, domesticated and sympathetic. If AIDS had not been
vanquished in life, it had on television, and by the mid-90's lesbians were
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raising a child on ''Friends,'' ''Will & Grace'' was in the test tube and the
triumphal road toward ''Queer Eye for the Straight Guy'' (not to mention
marriage rights) was being paved.
But the prize for pale resemblance in AIDS art has to go to Jonathan
Larson's ''Rent,'' which opened on Broadway in 1996. The musical, about East
Village bohemians fighting AIDS and greedy landlords in an atmosphere of
Reagan-Bush-era despair, is based, most obviously, on ''La Bohème'' and also on
a 1990 novel called ''People in Trouble,'' by Sarah Schulman, a longtime activist
and early Act Up member. ''Rent'' has a lot wrong with it, but as a story of AIDS,
it's particularly bizarre, not least because the dying heroine undergoes a
deathbed reversal and lives to sing about it. As a case study in how art about
AIDS most profoundly changed America, however, it can't be topped. In ''Rent,''
unlike in ''People in Trouble,'' AIDS is primarily experienced and observed --
and survived -- by heterosexuals. (The gay character with AIDS stays dead.)
Early works about AIDS had engaged in a series of necessary substitutions, the
paradoxical result of which was not only that straight people were shown to be
in danger but also that gay people were shown to be approximately
interchangeable with them. In ''Rent'' that substitution is complete; what
doesn't survive the success is the truth.
Of course, there are many truths, and art is not required to tell any of them.
That our culture flatters and rewards some over others (or even prefers flat-out
falsehood on occasion) should surprise no one. What is surprising is that some
works, through a kind of double vision, are both true and popular.
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Surely the most lasting work about AIDS (or perhaps about anything of its
time) is ''Angels in America'' -- a play that makes double vision seem puny.
Kushner threw into the bag all that he loved and hated about life in the mid-80's
and let it bleed together. As a result, you have a six-hour drama in which, among
many other hilarious and harrowing scenes, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg recites
the Kaddish over the body of Roy Cohn, who had once worked tirelessly to
arrange for her execution. The absurdity of the image gives way to the terrible
understanding that all reconciliations are possible. Now, ''reconciliation'' is a
word almost as suspect among activists as ''consolation'' -- and yet ''Angels,''
which is a great activist artwork, is suffused with both. This is perhaps even
more evident in 2003 than it was in 1991, when I saw an early version of the
then-almost-eight-hour play in San Francisco. It has somehow grown even
bigger since then, despite the cutting, because, for many of us in America, AIDS
has grown smaller. Back then, all I could think about was the way it did (or did
not) reflect my own story, my own losses, my own fears, which were so much
around me. Now it is about the world: the larger net of responsibility that life
implicates us in. In that way, ''Angels'' continues to be on the front line of
activism -- activism broadly defined -- even as we retreat from it.
I only really understood just how far we have retreated -- and how inured
we are to that retreat -- when I got a preview this fall of the Act Up Oral History
Project. If the strength of ''Angels'' derives, in part, from its combination of high
artifice and political urgency, the videos that are the core of the project have
neither high artifice nor political urgency, which is odd because they are the
work of Sarah Schulman -- the same Sarah Schulman who wrote ''People in
Trouble'' -- and the experimental filmmaker Jim Hubbard. The videos are
simply a lest-we-forget record, like Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah
Visual History project. There are absolutely no frills: Hubbard's camera records
dead-on the interviews that Schulman conducts with some 35 surviving
members of Act Up. (At least 100 more remain to be taped, but the completed
interview transcripts are already available at www.actuporalhistory.org.) Still,
they are profoundly moving. By telling the story of how they each came to do
extraordinary things -- and not just arty things, like designing posters, but
hopelessly boring things, like writing to the insurance commissioners of all 50
states -- the interviewees surprise themselves over and over with the realization
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That insight seems to have died with the advent of protease inhibitors. Gran
Fury disbanded in 1995; the Day Without Art is now only haphazardly observed.
It's a familiar, almost autoimmune process. At the beginning of AIDS, artists
humanized the disease and engaged people's instincts for self-preservation by
appropriating comfortable, popular forms of expression. But good intentions
can yield bad results. Within about a decade, that appropriation neutralized the
artists' ability to make further change; the message itself (and even some of the
messengers) became comfortable and popular. Tom Hanks wins the Academy
Award: case closed on AIDS. Which is not to say no good came of this. Under
cover of the darkness of disease, the gay movement transformed itself into a
raging mainstream success, albeit one concerned with incremental adjustments
instead of fundamental change. Many of us, gay or not, are better off as a result.
But what if there's another plague? What's most chilling about the AIDS works I
have been watching and mulling recently -- high, low, agitprop and all -- is that
if they represent the most successful politicized arts movement in the history of
America, it may also be the last.
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