HIV/AIDS: Arts and Activism

Forty years after the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, Mucem in Marseille is devoting a major exhibition (December 15th, 2021—May 5th, 2022) to the social and cultural history of the disease. On this occasion we have interviewed Thibault Boulvain, recent author of L’Art en Sida, 1981-1997 [Art in Aids] (Les Presses du réel, 824 p., 38 euros) and of the article on artistic activism in the Mucem exhibition catalogue. He also signed an afterword, alongside Élisabeth Lebovici, to the book by Marion Scemama and David Wojnarowicz A Slow Boat to China (Is-Land, 156 p., 28 euros)

In the early 2000s, Stéphane Abriol and Françoise Loux, then curators at the Musée des Arts etTraditions Populaires, in Paris, set out to assemble an ethnographic collection of objects related to AIDS and the new forms of activism that arose in that context. This collection, which was transferred to Mucem when it was created in 2013, and has become the most substantial in Europe in this field, forms the core of the VIH/sida exhibition. Alongside the militant artefacts are some outstanding works—two stages of Michel Journiac’s Rituel deTransmutation du Corps Souffrant au Corps Transfiguré [Ritual of transmutation of the suffering body to the transfigured body, 1993-95] and Yann Beauvais’s Tu, Sempre (2001)—which bear witness to the extraordinary creative activity of the period. In his decisive work L’Art en

sida,1981-1997 [Art in AIDS], the art historian Thibault Boulvain maps out this profusion in the Atlantic region, which he inserts into a cultural history of AIDS as a paradigm of a new relationship to the body, to mortality and to social relations. LP

The heart of the AIDS epidemic, the 1980s and 1990s, corresponds to an era readily depicted as devoted to futility, festivity, and the cult of the body—the flip side of a political and moral counter-reform. How does AIDS relate to its time? The AIDS crisis is first of all linked to a hard-line ideology that had the dual face of Ronald Reagan and MargaretThatcher, with the singular violence of tragedy, in which the worst of society always crystallises: homophobia, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, the predatory instincts of a deregulated economy, etc. It broke out at a time when the counter-reform was being implemented. It erupted at a time when the neo-liberal counter-revolution, ultrareactionary, was accomplished through the triumph of the strong and the hunting down of the weak, of whom people living with AIDS were paradigmatic figures; it also erupted at a time when the ultra-conservatives were crusading against “Evil”, which they soon saw as being concentrated in this disease, constructed and interpreted as the divine sanctioning of past deviances, of a guilty present. From this point of view, the AIDS crisis revealed the society of the 1980s and 1990s, which appears in its prism as described by Félix Guattari: “barbarous”. As for the elevation and cult of the body, the spirit of celebration, they had to cohabit with the catastrophe, which inevitably burdened them with another tragic meaning, attacked them, condemned them. For those who were affected by the crisis, it covered everything. Robin Campillo suggested this magnificently in BPM (Beats per Minute) (2017), where the very beautiful clubbing scene is a moment, stolen from the decimating present, of intense joy, but so fleeting. And if advertising did multiply its perfect idols, if dreams of success were exaggerated, if the ideal of full health was celebrated, if heroes were exalted and a host of enemies reinvented, it was first and foremost against everything that threatened the dream of an era, and in particular the epidemic.

A CONSTANT DREAD

Faced with the negligence of the public authorities, the epidemic very soon gave rise to a new kind of militancy. What forms did the contribution of artists to these activities take? Was this commitment, often aggressive, a continuation of that of the 20th century avant-gardes? All the activists in the fight against AIDS based their actions on legacies and the invention of specific forms. On the American side, it is certain that the lessons, sometimes coming from Europe, of agitprop, Dadaism, mobilisations against the Vietnam War and the imperialist policy of the United States in Latin America, were retained and assimilated. Thus, in 1987 activists appropriated the white hand of the Latin American death squads and turned it red to signify the scale of a massacre that was being continued on the home front of a new war. This background of struggles, augmented by those for civil rights, women’s rights, gays and lesbians, and African-Americans, was decisive.

As for the forms of activism themselves, they were extremely diverse—this is also what makes their strength incomparable: posters, flyers, street demonstrations, T-shirts, badges, etc. In the context of the time, and the orbit of cultural activism that Douglas Crimp wrote about in 1987, (1) artists acted

Page de gauche left: Act Up-Amsterdam. 2000-2013. Affiche poster. (Coll. et Ph. Mucem © Act Up-Paris ). Ci-contre opposite: Niki de Saint Phalle. AIDS, you

can’t catch it holding hands. 1986. (Munich et Lucerne, Verlag C.J. Bucher GmbH ; © Niki de Saint

Phalle ; Ph. Mucem/Yves Inchierman)

in all sorts of ways, some by directly helping to produce the media of struggle, others by taking their work to the streets, others by donating money, selling their work, etc. There were a thousand ways to get involved, but almost as many ways not to react.

In the crisis everyone reacted in proportion to their own strengths and weaknesses; from this point of view, political commitment shouldn’t only be considered in terms of direct participation in activist actions, but also in terms of everything done in the privacy of studios, on an individual scale, which is certainly no less interesting and important than the rest. I often think of Mathieu Lindon’s words about Hervé Guibert ( Hervelino, 2021): AIDS, “He did what he could with it”. This shows the multitude of attitudes and actions, the “legitimacy” of which should not be considered so much as what they were able to do, at all levels.

’Art in AIDS’ seems to stretch from a baroque, excessive, visually striking aesthetic to a more elegiac tone, sensitive to the loss of life, pleasure and beauty, invested with a certain minimalism. Artists such as Robert Gober and Jean-Michel Othoniel could be associated with both these trends. Is there such a thing as “AIDS art”, which would form a transition between the art of the 1970s and our time? I don’t particularly like the expression “AIDS art”, I prefer to look at things as an ongoing haunting that has tormented artists for years. The crisis provoked representations that could no longer be the same, and for good reason. At all levels, including art, it forced us to “invent everything”, ”rethink everything: make do, tinker“, as Philippe Artières and Janine Pierret (2) recall, and this effort was all the more intense because it was necessary to grasp both the best and the worst, life and death, anger and defeat, despondency and joy, etc. Everything had to be said, and this is what the images could do, suddenly charged with the responsibility for the whole story.

So, of course, the artists who inherited the whole past, from the 1960s and 1970s in particular, reproduced in their works what they felt responded to the enormous representational challenge posed by the AIDS crisis. You mention Gober and Othoniel, but the list is infinitely longer of those who, so to speak, “updated” the forms, concepts, and gestures of the avant-gardes, minimalism, conceptual art, performance art, etc., forcing them into a context in which they proved to be formidably effective. Consider the work of Félix González-Torres, who believed as much in the power of beauty as in the power of minimalism to convey messages and emotions, and who knew how to combine them to denounce the “war-makers”, the worst of society, and finally to celebrate Ross, his companion, love, life, in spite of everything.

FORMS OF RESISTANCE

The history of AIDS in the West, both as an epidemic and as a campaign, is largely New York-based. How do ideas and forms circulate between New York and other creative centres, notably Paris? The history of this period is first and foremost that of a generation of women and men who struggled, invented, created, discussed, circulated, and nourished one another, sometimes in a confrontational way. They made ideas and forms travel, from one side of the Atlantic to the other, with varying degrees of success. If the American part of the history of the AIDS crisis has been more widely remembered, it is because the forces deployed in the struggle by American activists were considerable, including in the artistic and cultural spheres, in keeping with a political, social and cultural situation that had deteriorated dramatically.

In Europe the AIDS crisis developed in an equally damaged context, but in many ways very different. Cultural activism, imported from the United States to France by Didier Lestrade, founder of Act Up-Paris, who immediately understood what was at stake, did not find fertile ground. The fact remains that something certainly did happen, in Paris as in London, Berlin and Madrid. There, as elsewhere, forms of resistance were invented, and attempts were made to think about the catastrophe and its disastrous consequences, both in contact with the American experience, which established an unbeatable model, and independently, by adapting. Lestrade suggests that, for France, it was a matter of those who had to mobilise everything on their own: in the field of activism, he insists, “we did something different” from what was being done in the United States. An observation of the geography of the Parisian artistic and cultural scene at the time reveals zones of activity, more or less connected to Act Up-Paris, around Michel Journiac, Gilles Dusein, Marion Scemama, where French and foreign artists gravitated (Zoe Leonard, Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz, etc.). Here again, there were all sorts of involvement, from the street to the studio, the single category of activism being insufficient to bring together the extent of the powers mobilised at the time.

Translation: Chloé Baker

1 AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, special issue of October, n°43, Winter 1987. 2 Mémoires du sida. Récits des personnes atteintes. France, 19812012, Paris, Bayard, 2012.

David Wojnarowicz. Untitled (Face in Dirt). 1991. (© Court. the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P. P. O.W, New York)