[ aids / sida ]

Press
AIDS exhibit is powerful political art
By JUDE SCHWENDENWIEN
Special to the Courant

Published in The Hartford Courant on Wednesday, September 26, 1990.

The AIDS crisis has galvanized many artists to become activists. Political art has always been one of the more difficult art forms to digest because of a tendency by artists to be didactic.

“AIDS/SIDA” is one of the most adventurous exhibitions at Real Art Ways and poses a good prediction for this alternative space in the 90’s. RAW has opened up its space for a show that is not a traditional art exhibit but rather a commentary on a serious situation that affects lives outside gallery walls.

ACT-UP is one of the leading Art AIDS activists groups, begun in review New York to bring attention to misinformation spread about AIDS. Its efforts are radical, intense and always controversial.

This show features many df the group’s fliers and posters, which can be found plastered in any number of spots in major metropolitan centers. What it produces is not art per Se, but the visual appeal of the group’s posters incorporates certain graphic aspects of art that can communicate to a wide audience.

Gran Fury is a subsidiary group of artists involved in ACT-UP. Members provide the most visually arresting works in the exhibition. One of their major pieces is a monumental black-and-white poster. The image depicts two government officials shaking hands. What is disturbing is the angle of the photo: The camera is beneath the men, looking up to imply that they, in their positions of power, tower over the people. Above and below the im-age is white on black text stating: “When a Government Turns Its Back on Its People, Is It Civil War?” The statement below refers to the government’s view of AIDS victims as expendable and questions if this is a form of medical apartheid. Pretty strong stuff for an art show.

Keith Haring, who died of AIDS several months ago, was able to make the best use of his popular, accessible cartoon style to promote AIDS awareness. One of his most recognizable works is not found in any gallery; rather, it is a mass-produced poster showing three of his anonymous cartoon figures in the positions of “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” The slogan that matches the image is ‘Ignorance = Fear.”

However, it sometimes takes a more potent image to drive the point home. The most powerful works in this show are not the posters with statements that hit like a sledgehammer; instead, they are photos from the series “Romanian Children With AIDS” by Peter Levasseur. The stark, startling images of emaciated, almost skeletal babies expand the extent of AIDS’ decimation of human life beyond specific risk groups. This show is chock-full of text that is often didactic but necessary, yet sometimes a single picture says it all.





AIDS Exhibition Pleads Its Case
By VIVIEN RAYNOR
Published in The New York Times Sunday, September 23, 1990.

Unveiled at the Paris Salon of 1819, Theodore Gericaults “Raft of the Medusa” was met with mixed re actions, and though it attracted thousands of spectators, the picture brought the artist neither critical nor financial success. He died five years later, at the age of 33, having been wracked alternately with despair and the desire to produce still more ambitious works. It is said that on at least one occasion he dismissed the 18-by-24-foot canvas (now in the Louvre) with: ‘Bah! A vignette!”

Time and the reactions of other artists, notably Delacroix, have since proved the picture to be not only the artist’s magnum opus but also the first major painting based on a topical event — in this case, a scandalous shipwreck that had occurred three years before. The historian Lorenz Eitner said that Gericault’s motives may well have been political at the start. but ultimately the “Raft”’ became a kind of catharsis for personal misery that seemingly was rooted in a wretched love affair. He was later to say that he wanted to see misfortune on trial.

There are no heroes in the picture, only a group of survivors sighting a brig that does not see them, the whole episode lasted 13 days involved cannibalism and cost 150 lives. After attempts by the French Government to cover up the scandal, the captain whose incompetence caused the wreck was demoted and sentenced to three years in prison. A few years later, the ship’s surgeon and a naval engineer collaborated on a best-selling exposé.

A disaster that threatens to engulf the whole world, AIDS has yet to inspire art comparable to Gericault’s. The reasons for this are many and unfathomable. But one of them may be that Romanticism is no longer a means to an end but an end in itself, and a highly political one at “AIDS-SIDA,”’ an exhibition at Real Art Ways, in Hartford, lends support to this idea, in that it comes on like a demonstration against the Vietnam War.

Viewers are petted with “information” that seems intended to arouse guilt and panic. There are photographs of AIDS babies in Romania; T-shirts, one emblazoned with Liberty raising a finger instead of the torch, another with the words “Queen Nation,” statistics, like “one AIDS death every half-hour,” and posters, some effective, others gratuitously nasty.

Since very little of this can be described or quoted, it remains only to say that the show is something of a rabble rouser. It may aim to scare the world straight (although not in the heterosexu1 sense of the word), but it does so in a way calculated to turn of f the very people who need to be turned on to the situation — the religious, the socially respectable and those who fear anarchy more than death.

This is a forum for pleading many causes, notably that of sexual freedom, and there is a strong sense of. paranoia and self-pity. It is as if the plague that directly or indirectly threatens everyone is somebody else’s fault, and to the degree that doctors have failed to find a cure, it is. But like artists-against-the-bomb shows, this one seems concerned primarily with going on record against AIDS, as if there were a party in favor of the disease. It defies the unconverted rather than reasoning with them, and if ever there was a time for reasoning, this is it.

All the same, the display, for all its faults, marks the awakening of Real Art Ways from its “avant garde” torpor. The director, Will Wilkins, and the cuator, Anne Pasternak, are still fairly new, and there is reason to believe that they will continue to address a larger public without going down the populist drain.



An Education about AIDS
By FRANK RIZZO
Courant Staff Writer

Published in The Hartford Courant on Friday, September 7, 1990.

Art takes an active, rather than a passive, role in two shows bowing this month In Hartford.

The notion of what is art, as well as the role of artists and the places it is viewed, are being dramatically challenged in two exhibits — one at an established museum and the other at an alternative art gallery.

Starting today and continuing through Sept. 29, Hartford’s Real Art Ways presents “AIDS/SIDA,” a show made up of dozens of pieces by local and national artists and activists. who employ art to broach such issues of the AIDS crisis as sexual and racial discrimination, pediatric AIDS and testing and research.

Beginning Sept. 30 and continuing through Nov. 18, the Matrix Gallery at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford presents “AIDS Timeline, 1990,” an exhibit presented by Group Material, four New York artists whose mission is to mount provocative group shows organized around a single social theme.

“It’s not just about artists working wIth the theme of AIDS, but activists who are using art to communicate about AIDS,” says Anne R. Pasternak, curator at Real Art Ways Pasternak, who is a former director of the Boston and Manhattan branches of Stux Gallery, says the role of art and activism is an appropriate one. “It’s an art gallery, but we feel we have the responsibility to teach about the AIDS crisis. It’s also an issue many artists are working with in their art.”

Andrea Miller-KelIer, curator of contemporary art at the Atheneum, agrees, adding that the Wadsworth sees itself as a socially responsible institution. “We’re definitely, as an institution, facing the issue of AIDS head on,” she says.

AIDS will be explored at the Real Art Ways show in painting, photography, sculpture, video and graphic arts. Participating will be such AIDS activist groups as Gran Fury, ACT UP, Queer Nation, WHAM! and Boys With Arms Akimbo.

Also featured will be work by Jay Critchley, best known as the engineer of the “Old Glory Condom Corporation,” Abe Ryebeck of the campy political United Fruit Company and Boston-based collage artist painter Cary Leibovitz, who had a one-man show at the RAW gallery earlier this year artist David Wojnarowicz, whose pieces critical of political and religious leaders caused the National Endowment for the Arts to withdraw a grant last year to an exhibit in which his work appeared; West Hartford painter Peter Edlund; and Andres Serrano, whose “Piss Christ” last year was one of the art pieces that enraged politicians and led to restrictions on the endowment.

Among the video displays will be a booth where viewers can choose between heterosexual, lesbian and homosexual safe-sex tapes.

Though much of the work has received positive response from the art community, neither exhibit is concerned with pure aesthetics. They’re out to grab audiences, say those involved with both shows.

“There is a critical and important issue that supersedes aestheticism and art history and everything else, and that is the AIDS crisis,” says Donald Moffett, one of the 11 mem-bers of Gran Fury, a collective of New York AIDS activists who use the power of visuals in art, graphics and advertising to get their message out. “The art side is totally secondary to the projects.”

The Matrix show chronicles the AIDS epidemic since 1979 — coincidentally the year Group Material was formed — to the present and in doing so hopes viewers will see a larger picture.

Along a black line running around the walls of the gallery, works by local and national artists, statistical information and artifacts from popular culture, government and grassroots publications are presented in a push-pin fashion. The exhibit,with its combination of data, fine art and mass-produced material from pop culture, explores the responses to the crisis through the years by the media, medical-community, politicians, artists and AIDS activists.

Group Material — consisting of Julie Ault, Doug Ashford, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Karen Ramspacher — first presented “Timeline’ in Berkley, Calif., earlier this year but has adapted the exhibit to each new community and exhibit space. In preparing the show for the Atheneum, members of Group Material came to Hartford last spring to meet with area artists, AIDS activists and museum staffers.

Among the images presented are works by such well-known artists as Dorothea Lange, Keith Haring, Duane Michals, Nancy Spero, Louise Lawler and Lorna Simpson.

“There is a kind of a dialogue that we set up in the installation between the art and the archival material,” says Ault. “No one thing tells the story, but as a total a story starts to get told.”

Says Ashford, “In America, we end up being dependent upon a par-ticular kind of expert [for information]. We are taught to see history as a single kind of narrative written by a particular type of .... But culture is a much more diverse and democratic experience.”

Ramspacher says the overall goal of the exhibit Is to provide information that will make people “see things or maybe have access to things that perhaps they wouldn’t have before — at least, not all together at one time. You string it all together and it paints a picture.”

But besides givng information, Group Material is redefining bow art is viewed.

“I’ve admired Grou Material’s work for years, and wanted to introduce the work of Group Material to our visitors,” says Miller-Keller of the Atheneum. “ [The exhibition] does break down [art] barriers and expand possibilities to know that this could be an art form. The art exhibi-tion itself Is a medium of expression, that artists can choose to pr resent their ideas in this f ashion and that it has been recognized in a variety of places as being valuable. And that to me is important because whenever you expand the range of possibilities or expand the discourse we are empowering the public.”

“Secondly, I share the urgency they feel in the area of education in the area of AIDS. And this becomes one legitimate way to contribute. I hope positively, to public education and awareness.”