HISTORY CONTEMP ART paper
ACT UP: The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power
• Founded New York City, Gay Lesbian Community Center, March 1987 • Autonomous branches immediately spring up nationwide in Chicago,
Los Angeles, San Francisco, as well as internationally • In protests, AIDS activism and AIDS activist graphics are inseparable • SILENCE = DEATH becomes the coalition’s emblem • ACT UP itself is structured horizontally, composed of specialized
affiliate groups (or cells), with no official leadership • ACT UP’s weekly Monday night meetings employ Roberts Rules of
Order; protests (or zaps) employ organized civil disobedience.
SILENCE = DEATH PROJECT AIDS DEMOGRAPHICS, pp. 14/15:
Our emblem’s significance depends on foreknowledge of the use of the pink triangle as a marker of gay men in Nazi concentration camps; its appropriation by the gay movement to remember a suppressed history of our oppression; and, now, an inversion of its positioning (men in the camps wore the triangles that point down, SILENCE = DEATH’s points up). SILENCE=DEATH declares that silence about oppression and annihilation of gay people—then and now—must be broken as a matter of our survival. The power of this equation under a triangle is the compression of its connotation into a logo, a logo so striking that you ultimately have to ask, if you don’t already know, “What does that mean?”
LET THE RECORD SHOW AIDS DEMOGRAPHICS, pp. 14/15
In 1987 The New Museum curator Bill Olander, a person with AIDS and member of ACT UP, offered the coalition its window space for a work about AIDS. Expanding SILENCE = DEATH’s analogy of AIDS and Nazi crimes through a photomural of the Nuremburg trials, Let the Record Show indicted a number of public individuals for their persecutory, violent, homophobic statements about AIDS, and, in the case of then president Ronald Reagan, for his six-year-long failure to make any statement at all about the nation’s number-one health emergency. The installation also included an LED sign programmed with ten minutes of running text about the government’s abysmal failure to confront the crisis. For the installation’s design, well known art world tactics of appropriation and detournement were employed.
WALL STREET DEMO: CRASH THE MARKET, 1987 AIDS DEMOGRAPHICS pp. 26/27
• With a death count of 32,000, ACT UP’s first demonstration, called by Larry Kramer, targeted the big business for the engendering of the AIDS crisis: • A collapsing New York City health care system • An insurance industry that won’t reimburse for home health care or
experimental drugs • Government officials who ignore the crisis • The National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration for
their inhumane and bureaucratic procedures • The refusal of pharmaceutical companies to act on promising new drugs,
while instead profiteering from treatments like AZT – a highly toxic drug.
Michel Foucault: A Lecture, 1976
• Foucault—who advocated anecdotal intervention by laypersons into a given establishment’s business as usual—was widely read by members of ACT UP. • Foucault, pp. 972, designated anecdotal information as subjugated
knowledge. By that phrase, Foucault was referring to “historical content that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence” by the establishment. • Subjugated knowledge also refers to: a set of knowledges that have been
disqualified as inadequate, [as] naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.
STOP THE CHURCH ACTION, NYC, 1989 AIDS DEMOGRAPHICS pp. 130/131
• In 1987, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops agreed to allow a limited exception to the ban on contraceptives. Condom use as a protection against HIV infection would thus be minimally tolerated by the Church • Archconservative Cardinal O’Connor of New York, however, vehemently
opposed the ruling, railing against the teaching of any safe sex practice other than abstinence. • O’Connor’s influence went beyond his religious jurisdiction, to the ear of
Mayor Koch whose AIDS policy’s mirrored O’Connor’s. • Such that, in NYC public schools–where 85% of the population were people
of color–abstinence remained the official sex educational policy.
ACT UP AND SEXUALITY: WE KISS BECAUSE… AIDS DEMOGRAPHICS, pp. 54/55
• Among Gran Fury’s most popular images are two posters produced for ACT UP’s same-sex kiss-in, to protest homophobic responses to AIDS.
• ACT UP’s Brochure Statement:
• We kiss in an aggressive demonstration of affection; We kiss to protest the cruel and painful bigotry that affects the lives of lesbians and gay men; We Kiss so that all who see us will be forced to confront their own homophobia; We kiss to challenge repressive conventions that prohibit displays between persons of the same sex; We kiss as an affirmation of our feelings, our desires, ourselves.
ACT UP AND “Queer Nation” AIDS DEMOGRAPHICS, pp. 54/55
• “Kiss Ins” were staged in response to the factual events of 1989:
• One in ten lesbians and one in five gay men were physically assaulted because of their sexuality
• The US Senate’s Helms Amendment, prevented federal funding of any AIDS educational materials that could be construed to promote lesbian or gay sex
• The federal gov. slowness to react to the AIDS crisis was tantamount to condoning the deaths of tens of thousands of gay men
• The Civil Rights Commission opposed legislation authorizing the gathering of bias- related crime statistics because it objected to the inclusion of sexual orientation as a bias category.
DAY OF DESPERATION: 100,000 DEATHS, 1991