5 pages reaserch essay

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INTRODUCTION ART about AIDS

Junge, Sophie. Art about AIDS : Nan Goldin's Exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, De Gruyter, Inc., 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=4718395. Created from sjsu on 2020-11-16 08:38:35.

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The MEANING of ART DURING the AIDS EPIDEMIC

“By its very existence and its volume, this show proves its own prem- ise — that AIDS has not and will not eliminate our community, or succeed in wiping out our sensibility or silencing our voice.”1

Nan Goldin wrote these words in her introduction to the catalogue of the 1989 New York City exhibition, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. In recent years, Goldin’s wish that artists with AIDS receive lasting rec- ognition seems to have come true. Exhibitions such as Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism (2013–2014) or AIDS in New York: The First Five Years (2013) have rediscovered and revisited artistic confrontations with AIDS.2 After two decades of relative disregard, there has been a re- surgence of interest in the AIDS epidemic as an object of artistic refl ection.

One sign of this has been a veritable boom in HIV/AIDS-related exhibitions, including not only the group shows mentioned above, but also retrospectives of individuals including David Wojnarowicz (1954 – 1992) and Mark Morrisroe (1959 – 1989). These artists are hailed as represen- tatives of a social movement and their work is presented to the muse- um and gallery public as examples of political art about AIDS.3 Many of the gay artists involved were themselves HIV-positive and died from AIDS-related causes. They did not have the opportunity to develop their art in new contexts after the epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s abated, and to this day their works remain closely connected to the historical outbreak of AIDS in the United States. In contrast, women artists such as Nan Goldin and Kiki Smith, who also put AIDS at the center of their work, have been on the artistic landscape continuously since the 1970s, and their work today belongs to an internationally recognized artistic canon.4 As banal as it may sound, they also owe this constant presence

1 Goldin, “In the Valley,” 5. 2 Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism was exhibited 2013 / 2014 in the New York

Public Library, AIDS in New York: The First Five Years was shown in 2013 at the New- York Historical Society. In the same year, the exhibitions LOVE AIDS RIOT SEX 1: Kunst Aids Aktivismus 1987 – 1995 and LOVE AIDS RIOT SEX 2: Kunst Aids Aktivismus 1995 bis heute could be seen in the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (nGbK) in Berlin. In 2012, the show Gran Fury: Read My Lips opened at 80 Washington Square East Gallery of New York University and the group show This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

3 For example, Spirituality: Works by David Wojnarowicz from 1979 – 1990 (2011), exhibition at P. P. O.W Gallery, New York City; an evening of fi lms by and about David Wojnarowicz at Tate London in January 2011; the inclusion of Wojnarowicz in HIDE / SEEK: Differ- ence and Desire in American Portraiture (2010), exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D. C. ; and a Mark Morrisroe retrospective in Fotomuseum Winterthur (2010 – 2011).

4 Following Jutta Held, I defi ne canon as the gauge or measure by which the quality of artists or works is determined, accepted as a binding defi nition of a corpus of exceptional artists and works (Held and Schneider, Grundzüge Kunstwissenschaft, 244). For a feminist perspective see Nochlin, “Women Artists” and Griselda Pollock, who defi ned canon as a “discursive formation which constitutes the objects / texts it selects as the products of

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to the fact that they did not become infected with HIV and survived the AIDS epidemic.

Recent exhibitions about HIV/AIDS are a sign of a marked interest in 1980s American activist art. These artworks were immediate reactions to the sociopolitical consequences of the epidemic. For example, in 2010, the fall show of the White Columns gallery in New York City focused on the political and artistic activism of ACT UP, the central voice of the city’s AIDS movement. The exhibits SICK 80s at the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona at the end of 2010 and the “AIDS room” installed at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the same year are examples of the desire to canonize activist art — whether graphic art, photography, or in- stallations — and create visibility for these representations of a past crisis.5 Gallery Gmurzynska in Zurich, a commercial gallery, exhibited a large red AIDS sculpture by the Canadian art collective General Idea in the winter of 2011, indicating that artworks about AIDS can even now be lucrative.

Furthermore, around 30 years after the height of the epidemic in the United States and Europe, artistic confrontations with HIV/AIDS are also increasingly the subject of research in the social sciences and the humanities.6 But academic researchers, like curators and gallery own- ers, seem more interested in activist art — often the creations of collec- tives — than in individual explorations of AIDS. The latter, heterogeneous and more diffi cult to read, have at best been the subject of monographs.

The analysis at hand attempts to close this gap. Its focus is not the pictorial discourse created in collective and anonymous processes, but the meaning of individual artworks that were a reaction to a concrete political situation. Through a historicization of the epidemic and the ar- tistic grappling with the same, this study also throws a critical eye on the current canonization of art that has written a particular history of AIDS. Countering the narrative of medical progress in the fi ght against the virus, the focus is on the self-empowerment of gay, lesbian, and bi- sexual American activists who were reacting to a specifi c sociopolitical situation in Ronald Reagan’s America. It is the history of a local move- ment that, in its struggle against AIDS, the Reagan government, and the pharmaceutical industry, played a decisive role in creating visibility for the epidemic and changing the way in which it was seen.

This history of overcoming a past crisis is unrelated to the cur- rent global spread of HIV and the continuing epidemic in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where every twentieth adult is HIV-positive.7

artistic mastery and, thereby, contributes to the legitimation of white masculinity’s exclusive identifi cation with creativity and with culture” (Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 9). As an example of current exhibitions see Goldin’s participation in the show PRIVAT, 201 2/ 2013 at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt / M., and Kiki Smith: Sojourn at the Brooklyn Museum in 2010.

5 The full titles are ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987 – 1993 and Sick 80s: The AIDS Crisis, Art and Counter-biopolitical Guerrilla.

6 Just one example is the work of the Association for the Social Sciences and Humanities in HIV (ASSHH) and the comprehensive literature on cultural responses to AIDS by i. e. Gregg Bordowitz, Emily Colucci or Lutz Hieber (see Bibliography).

7 See http://www.who.int/hiv/ (last accessed Feb. 06, 2016).

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Nevertheless, this (local) history of a political battle fought by Western activists shaped the (global) image of HIV/AIDS, as exemplifi ed not only in exhibitions but in many other cultural products. John Irving’s novel In One Person (2012), documentaries such as United in Anger (2012), the ACT UP Oral History Project, and the Academy Award-winning feature Dallas Buyers Club (2013) are just a few of many examples.

Current historicization stresses the fi ghting spirit of the Ameri- can AIDS movement and almost exclusively canonizes activist art in exhibitions about AIDS. This begs the question of the power of defi ni- tion regarding the epidemic. Which images are suitable to represent HIV/AIDS today and how should we remember the epidemic? These questions have accompanied images about AIDS since the 1980s and to this day — I posit — the power of cultural defi nition lies in the hands of former activists and representatives of the gay community.8 Frank Wagner’s two exhibitions at the Berlin gallery Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (nGbK), Vollbild AIDS (1988), the fi rst German group exhibition on AIDS, and the more recently curated two-part show LOVE AIDS RIOT SEX (2013 / 2014) must be seen in this context.

Even today, many former activists’ interest in images of HI V/ AIDS is politically motivated. These artworks are constitutive for the histo- ry and self-understanding of their community. Thus representations of the epidemic are not truly open to interpretation by anyone, but act as the voice of certain social groups. From a social-science rather than a political perspective on artistic responses to AIDS, this rather one-dimen- sional history of the epidemic in the United States and Western Europe must be seen critically. There is a great danger that old quarrels about interpretation could become solidifi ed. Old dichotomies about “correct” and “incorrect” images are not broken, but reproduced, and the makers of these images are reduced to their position as enunciating subjects.

Former AIDS activist David Deitcher named a further reason for the current interest in AIDS activism: it fulfi lls a wish for “a passion of engagement” and the

desire to experience the sense of solidarity, the possibility for a coalition that crystallized in those years. […] But I do think there is, if anything, a kind of nostalgia for that kind of critical mass, which has to do with politics and identity and community. 9

In no way does the current analysis wish to belittle the experiences of ac- tivists such as Deitcher. Nevertheless, this study does not preference the pictorial politics of a particular community, but rather sets itself the goal of uncovering the meaning of artistic and political pictorial strategies.

8 The fi lm United in Anger and the ACT UP Oral History Project were produced and initiated by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman. The Oral History Project is situated in the Harvard College Library since 2011 and is openly available online: http://www.actuporalhistory.org (last accessed Feb. 06, 2016).

9 Author’s interview with David Deitcher, May 23, 2011 (p. 327). All interviews can be found in full in the appendix.

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There is no question that the history of AIDS activism should be part of the canon of visual responses to the epidemic in America. But the dominant focus on activist art should be expanded to counter a one- sided (pictorial) history of AIDS. The sociopolitically loaded nature of art- works about AIDS in the 1980s can be transferred to the contemporary reception of this art. In this way, we can better understand processes of art-historical appraisal and of canonization beyond the context of AIDS. Thus the starting point of this analysis is the question of which histories of AIDS were and are told — with a critical eye toward transmission.

The analysis of artworks dealing with AIDS presents a challenge to the academic discipline of art history. These works do not fi t into the usual categories of style and epochs because their artistic culture, gen- erally understood as a movement, is characterized by heterogeneous me- dia and styles. At the same time, statements about individual works and oeuvres have a tendency to lapse into subjective, biographical testimony about personal involvement. As an alternative, this study looks at the artistic and sociological framework of the exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing and analyzes the genesis of the show and the concept of curator Nan Goldin as well as the works themselves and their reception. The focus is on artistic investigations of the AIDS epidemic in the Unit- ed States between 1985 and 1989. These works explore the physical and psychological effects of AIDS, the societal discourse on the epidemic, and the reactions of government and media.10

The time span was chosen due to the large number of artworks about AIDS after 1985. Although the epidemic began in the early 1980s, artistic reactions fi rst began to appear in large numbers in the second half of the decade. This lag can be explained by the fact that the fi rst counter-discourse by people with AIDS 11 was solely textual, because (pic- torial) visibility of people with AIDS was seen as inviting marginalization or repression. For these reasons, many people with AIDS did not want to have their pictures public. Only in a second counter-discourse did people with AIDS create their own pictorial language of self-representation.12

In 1987, AZT — the fi rst antiretroviral medication which inhibits HIV replication — was approved. In the mid-1990s, a combination therapy of various antiretroviral drugs was introduced that, at least for many

10 I use William H. Foege’s defi nition of an epidemic: “a disease or other condition caus- ing high mortality or morbidity and often accompanied by social dislocation” (Foege, “Plagues Perceptions,” 12). In the following I shall go into the use of the term in more detail.

11 I use the phrase people with AIDS to denote those infected with HIV, those sick from AIDS-related diseases (directly affected) as well as their relatives and friends (indirectly affected). Both AIDS activists and people with AIDS have rejected the term victim, which implies they are only passive patients and places them in the category of an Other from which the general population can disassociate itself. The term people with AIDS was coined in 1983 at the Second AIDS Forum in Denver, Colorado (Grover, “AIDS Keywords,” 26). Susan Sontag uses the term general population as a code for white heterosexuals (Sontag, Illness and Aids, 68). This is the sense in which I use this phrase. Simon Watney has criticized the lack of differentiation in this category, which reduces all differences of class, gender, and ethnicity to sexual orientation (Watney, “The Spectacle of AIDS,” 73).

12 Grover, “Visible Lesions,” 31.

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inhabitants of Western industrialized countries, led to a dedramatization of the epidemic.13 These medical developments are clearly refl ected in the arts. In the early 1990s, activist collectives disbanded and HIV/AIDS lost its importance as an issue in the art world. However in the United States — a country without public health insurance — the crisis was only over for people with AIDS who could afford the life-extending medica- tion.14 This included those artists with AIDS at the center of this study who, as we shall see below, were mainly members of the white middle class and had access to treatment.

In the late 1980s, numerous group and individual exhibitions explored the topic of AIDS. The exhibitions themselves and the literature about them — for instance the group exhibition From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS (1992 – 1994)15 and Rob Baker’s 1994 publication The Art of AIDS16 — commonly referred to the works shown as “Art about AIDS.” 17 Like the individual works themselves, these shows exhibited a wide con- ceptual, contextual, and medial diversity. The broad spectrum ranged from monographic gallery exhibitions, such as David Wojnarowicz’s 1990 show Tongues of Flame at Illinois State University in Normal, to group exhibi- tions such as the abovementioned From Media to Metaphor, a travelling exhibition that was shown in nine different places over two years.

There is no common visual language intrinsic to Art about AIDS that allows the identifi cation thereof; it describes neither a particular school nor program. Instead, these artistic explorations are completely heterogeneous in terms of media, form, and content, and are rooted in their contemporary artistic contexts. One reason for the hetero geneity is certainly the lack of temporal or artistic distance to the crisis. The sud- denness with which the epidemic hit the New York City art scene left no time to develop common imagery. While curator Thomas W. Sokolowski nevertheless has spoken of an “AIDS style” that is “hard, clean, and fast,” the analysis at hand assumes that the only thing that brought these artists together under the label Art about AIDS was their status as people with AIDS.18

The heterogeneity of these artworks raises the question of wheth- er Arthur C. Danto’s concept of post-historical art might offer fi tting terminology for artistic explorations of AIDS. Danto, elaborating on

13 The term “dedramatization” (Entdramatisierung) is theater scholar Beate Schappach’s designation for the slow retreat of the AIDS crisis (Schappach, Aids in Literatur, Theater und Film). All current medical facts on HIV and AIDS are from the website http://www.hivbuch.de (last accessed Feb. 06, 2016).

14 Deitcher, “American Interregnum,” 35. 15 On exhibitions about AIDS see Dreishpoon, “Review of Art’s Revenge” and Harris,

“Urgent Images.” From Media to Metaphor is discussed in more detail below. 16 For examples of Art about AIDS see also Deitcher, “Silence.” 17 I understand Art about AIDS as a label or (genre) title, for which reason it is capitalized

here and in the following. 18 Sokolowski, “America,” 67. I use this open defi nition, unlike Rob Baker, who looks

only at “gay representations of AIDS in the Arts” and unsurprisingly then asks about the continuing relevance of this work (Baker, Art of AIDS, 15 and 138).

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Georg W. F. Hegel’s ideas about the end of art, famously stated that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, exhibited in the Stable Gallery in New York City in 1964, marked the onset of art “after the end of art.” 19 He did so in opposition to Clement Greenberg’s paradigm of “the purity of modern- ism” refl ected in the contrast of “high art” and “low art.” Danto instead saw posthistorical art as a synthesis of life and art, of everyday objects and artworks.20 However Danto did not really mean the end of art itself, but rather the end of modernist art history as defi ned by Greenberg.21 To defi ne Art about AIDS, it is not useful to focus on lacking guidelines, and Danto’s terminology is therefore not precise enough. Instead it is necessary to transcend the margins of an idealistic concept of art and and, as Danto in fact demanded, to create an art history that includes social history.22

If we want to be able to analyze Art about AIDS and look not only at the political function of activist art in the service of the AIDS movement, we need to expand art historical approaches to include the sociology of art. This interdisciplinary research approach makes it possible to conduct scientifi c research on Art about AIDS and its meaning in the social dis- course on AIDS in the 1980s. Only in this way can we take into account the specifi c conditions of its political and social production and distribution.

This study therefore centers on the group exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (Witnesses in the following), curated by the Amer- ican photographer Nan Goldin (born 1953) at Artists Space in New York City. The exhibition ran from November 16, 1989 until January 6, 1990. Witnesses was the city’s fi rst group show about AIDS and it sparked a nationwide debate about government funding of art. This controversy made the exhibition highly relevant as a political and artistic event, and comprehensive archival material on Witnesses is available to the public at the New York University (NYU) Fales Library. This material provided the basis for the study at hand. This analysis has consciously avoided personal statements by the artists with AIDS in the show and is not in- terested in eventual relationships between artists’ biographies and their creative work. Rather it asks about the contemporary reception of the ex- hibition by artists, curators, people with AIDS, and the American media, and analyzes the functionalization of this paradigmatic exhibition in the political and artistic discourses (on AIDS) of the late 1980s. It thus aims to expand this area of research, which is necessarily dominated by sub- jective and biographical approaches, in a new and productive manner.

19 Hegel saw the end of art as accompanying gains in knowledge: “We may well hope that art will always rise higher and come to perfection, but the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit” (Hegel, Aesthetics, 103 and Danto, “End of Art,” 30 – 31).

20 Danto, “High Art,” 157. 21 Ibid. 22 Although Danto’s “art after the end of art” seems fi tting to the end of the 20th century,

which has often been called apocalyptic, I do not fi nd his ideas very original. They are very similar to Peter Bürger’s description of the historical avant-garde as well as to, for example, Douglas Crimp’s defi nition of postmodern art (see Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde and Crimp, “Photographs at the End”).

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QUESTIONS and AIMS

The research project at hand presents a pioneer analysis of a segment of the New York City art scene that was greatly impacted by AIDS and that presented itself publicly in Goldin’s exhibition. I view the self-pro- claimed Art about AIDS of the time as a representation of social out- siders who were not part of the heteronormative 23 general population and made communal artistic statements in New York City.24

At the center of my study is photographer Nan Goldin. As curator and as an artist who thematized AIDS in her own work, she was a key fi gure of the East Village art scene in New York City. Both the sites of research relevant to this study as well as the various ways in which AIDS was dealt with in art at the time converge in her person. The following questions guided my analysis of the exhibition:

— What were Goldin’s demands on the artworks in her show? — How did artists represent themselves in the show? Did they

distance themselves from media images of HIV-positive people and AIDS patients in the press, that is from images created by the general population who were, assumedly, not affected by the epidemic?

— In the context of the AIDS crisis, what were the specifi c functions of the individual artworks and of the exhibition as a whole as regards representation, economics, ethics, and the formation of identity?

— What was the sociological and theoretical role of the artists’ personal relationship to AIDS, or HIV status, regarding the recep- tion of the works?

To answer these questions about the conditions of production as well as the concept and reception of the exhibition, I studied all those involved in the show. Following Mieke Bal’s theory of cultural analysis, I looked at Goldin’s show as a discursive formation, the conditions of which — the Artists Space as institution, the curator Nan Goldin, the artworks, artists, visitors, and political framework — must always also be taken into con- sideration.25 Bal views exhibitions as a synecdoche of a larger cultural and political context.26 Her approach makes it possible to look both at the aesthetic value of an individual artwork and the cultural meaning of art. I also examine Goldin’s community, which I defi ne in the following as

23 With Michael Warner, I use the term heteronormativity to describe a social system in which heterosexuality is presented as the norm (see Warner, “Queer Planet”).

24 Following Nelson Goodman, under ‘representation’ I include concepts and pictures that refer directly and indirectly to AIDS; indirect representations are pictures that denote an object without portraying an exact likeness (Goodman, Languages of Art). Thus I use representation — also incorporating T. J. Clark’s defi nition of the concept — to mean the system of signs that structure society and compete with one another for ascendance. Clark speaks of a “battlefi eld of representations” (Clark, Painting of Modern Life, 6).

25 Bal, Double Exposures, 3 – 4. 26 Bal, “Discourse of the Museum,” 206.

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a social group with fundamental common values27 as regards not only its artistic production, but also its social structure. Starting from the thesis that these artists with AIDS formed an elite, I look at the commu- nity members — socially marginalized as gay people with AIDS — as an exclusive network that self-confi dently set itself apart from the general population.28 Whether they created their own canon of visual representa- tion within this alternative space is explored further on. Alongside Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz (1954 – 1992) is an important fi gure within this study. From the 1970s, Wojnarowicz had worked with a variety of media including graffi ti, painting, photography, collage, text, and fi lm. He was one of the best-known artists in the show. As an HIV-positive AIDS activ- ist and member of Goldin’s community, he acted as the point of intersec- tion between her circle of friends and the AIDS movement. Like Goldin, he is a key historical fi gure.

This comprehensive analysis of the show Witnesses aims to make a contribution to the research of a specifi c and yet representative artis- tic community. That community used artworks and exhibitions as both self-representation and political protest during a threatening medical, personal and societal crisis.

In four chapters, we shall take a close look at the curator and her con- cept, the political situation of the time, selected artworks, and Goldin’s community. The guiding question of the fi rst chapter is the goal of Gol- din’s exhibition concept as well as her selection criteria. To aid the ex- amination of Goldin’s motivation and concept, we shall also be looking at Goldin’s own response to AIDS in her photographs of Gilles and Gotscho, taken between 1991 and 1993.

To better understand Goldin’s aims, Witnesses is compared with three other New York City group shows about AIDS that opened be- tween 1989 and 1992:

— Images & Words. Artists Respond to AIDS, Henry Street Settlement, 1989 / 1990

— The Indomitable Spirit, International Center of Photography, 1990 — From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS,

travelling exhibition, 1992 – 1994

27 Sebastian Haunss avoids the term gay community and instead introduces the concept of “scene.” He defi nes scenes as located in a specifi c space and dependent upon interaction and not only communication; as local and action oriented and only loosely tied to social status (Haunss, Identität in Bewegung, 87 and 89). The concept of scene is also useful for this work, in particular the term “art scene.” I use scene rather than milieu because belonging to the latter is not a matter of free choice, but is predispositioned and delimited by long-term overall structures, and usually has fi xed borders that cannot be crossed (Ibid., 85).

28 I use the term elite as a sociological category following Pierre Bourdieu’s delineation of the aristocracy. Elites are defi ned by their social position and their cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu, Distinction, 114 – 116). A more thorough defi nition of the concept shall be given below.

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All of these exhibitions are characterized by the diversity of the artistic forms through which AIDS was explored. Each also published a cata- logue, making a study of primary sources possible.29

In the second chapter, I take a close look at the genesis of the show and its importance in the context of the American culture wars. The exhibition was funded with money from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).30 Shortly before the exhibition opened, the NEA threat- ened to withdraw its support because the exhibit, in particular David Wojnarowicz’s contribution to the catalogue, was too “political.” 31 Not until the day of the opening did the NEA and Artists Space reach an agreement. This confl ict about government funding of Art about AIDS was part of larger battles about NEA funding, including the confl icts of the same year surrounding photographs by Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe.

In the third chapter, we shall explore some of the artworks exhibited at Witnesses. Starting with Goldin’s demand for appropriate, “positive” rep- resentation of people with AIDS, I compare the photographic portraits of gay men with AIDS shown in the exhibit with media images considered to be “negative” portraits of people with AIDS. One-third of the works shown in Witnesses were photographic portraits; seven of these works are the fo- cus of my analysis. Three photographs examine the theme of sexuality and (homo)erotic desire; four are portraits of people with AIDS. Through this analysis, I was able to gain a fundamental understanding of the function and meaning of photography in Witnesses. I was also able to situate the works in the political discourse (surrounding AIDS) of the late 1980s.

The fi nal chapter revolves around Nan Goldin’s community. I look at its inception and structure, grounded in the artists’ enclave of the East Village and in the larger AIDS activist movement. A comparison with the activist works of the artists collective Gran Fury provides insight into the utilization of art during the AIDS epidemic and allows us to pose questions about judging these various artistic engagements with AIDS. In conclusion, I look at AIDS as a social and cultural crisis. One partic- ular interest is how historical epidemics such as the plague and syphilis were used as metaphors to construct meanings for this new epidemic.

ART about AIDS in WITNESSES: AGAINST Our VANISHING, 1989

Almost 100 works by 25 artists were exhibited in Nan Goldin’s show. Be- fore Witnesses even opened, these works — and a David Wojnarowicz text in the catalogue — led to a raging debate about government funding of

29 There were exhibitions about AIDS outside of New York City, for example AIDS: The Artists’ Response, at the Hoyt L. Sherman Gallery of Ohio State University from Feb. 24 to Apr. 16, 1989, curated by Jan Zita Grover. As this study focuses on art in New York, these exhibitions will not be examined further.

30 The NEA was founded in 1965 as the fi rst federal foundation for the support of art and culture nationwide.

31 Document Frohnmayer 1989a. All archival documents from Witnesses are cited with the NYU Fales Library fi le numbers in the appendix.

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supposedly obscene artworks. This resulted in enormous media publicity for the small, short-term exhibition, so that suffi cient archival material is now available to reconstruct and analyze both the events before the show’s opening and the reception of the show by contemporary news- papers, art journals, artists, and art critics.

In terms of content, Goldin’s show exhibited the usual heterogene- ity of Art about AIDS. The artists approached the subject from a variety of perspectives and their art is indistinguishable from the contemporary artistic context as regards both form and content. As solely photographs are analyzed in the third chapter, and only a selection thereof, a short overview of the entire show and its artistic themes follows.

The artworks in Goldin’s show were presented in two rooms. In the fi rst were the works of 14 artists covering a broad spectrum of me- dia — painting, drawing, photography, installations, and sculptures — and varying grades of abstraction. The second room was mostly given over to photography. All of the pieces dealt with the human body and, through the body, with issues connected to HIV/AIDS such as sexuality, illness, death, loss, and memory. Themes included the intimacy of two bodies ( David Wojnarowicz, David Armstrong, Peter Hujar), the fragmentation and destruction of the body and its margins (Dorit Cypis, Greer Lankton), the body’s absence (Jo Shane, Kiki Smith, Shellburne Thurber), its de- cline (Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Mark Morrisroe, David Wojnarowicz, Vittorio Scarpati), and inner workings (James Nares). This fi t in with Goldin’s conceptual ideas, expressed in the catalogue, which were con- cerned less with explicitly political questions and more with the artists’ personal responses to AIDS.32

The motif of boundaries played an important role in these diverse explorations of the body. The unity of the body and the concomitant safe- ty of our bodies’ margins was questioned: while Dorit Cypis presented her own body as fragmented in 28 photographs, Greer Lankton and Ki- ki Smith asked whether skin defi nes and protects our bodies, especially from HIV. Smith’s installation All Our Sisters, Room 1, no. 27 (1989), is representative of many of the show’s works, as it expressed diverse as- pects of this boundary motif. All Our Sisters is an off-white rectangular muslin banner printed with almost 80 female fi gures and, hanging from the ceiling above the banner, a papier-mâché sculpture, also in the form of a naked female body. The delicate sculpture refl ects the fragility and vulnerability of human skin, which is barely able to ward off an HIV in- fection.33 As a sculpture of a woman’s body, it also represents the body’s defenselessness against male penetration, thus breaking the long-held si- lence about the threat of HIV infection for women. Smith’s hollow paper sculpture symbolizes the presence of the absence of a person after their death.34 It is only the imprint of a body and is thus a site of the body’s last

32 Goldin, “In the Valley,” 4. 33 Weingart, Ansteckende Wörter, 40. 34 These papier-mâché works were inspired by Japanese paper balloons. Author’s interview

with Kiki Smith, July 8, 2011 (p. 338).

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touch. Although the air-fi lled paper sculpture, like the absent body, takes up almost no physical space, it is a lack that demands its proper place: “It takes up the similar kind of psychic space, just the form without having any content whatsoever.” 35

Shellburne Thurber, who began taking photos of empty motel rooms in 1989, six of which were exhibited in the show, also equated the emptiness of space with the absence of bodies and thereby refl ect- ed on loneliness and intimacy, and loss and memory, not only in the context of the AIDS crisis.36 Despite the universality of these two re- fl ections on the disappearance of the body, and despite Kiki Smith’s explicit desire not to be reduced to the discourse surrounding AIDS,37 a link can be made to her personal mourning of those who died in the AIDS epidemic, as she clearly stated in the exhibition catalogue: “The paper body hovers near the ceiling […] like the many souls of my com- munity dead from AIDS alive in me.” 38

Because HIV crosses the boundaries of the body, it necessarily calls to mind the border between the interior and the exterior. This in turn leads to more boundaries being drawn: between the individual body and the envi- ronment, as well as between the sick and the healthy, between people with AIDS and the general population. These borders were on the one hand used to marginalize people with AIDS as the enemy within. On the other hand they were criticized in theoretical discourse and artistic explorations and erased in order to fi ght the stigmatization of people with AIDS.39

These artworks are not only personal expressions of loss and la- mentation due to AIDS, but also fundamental questionings of the lines drawn between the private and the public. It is noticeable that women artists in particular (Cypis, Lankton, Smith) dealt with these questions, but not surprising, as the dissolution of these dichotomies had also played a large role in feminist discourse in art and academia since the 1970s. The desire to transcend such opposition and to break down binary structures was exactly what informed the feminist adage “the personal is political.” 40 This process sounds out Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, which is based on the exclusion of private interests and of certain social groups. By making the private public, Habermas’s strict binary opposition of private and public is sublated.41

Julia Kristeva, whose psychoanalytical texts were often cited in feminist discourse, added a further aspect to the discussion of the bound- aries of the body. She linked the dissolution of the body’s margins to its contamination and equated the dichotomy of pure and impure with that

35 Ibid. 36 Peter Kruska noted that this motif grew out of her work for a college yearbook publisher,

for whom she took portraits of students (Kruska, Boston School, 25). 37 Author’s interview with Kiki Smith, July 8, 2011 (p. 337). 38 Smith in Artists Space, Witnesses, 28. 39 Bright, “Pictures, Perverts,” 1. For a fundamental discussion of stigma and

stigmatization see Goffman, Stigma. 40 Held and Schneider, Grundzüge Kunstwissenschaft, 455. 41 Habermas’s concept of the public is based on its strict separation from the private,

see Habermas, Public Sphere.

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of self and Other. Kristeva introduced the category of the ‘abject’ to de- note contamination — which Susan Sontag also saw as a central metaphor for AIDS 42 — those unassimilated parts of the self located at the margins of existence, at the border between subject and object.43 A concrete exam- ple of the abject is bodily fl uids, which belong to, but nevertheless leave, the body. In this way the body frees itself from its boundaries and the internal pushes out. The category of the abject can be applied to the de- fi lement of the body and of society by AIDS, for as Kristeva said: it is “not a lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.” 44

The link between (corporeal) boundaries and the contamination of society is a theme also taken up by the artistic confrontations with AIDS in Goldin’s exhibition. Within this show there was an intersection of feminist questionings of identity and gender, and issues central to the discourse surrounding AIDS: (homo)sexuality, autonomy, the right to control your own body, and the visibility of social minorities. The exhi- bition’s artworks therefore cannot be classifi ed only as part of the AIDS discourse; they were also multidimensional inquiries into gender and the body. Diverse as these discourses themselves, they mirrored a funda- mental plurality that can be seen in the intersection of AIDS discourse, feminist theory, and queer theory.45

Finally, the artworks in Witnesses were situated squarely within the artis- tic context of their times. The topos of fragmented or broken bodies was common in the 1970s and 1980s. While AIDS gave it new relevance, it did not fi rst come into being with the epidemic.46 The theme of vulnerable, de- teriorating, or destroyed bodies in Goldin’s show was mirrored for example in Kiki Smith’s wax fi gures — “bodies on the margins of state-sanctioned or- der” 47 — or Andres Serrano’s series, The Morgue (1992). If we read the body as a refl ection of or metaphor for society, these artistic representations of bodies destroyed also illustrated the apocalyptic mood of the fi nal decade of the twentieth century.48 AIDS played a major role in the creation of this mood. The epidemic marked a turning point in attitudes toward sexuality and death as well as toward illness and medicine, and brought catastrophe back into the mindset of privileged Western European and American popu- lations.49 AIDS heralded the return of the themes of sick and decaying bod- ies as well as death — taboos in Western society — also as the subjects of art.50

42 Sontag, Illness and Aids, 153. 43 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1 – 2. 44 Ibid., 4. 45 For an introduction to queer theory see for instance Giffney, Queer Theory. 46 The fragmented body had its peak as an art motif in the mid-1990s, as illustrated by the

title of the 1995 Venice Biennale, Identity and alterity: Figures of the body 1895 / 1995. 47 Schmidt-Wulffen and Schwander, “Untitled,” 10. All translations by Laura Radosh unless

otherwise noted. 48 Belting, Menschenbild, 6 – 8. 49 Sontag, Illness and AIDS, 158. 50 Fuller, Endzeitstimmung, 32.

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WAS ART about AIDS an AMERICAN PHENOMENON in the 1980s? A COMPARISON with the FEDERAL REPUBLIC of GERMANY

This study looks only at artistic responses to AIDS in the United States, more specifi cally at artists working in and artworks exhibited in New York City. This is not because American art history is the starting point of this work, rather it is a result of the specifi cities of the AIDS epi- demic in the United States and of cultural engagement therewith; no other country produced a similar visual discourse around AIDS in the 1980s. The broad diversity and heterogeneity of artistic explorations of AIDS — whether individual grapplings, collective forms of visual protest, or alternative representations of people with AIDS — seem to be a phe- nomenon exclusive to the United States and most prominent in New York City, the center of the American art scene.51 In other Western industrial- ized countries in contrast, such as West Germany, where one might ex- pect similar artistic reactions to the epidemic, group shows about AIDS exhibited almost only American artists.

The exhibition Gegendarstellungen: Ethik und Ästhetik im Zeitalter von AIDS was a 1992 show at the Kunstverein in Hamburg and the Mu- seum of Art Lucerne organized by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, director of the Kunstverein at the time, in collaboration with British AIDS theorist Simon Watney.52 All of the works exhibited were by American and Ca- nadian artists who had been able to establish themselves as representa- tive of an artistic discourse on AIDS.53 The catalogue texts never once discussed the decision to show only North American works. However a 1992 review of the exhibition praised the model character of the artistic discourse, while claiming that it could not be applied to the situation in West Germany.54 Frank Wagner, the above-mentioned curator of the exhibition Vollbild AIDS, shown in the nGbK in Berlin in 1988, combined both American and German artworks. However he also stressed that ar- tistic explorations of AIDS from New York and their refl ection on the interaction of art and AIDS had no German analogue.55

And in fact, the fi rst cases of AIDS were diagnosed in the United States. At the end of the 1970s, a new epidemic broke out among young gay men in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, years be- fore AIDS was recognized as a viral infection.56 There were increased

51 There has however been a broad literary discourse on AIDS in Europe, see for example Hervé Guibert’s novels A l’Ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie and Le Protocole compassionel or Peter Zingler’s novel Die Seuche.

52 I use ‘AIDS theorist’ to denote academic members of the gay community and / or AIDS movement, mostly from the social sciences and humanities, who, motivated by the impact of AIDS on their lives, analyzed AIDS as a social construction. Alongside Simon Watney, key theorists of this discourse include Robert Atkins, Douglas Crimp, and David Deitcher.

53 Including the artists David Wojnarowicz, Gran Fury, and Nan Goldin. 54 Becker, Review of “Gegendarstellung”, 330. 55 Wagner, “Übers Sofa,” and interview with Wagner in Ruf et al., “Mark Morrisroe,” 345. 56 A report by the Centers for Disease Control from June 5, 1981 recognized AIDS as an

epidemic for the fi rst time; see Holloran and Hunt, Social History of the United States, 103.

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incidents of a certain form of pneumonia (pneumocystis carinii) and of skin cancer (Kaposi sarcoma) that usually did not affect young men and was a sign of a weakened immune system. Lacking knowledge about the causes and origin of the disease, until 1982 the symptoms were clustered under the name GRID (gay-related immune defi ciency), linking the AIDS epidemic to sexual orientation from the very beginning. In 1982, the Cen- ters for Disease Control and Prevention decided upon the term AIDS, acquired immune defi ciency syndrome. In 1983 / 1984, HIV was isolated in France by Luc Montagnier and in the United States by Robert Gallo and the mystery of transmission was solved.57

Comparable symptoms among gay men in Germany also fi rst ap- peared in the late 1970s. But there were important differences in how West Germany and the United States dealt with the epidemic. In 1983, the Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe (German AIDS Service Organization) was founded and over the course of the following two years, the Federal Ministry of Health sent fl yers to all West German households informing the popula- tion about AIDS. The German minister of health, Rita Süssmuth, pushed for education about preventative measures and infection risks and called publicly for empathy with people with AIDS.58

The U. S. government implemented no state measures against AIDS. Not until his second term in April 1987 did Ronald Reagan, president since 1981, make a public statement about AIDS, admitting the epidemic was “Public Health Enemy Number 1.” 59 This statement did open oppor- tunities for the fi ght against HIV/ AIDS across the nation, but did nothing to change the concept of the state as the protector and guarantor of tra- ditional family values. The government claimed that only monogamous, heterosexual marriage offered protection against HIV. It failed to inform the population that infections could be transmitted by heterosexual sex and put no resources into safer sex education.60 Societal ignorance and public taboos discouraged empathy with gay men or identifi cation with people with AIDS, marginalizing them even further.

As a result, all educational campaigns and support for the sick were organized by people with AIDS themselves. In New York City, the gay community took on the care and support of HIV/AIDS patients and their families. In 1982, the fi rst non-profi t AIDS organization was founded, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), a support center for people with AIDS. GMHC was founded and run with private donations alone and received no government aid.61 Dennis Altman has diagnosed this as typical for the

57 Epstein, Impure Science, 78. 58 Jones, “AIDS in West Germany,” 441 – 442. 59 Tygiel, Ronald Reagan, 226. 60 Watney, “Introduction,” 20. This ignorance about the cause and transmission of HIV/AIDS

was also rampant in the press. Watney cited an article in the Daily Express from Dec. 12, 1988, in which Claire Dover named “20 Facts You Need to Know About a Killer.” She described the way in which the virus originated in Africa and went to the United States via Haiti. The only protection against the virus was a faithful, monogamous partnership, since the main channel of infection was anal sex, which was unsuited to human anatomy (Ibid., 37 – 39).

61 Perrow and Guillén, AIDS Disaster, 112.

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American tradition of volunteer work, which he connected to a lack of government responsibility in social crises.62 Dan Cameron made a simi- lar observation: “It wasn’t at all clear that the government was going to make the right decisions. They needed pressure.” 63

ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, was also founded in New York City in 1987 to express the disappointment in and anger at the government for failing to respond to the AIDS crisis and ignoring the extent of the epidemic. ACT UP became the main mouthpiece of the AIDS movement. It promoted explicitly political grassroots activism and used protest and artistic interventions to gain attention for the crisis and to pressure government agencies to act.64 ACT UP groups were also formed in Germany, but their activism was limited to the local level and they were unable to stimulate political change. Benjamin Buchloh has interpreted this disparity between West Germany and the United States as a fundamental difference in the role of art in the respective societies. While political art in the United States was created with the goal of real cultural intervention in politics and society, there was no comparable artistic activism in West Germany in the 1980s.65 Lutz Hieber expanded upon Buchloh’s theory; in general, he argued, there was no point of en- gagement for provocative political activist art in West Germany at the time, such as existed in the United States in the art of Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger. In West Germany, the relegation of historical avant- garde movements to museums destroyed the possibility of using art as social intervention.66 However this argument is rather weak; more than almost any other institution, MoMA in New York worked since its found- ing in 1929 to bring Cubism, Surrealism, and Dadaism into museums and played a large role in the canonization of those movements.

Furthermore, although there was no comparable AIDS activism in West Germany in the 1980s, other social issues such as environmental protection, world peace, and coming to terms with the Holocaust were re- fl ected in art. One example is Joseph Beuys’ piece Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung (7000 Eichen) at the documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, or his campaign work for the Green Party.67 The Cold War and environmen- tal catastrophes such as the meltdown in Chernobyl in 1986 increased so- cial consciousness of catastrophe in Germany and led to activist art. The decisive reason why there was no such Art about AIDS in West Germa- ny was simply the government’s public health policy. People with AIDS were perhaps just as stigmatized, but they at least had health insurance (and therefore medical care).

In the United States, ignorance about social minorities and condem- nation of homosexuality necessarily made the AIDS epidemic a social taboo. Jürgen Heideking and Christof Mauch have diagnosed this lack

62 Altman, New Puritanism, 181. 63 Author’s interview with Dan Cameron, July 11, 2011 (p. 321). 64 Halcli, “AIDS, Anger, Activism,” 135 – 137. 65 Buchloh in Armleder et al., “Die 80er Jahre,” 80 – 81. 66 Hieber, “Politisierung der Queer Culture,” 219. 67 See also Vol. 93 of Kunstforum International (1988) on “Kunst und Ökologie.”

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of interest in social minorities as a sign of a social turn toward navel gazing and increased individualization.68 Furthermore, not only lack of health insurance, but the Reagan regime’s other massive cuts in social services made life more diffi cult for people with HIV/AIDS. When AZT, the fi rst anti-retroviral medication, became publicly available at hor- rendous prices in 1987, many people with AIDS were excluded from this life-extending therapy due to the costs.69 In New York, where 45 percent of all new infections nationwide were reported in the early 1980s, the public health system had been teetering on the brink of collapse since the 1970s.70 Lack of adequate medical care in fact made AIDS a greater medical crisis in the United States than in West Germany.71

The neo-conservative Republican government created a societal con- sensus that there was no reason to integrate marginalized groups or to fi ght discrimination. That attitude aided the religious right, who instrumental- ized the fear of AIDS to promote their traditional, conservative values.72 This unstructured movement of fundamentalist evangelist Christians called for the literal interpretation of the bible, strict moral values, and patriotism; they had been proselytizing against sexual liberation, abortion, and homosexuality since the 1970s. Political connections to the Reagan gov- ernment increased their social relevance from the early 1980s on, leading to a marginalization of gays and lesbians even before the outbreak of AIDS and lending moral implications to the epidemic in the public eye.73

The movement’s public fi gures such as Jerry Falwell, television evan- gelist and founder of the political religious group Moral Majority, decried AIDS as God’s punishment for the sinful homosexual lifestyle. The Moral Majority fanned fears of sexual minorities by claiming that homosexuality itself was a cause of illness, and was catching. The epidemic was a sign of the impending apocalypse due to America’s sinful society.74 This instru- mentalization of AIDS in the name of religion, a result of a fundamentalist interpretation of American Puritanism, helped to make any dealings with illness and sexuality taboo. Neither American society nor the Reagan gov- ernment was able to react to AIDS — except in the form of moral approba- tion and condemnation of an allegedly sinful homosexual lifestyle.

Moral reprobation of homosexual carriers of disease played a role in public AIDS discourse in Germany as well. James Jones (1992) con- ducted a linguistic analysis of this discourse as published in the weekly

68 Heideking and Mauch, Geschichte der USA, 363 – 364. 69 Stein, Gay and Lesbian Movement, 157. 70 Perrow and Guillén, AIDS Disaster, 78 and 68. In San Francisco, the reaction to AIDS

was both earlier and more concerted, a result of the decentralization of U. S. policy (Fetner, Religious Right, 53 – 54).

71 By the late 1980s, the CDC reported more than 90,000 AIDS-related deaths (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2001, HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report 13, no. 2, p. 30, cited in Fetner, Religious Right, 55).

72 Tygiel, Ronald Reagan, 106. 73 One of their fi rst public actions was Anita Bryant’s 1977 Save the Children campaign

against the Florida anti-discrimination law. Bryant spoke openly against legal equality for gays and lesbians (Bernstein, “United States,” 202).

74 Long, Apocalypticism, 2. The notion that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuals can also be found in Christian literature of the time, for example Rowe, Homosexual Politics.

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news magazines Der Spiegel and Stern. In them, AIDS was constructed as a foreign epidemic brought by the bad guys from the United States to Germany.75 In this AIDS discourse, people with AIDS are alien and perverse and thus social outcasts, a widespread stereotype that was al- so often repeated in American pictorial and linguistic discourse.76 Jones feared that this construction of an American epidemic could also be a danger to so-called risk groups77 in Germany, because labeling AIDS a foreign epidemic downplayed the danger of infection in West Germany, and portrayed American prevention measures as exaggerated and un- necessary. This is particularly true for the aggressively sexual safer-sex campaigns by ACT UP and GMHC. These were picked up by the Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe, but repudiated by the German gay community.78 Sander L. Gilman also believed that the lack of an AIDS discourse comparable to that in the United States was one result of the construction of the epi- demic as American, considering Germany’s negative image of the United States after the Vietnam War.79

Finally, in both countries AIDS was experienced as an attack on Western industrialized countries’ belief in progress. In 1979, the World Health Organization offi cially celebrated the eradication of smallpox, underscoring Western societies’ feeling of security; AIDS was an as- sault on their trust in technology, on the pharmaceutical industry, and on science and medical research, undermining the belief that each gen- eration could achieve more than that of their parents.80 The epidemic and the way it was dealt with led to a realization of vulnerability and ignorance — conditions that did not fi t into the self-image of Western so- cieties.81 The inexorable push forward was also stopped in fact, because a generation that actively shapes society, 25- to 40-year-olds, was dying. In the United States, this societal drama and the government silence sur- rounding it gave rise to a powerful political movement and a multifarious pictorial discourse on AIDS.

75 Jones, “AIDS in West Germany,” 445. While Jones concentrates on the white gay community as the bad guy, it should be said that the spread of the epidemic among African-Americans also called up racial stereotypes.

76 Ibid., 448 and 455. 77 Sander L. Gilman names Haitians, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin addicts as the

so-called risk groups (Gilman, Sexuality, 309). Like Gilman, I prefi x the term risk groups with so-called to make clear that HIV infections are not transmitted within certain social groups, but through specifi c practices.

78 Jones, “AIDS in West Germany,” 457. See for example the slogan of the Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe: “Schwitzen. Spritzen. Safer Sex” (sweat. shoot. safer sex).

79 Gilman, “Plague in Germany,” 1164. 80 Pulver, Tribut der Seuche, 278. 81 See also author’s interview with Ross Bleckner, June 1, 2011 (p. 313).

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METHODOLOGY and THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The focus on Goldin’s exhibition in this analysis links art history analy- ses, the sociology of art, and cultural studies methods to study the specif- ic conditions of the genesis of an artistic community impacted by AIDS as well as mechanisms of appraisal within this community.82 While my approach is interdisciplinary, the analysis is fi rmly within the fi eld of critical art history, as the starting point of all theses and theories is the artwork exhibited in Witnesses.

The context of Goldin’s show was the outbreak of AIDS and the con- tinued epidemic in the 1980s in the United States, which I consider to be a social crisis and not the sum of individual fates. AIDS changed not only political consciousness and ethical values such as tolerance and account- ability — as well as ideas about life and death, bodies and sexuality — but also initiated a shift in the articulation and function of contemporary art. With Paula A. Treichler, I defi ne AIDS as an “epidemic of signifi - cance.” 83 The meanings and metaphors of the verbal and pictorial AIDS discourses not only mirrored social power relations, but created them. Talking about AIDS produced value judgments, which is why I defi ne the epidemic less as a medical and more as a social phenomenon. AIDS challenged common assumptions about sexuality, illness, and death, and highlighted fears of the Other. I therefore lay great value in the question of who produced the knowledge, language, and images of AIDS. An analy - sis that focused on artistic questions alone would be too narrow.

To describe the production of knowledge, language, and images, I use Michel Foucault’s classical defi nition of discourse as

practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to language and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe. 84

When I speak of an AIDS discourse I therefore mean a delimited body of knowledge within the American society of the 1980s. This body was also constructed by theoreticians in a variety of disciplines (discourses), such as sociology, literary theory, and art theory, or within the fi ne arts

82 I do not limit the sociology of art to questions of the conditions of production, but see it rather as a broad approach to social history that also integrates aspects of identity. I thus distance myself from the Marxist sociology of art practiced by Frederik Antals and Arnold Hauser.

83 Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia.” The fundamental link between knowledge and power was fi rst delineated by Michel Foucault (see for example Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 35).

84 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 49.

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themselves. That is to say it was a specifi c, but not a closed system. Dis- course does however function as a regulatory system that “brings forth all possible combinations of statements while forbidding the impossi- ble,” 85 thus marking social hierarchies and actions. In the analysis at hand, AIDS discourse is divided into the “offi cial” discourse of the public media, which was in keeping with the beliefs and policy of Reagan’s con- servative government, and its counter-discourse, the written and verbal language of people with AIDS, AIDS theorists, and activists, who aimed to destabilize existing power structures from the margins.86 This division can also be applied to pictorial representations of and by people with AIDS. This pictorial discourse was a reaction to offi cial, hegemonic im- ages and their social and societal mechanisms of exclusion.

With this defi nition as my starting point, I see Witnesses as a specifi c collection of images, knowledge, and formations of subjects that played a forceful role as an event within the AIDS discourse. To analyze Witnesses, I follow T. J. Clark and ask socio-historical questions about the specifi c conditions of production, distribution and reception of this collection.87 The context of the exhibition is not a fi xed category, but one that can always be negotiated, as Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson explain from a semiotic perspective: “‘Context’ can always be extended; it is subject to the same process of mobility that is at work in the semiosis of the text or artwork that ‘context’ is supposed to delimit and control.” 88

Within the AIDS discourse, Goldin’s show is unique and can be de- scribed as a discursive event. Because of its singularity — less in terms of artistic innovation and more due to its function as a sociopolitical event — I use this terminology to underline the relevance of the exhibition and its specifi c effects. As the fi rst group show about AIDS in New York City, it gave the participating artists a common voice. Despite its short run and small size, it was able to garner an unexpected amount of media attention for an exhibition by and for people with AIDS because of the ensuing confl ict with the NEA. Said confl ict brought to the fore questions about the political content of art and the state funding thereof.

Following Foucault, we can say that Witnesses was an interruption of a relatively unifi ed discourse. As a discursive event, the exhibition was able to disrupt the regularity of this structure and make long-term changes to the discourse.89 For Foucault, such discontinuities appear re- peatedly: sudden, unexpected statements and events within the fi eld of

85 Eder, “Historische Diskurse,” 11. 86 This distinction draws from James Jones’ terms for the offi cial “discourse on AIDS”

and the “discourse of AIDS” conducted by people with AIDS (Jones, “AIDS in West Germany,” 455).

87 According to T. J. Clark, an artwork is always produced and discussed under specifi c conditions and thus itself becomes part of a historical process (see Clark, Images of People). Clark’s Marxist, class-based approach, which mainly concentrates on conditions of production, is here broadened following the feminist critique of Griselda Pollock. Thus in the course of the analysis, questions about the construction of identity shall also be explored.

88 Bal and Bryson, “Semiotics,” 248. 89 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 27.

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a discourse that displace other statements and events and are able to broaden the discourse over the long term. It is important to

grasp the statement in the exact specifi city of its occurrence; determine its conditions of existence, fi x at least its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement it excludes. 90

In this way, I view Goldin’s show as a discursive event within the AIDS discourse; a caesura that produced something new and had an unex- pectedly large impact on the larger societal level.91 These Foucauldian categories bring this study closer to discourse analysis. However this is not a methodology, but instead a research perspective that informs my interdisciplinary approach.92

The sociology-of-art perspective on Goldin’s show, which gives equal weight to all participants in and contributing factors to the creation, reception, and judgment of the exhibition, relies on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the artistic fi eld. Bourdieu’s terminology provides the vo- cabulary that mirrors the reciprocal relationship of artwork, produc- er, and audience — in this case Goldin’s specifi c artistic community. It allows me to integrate all of the factors concerning the exhibition’s artistic fi eld into my analysis.

Bourdieu coined this term in his 1979 study La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement to denote the (more or less) autonomous social micro - cosm created through the process of increasing social differentia - tion.93 This social space has a specifi c nomos, the fundamental laws of the fi eld with their own reference system, history, and rules, and a cul- tural capital that regulates the inner structure of the fi eld of actors, institutions, and interests.94 Bourdieu expanded upon this concept in his 1992 book Les règles de l’art: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire,95 an analysis of the literary fi eld in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In the artistic fi eld, social position and power, and the usual logic of the economy — the capital of the political and economic fi elds — are received indifferently.96 Instead, the artistic fi eld is determined by cultural capital — embodied capital (education, acquired knowledge, breeding), objectifi ed capital (books or paintings), and institutionalized

90 Ibid., 28. 91 Foucault, “Order of Discourse,” 67 – 69. 92 Eder, “Historische Diskurse,” 13. 93 Cited here in the English translation as Bourdieu, Distinction, 30 – 33. 94 Ibid., 228. On the economic, social, and cultural forms of capital see also Barlösius,

Pierre Bourdieu, esp. 187 and Bourdieu, Rules of Art. 95 Cited here in the English translation as Bourdieu, Rules of Art. 96 Ibid., 170.

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capital (degrees, university titles, and honors).97 Although representa- tives of the artistic fi eld are often poor, their authority is grounded in this symbolic capital:

The artist cannot triumph on the symbolic terrain except by losing on the economic terrain (at least in the short run), and vice versa (at least in the long run). 98

Bourdieu defi nes this authority more closely by splitting the artistic fi eld into two subfi elds: one in which the only interest is in symbolic recogni- tion, that is recognition within the fi eld, and another that accepts exter- nal hierarchies in which the value of an artwork is measured by its com- mercial success and the artist’s achievements outside the artistic fi eld.99 It follows that artworks are only considered to be such when their place within the artistic fi eld is recognized.100 The production, distribution and judgment of this placement need to be analyzed within a material, eco- nomic, ideological, political, and aesthetic framework because

the discourse on the work is not a simple side-effect, designed to encourage its apprehension and appreciation, but a moment which is part of the production of the work, of its meaning, and its value. 101

Bourdieu even sees the artists themselves as products of the fi eld, cre- ated in a collective process by the values that dominate within the fi eld, “discovered,” and then institutionalized and invested with (symbolic) capital as meaningful and valuable members of the community.102

Using these ideas, we can situate Goldin’s exhibition within an artis- tic fi eld in which the members knew each other and cooperated with one another. While Bourdieu was interested in the creation of individual art- works, this study goes one step further by investigating the constitution of an entire show. American sociologist Howard S. Becker shares this understanding of art as a social event: “created by networks of people acting together.” 103 To express this, he suggests the term ‘art world(s)’, which he defi nes as analogous to a social structure in which artists are workers and art the result of collective work. Becker made use of Arthur C. Danto’s (1964) term, artworld, which Danto introduced in an epony- mous article about the reception of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. War- hol’s work, Danto claimed, is only understood as art rather than every - day commodities because of their context. They “enjoy a double citi-

97 Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” 242. 98 Bourdieu, Rules of Art, 83. 99 Ibid., 165 – 169. This opposition necessarily leads to internal struggles over the power

of defi nition to legitimize the respective understandings of art (Ibid., 280 and 142). 100 Ibid., 238. 101 Ibid., 170. 102 Ibid., 262, 168 and 171. 103 Becker, Art Worlds, 369.

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zenship … between artworks and real objects … separated and united by the is of artistic identifi cation.” 104 Only the latter “takes [them] up into the world of art and keeps [them] from collapsing into the real object[s] which [they are].” 105 Bourdieu criticized Becker’s theory as merely de- scriptive. Rather than studying the artworld’s structure, Becker reduced it to the sum of individual actors bound only by interaction and cooper- ation.106 Neither was Bourdieu satisfi ed with Danto’s defi nition of the artworld, as it refers only to the artwork as an institution while ignoring the historical and sociological analysis of the genesis and structure of said institution. In so doing, Danto divided the analysis of artworks into two phases, production and perception, further reducing the latter to a purely aesthetic experience.107

For these reasons too, this analysis rests on Bourdieu’s theory of the artistic fi eld, which goes beyond Becker and Danto to include the fi eld’s historical and political conditions. In this sense, I view Nan Goldin’s community as an artistic fi eld in which multiple factors and actors de- termined the production and collective showing of the chosen works. This artistic community was fi rst formed by the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic and the concomitant societal crisis. Nan Goldin’s decision to create an exhibition about the consequences of AIDS arose from her per- ception of the epidemic as a collective affl iction. Her personal success as a photographer gave her suffi cient name recognition in the alternative art world of 1989 that the — equally established — Artists Space chose her to curate its program. These factors all contributed to the selection and exhibition of the show’s 25 artists. Goldin had enough authority within the fi eld to become the “discoverer” of these works due to her symbolic and social capital, her recognition as an artist, her networks, and her contacts. That is to say the power to consecrate artists and artworks is imparted by and within the artistic fi eld itself.108

This artistic fi eld is constituted by not only the curator, but also the artists and catalogue authors — in particular David Wojnarowicz, a successful East Village artist and AIDS activist who contributed both artworks and a catalogue text. Bourdieu’s theory can also be applied to the participating artists. They eschewed justifying themselves to larger society because of their recognition within the artistic fi eld:

Associating elitism and anti-utilitarianism, the artist[s] mock[ed] conventional morality, religion, duties and responsi- bilities and despise[d] anything that might evoke the idea that art could render service to society. 109

104 Danto, “The Artworld,” 582. Emphasis in the original. 105 Ibid., 581. 106 Bourdieu, Rules of Art, 205. 107 Ibid., 287 – 288. 108 Ibid., 168. 109 Ibid., 135.

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This statement is true for the artists’ community in Witnesses and under- scores the thesis of an artistic elite, which represented itself in Goldin’s show. However Bourdieu’s anti-utilitarian understanding of art-for-art’s sake must be relativized for Goldin’s community and its exhibition in light of the political AIDS movement.

In the third chapter, the object of study encompasses more than only Witnesses; the individual artworks are the focus of the chapter. The way in which they deal with the topic of AIDS is — in keeping with Art about AIDS — so heterogeneous that no meaningful results could be expected from a search for common categories. Not wanting to ignore the content of the works, I compare the photographic portraits within the show with press photos of gays and lesbians and people with HIV and / or AIDS from 1983 to 1989. This allows me to situate the role of the artworks within Goldin’s specifi c exhibition concept and within the discourse on AIDS. This comparative pictorial analysis does not distinguish content-wise between the artistic photographs and the press photographs, but reads them as (re)productive media of a cultural memory.110 The press pho- tographs are also subject to historical visual analysis. My questions fo- cus on the “historical conditionalities and meanings of images and their perception” as (press) photographs are not objective, purely illustrative sources of history, but are themselves historical.111

Stereotyping and the construction of identities are at the center of the visual analyses. I draw from cultural studies for my understanding of identity, which Stuart Hall has described as collective and plural, de- termined by society, and fi ercely contested.112 The struggle around the identity and representation of people with AIDS also motivated the art- ists to make the images in Goldin’s show.113 Foucault’s model of power relations — in particular the link between sexuality and power as expli- cated in The Will to Knowledge — was central to my analysis of the vis- ual construction of (homo)sexual identity during the AIDS crisis. These ideas are also central to gender and queer studies, which emerged as aca demic disciplines in the United States in the mid-1970s and mid-1980s respectively. Both disciplines examine the construction of (non- hetero- normative) identities that — like the photographs in Goldin’s show — push the borders of biological gender. They examine the ways in which so- cial categories of difference such as sex, ethnicity, and class affect social processes of exclusion, discrimination, and hierarchization.114 The con- struction of sexual identity is fundamental to my analysis of represen- tations of homosexuality within the exhibition. The artworks critiqued the “natural binary sex” (Judith Butler) and its heteronormative binary

110 Paul, “Visual History,” 13. See also Assmann, Cultural Memory. 111 Jäger, Fotografi e und Geschichte, 15. 112 Hall, “Cultural Identity”: Jacques Lacan’s and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic and

linguistic defi nitions of the subject, fundamental to both feminist theory and gender studies, are not a main concern of the study at hand.

113 Here one could also make use of the sociological category of the image, formed by an appropriate representation of the artist. On this see Kautt, Image.

114 See for example Whitehead, Moodley, and Talahite-Moodley, Gender and Identity.

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character is visually disrupted by the show’s works.115 Thus these artistic explorations can be studied with the terminology of gender studies and queer studies, both of which recognize sexuality and sexual desire as crucial aspects of the hegemonic construction of gender. Gender studies rescinds the equation of anatomical sex and social gender identity while queer studies goes further to deconstruct the male / female binary and normative heterosexuality.116

115 Butler, Gender Trouble, 31: “The institution of a compulsory and naturalized hetero- sexuality requires and regulates gender as a binary relation in which the masculine term is differentiated from a feminine term, and this differentiation is accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire.”

116 Ibid., 9 – 11. See also Marchart, Cultural Studies, 206 and 208.

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STATE of RESEARCH

This study is the fi rst comprehensive analysis of the exhibition Witnesses and the people involved in it. Stephen C. Dubin (1992) and Dustin Kidd (2010) have both examined the exhibition as a political event in their analyses of the American culture wars, but they looked neither at the artworks, nor did they draw from Artists Space archival material.117 As mentioned above, that material was donated by Artists Space to the NYU Fales Library in the summer of 2011.

AIDS as an object of study in the humanities and social sciences has to date been mostly restricted to the United States. The literature is therefore in the main interdisciplinary American research in the fi elds of sociology, history, art history, and literary criticism. Much of the literature on cultural reactions to AIDS was the result of research in the mid-1980s and motivated by the crisis itself. This literature centers on the importance of the epidemic and is replete with political rheto- ric condemning the marginalization and stigmatization of (gay) people with AIDS. Many of the key theorists, such as Jan Zita Grover, Paula A. Treichler, and Simon Watney were brought together by Douglas Crimp, art critic and AIDS activist, in his special issue of October (1987). That publication was key to the discourse on AIDS as a social construct and as a crisis with metaphorical weight.118

Such contemporary analyses of the AIDS epidemic are charac- terized by the personal investment of the authors and their striving to achieve self-determination for gays and the power of defi nition over AIDS.119 They therefore mainly focus on the linguistic construction of AIDS. Visual representations are usually used only to support their theo- ries. The lack of critical distance in these studies makes them of little use as secondary sources. Instead, I consider them as primary references in my comparison of pictorial and linguistic representations of AIDS. Michel Foucault’s refl ections on sexuality and power are fundamental to this early discourse on AIDS. From the early 1980s, Sander L. Gil - man conducted research on social minorities, sexuality, illnesses, and their manifestations. His comparative study of societal metaphors for AIDS and syphilis in October provided an important reference point for contextualizing AIDS in historical discourses on epidemics.120 Finally, from their publication to this day, Susan Sontag’s seminal essays “Illness as Metaphor” (1978) and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” (1989) have informed

117 Dubin, Arresting Images and Kidd, Legislating Creativity, who wrote of his sources: “All I have to go on is the catalog, a set of images of the works — images that are also somewhat reductive of the show itself and the works contained therein” (Ibid., 85).

118 See for example Crimp, “Cultural Analysis”; Treichler, Theory in an Epidemic; Watney, Policing Desire and Watney, “The Spectacle of AIDS.”

119 See Crimp and Rolston, AIDS Demographics and Baker, Art of AIDS, who inserted short “Interlude[s]” between the chapters of his book with personal remembrances of lovers and friends who had died.

120 Gilman, “AIDS and Syphilis.”

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the discourse on AIDS as well as writing on illnesses and epidemics.121 Brigitte Weingart’s more recent discourse analysis of the language used to discuss AIDS offers important insights into the representation of AIDS in text and fi lm.122

The introduction of combination therapy in the mid-1990s reduced the turmoil surrounding HIV/AIDS and allowed initial historicizations such as Jan Zita Grover’s periodization of the epidemic and its cultural debates.123 In the late 1990s, there was a marked fall in academic interest in the topic. Theoreticians such as Douglas Crimp revised and repub- lished their earlier texts and in general, refl ection on theoretical AIDS discourses took place.124

Since then, there has been a more encompassing debate on AIDS in the context of the conservative climate of the Republican era un- der Ronald Reagan (1981 – 1988) and George H. W. Bush (1988 – 1992), sub- sumed under the term culture wars. The above-mentioned studies by Dubin and Kidd and the anthologies edited by James L. Nolan (1996) and Richard Meyer (2002) make it possible to place Goldin’s exhibition within this cultural-political context. Meyer’s volume includes in-depth studies of the debates on government funding of art that are relevant to the study at hand, but Goldin’s show is dealt with only superfi cially. As a rule, these later analyses also remained the handiwork of the gay community. Having HIV/AIDS or having close friendships with people with AIDS has to this day been the main reason for, and plays a major role in, theorizations of AIDS. Relevant examples are Lutz Hieber’s ma- ny sociological studies on the activist discourse of ACT UP, in which he placed the political AIDS movement in the context of social movements or Simon Watney’s analyses of AIDS and the effects of the epidemic on gay identity.125 Art critic and former AIDS activist David Deitcher has criticized these academic studies of AIDS. In his view, historicization leads to the “normalization of AIDS” and does injustice to the continu- ing crisis for people with HIV.126

Recently, young researchers who no longer experienced the AIDS epidemic themselves are examining AIDS from a historical perspective, for instance the 2012 theater studies dissertation by Beate Schappach, AIDS in Literatur, Theater und Film: Zur kulturellen Dramaturgie eines Störfalls, or the 2013 history of medicine dissertation project by Lukas Engelmann on the pictorial construction of AIDS in medical atlases.127 These contemporary research projects in the humanities and social sci- ences are useful as regards their methodology and content. Nevertheless,

121 Sontag, Illness and Aids. 122 Weingart, Ansteckende Wörter. 123 Grover, “Visible Lesions.” 124 See Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy” or Meyer, The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous. 125 Hieber, “Grundriss einer Theorie”; “Postmodernismus als Politisierung”; “Politisierung

der Queer Culture”; “Douglas Crimp”; “Appropriation und politischer Aktivismus”; and Watney, “Acts of Memory.”

126 Deitcher, “Silence,” 124. 127 Schappach, AIDS in Literatur, Theater und Film and Engelmann, AIDS Unseen.

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there has as yet been no critical analysis of artistic representations of AIDS. The study at hand hopes to close that research gap.

General overviews of artistic representations of AIDS were pub- lished in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Baker’s The Art of AIDS (1994) looked to defi ne an Art about AIDS in the fi ne arts, literature, dance, and fi lm, and James Miller’s 1992 anthology Fluid Exchanges: Artists and Critics in the AIDS Crisis examined the art world of the times. Alongside these general overviews (which rarely examined individual artworks), research interest has been primarily in collective, activist art, for exam- ple Nina Felshin’s But Is It Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism (1995), Lutz Hieber and Paula-Irene Villa’s Images von Gewicht: Soziale Bewegun- gen, Queer Theory und Kunst in den USA (2007), and Gregg Bordowitz’s Imagevirus (2010) about the art collective General Idea.

Very few of the artists exhibited in Witnesses have been dealt with in individual monographs. Research exists on Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and David Wojnarowicz.128 With the exception of Wojnarowicz, AIDS plays a minor role in this research, as does Goldin’s function as curator. The study at hand also meets these research desiderata with its representation of an artistic community ravaged by AIDS.

Alongside secondary literature, found predominantly at the New York Public Library, the MoMA and Whitney Museum libraries, my main source of information was the primary material collected in New York City. The exhibit materials archived at the NYU Fales Library pro- vided my main source of research. This comprehensive archival material includes press releases, correspondence, documentation, reviews, and photos of the installation. It had not yet been completely archived at the time of my research in May and June 2011.129 David Wojnarowicz’s estate, also archived in the Fales Library and the P. P. O.W Gallery in New York, provided further key material for analysis.

Information on the exhibitions with which Witnesses is compared, From Media to Metaphor and The Indomitable Spirit, was found in the ar- chive of the Independent Curators International and in the International Center of Photography in New York. The exhibition catalogues of these shows and of Witnesses allowed insight into curatorial strategies as well as into the selection of both works and catalogue authors. Press photos of people with AIDS analyzed in the third chapter and reports on other exhibitions by artists shown in Witnesses from 1983 to 1989 were found by systematic searches in newspapers and art magazines.

This body of material is complemented by interviews with members of the relevant New York art community at the time. These interviews were conducted between May and July 2011 in New York City. They were necessary because secondary sources provided no answers to questions about the criteria for an Art about AIDS and, concomitantly, the mean-

128 See for example Scorzin, “Authentizität und Fiktion”; Becker, Fotografi sche Atmosphären; Ruf and Seelig, “Introduction”; Colucci, “Some Sort of Grace”; and Maguire, “The Relics.”

129 This material was archived in 2012.

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ing of this art. This information fi rst enabled me to answer central questions about the choice of artworks for the group show and to shift my focus to the meaning of Art about AIDS during the epidemic in the United States. Art critic David Deitcher, curators Dan Cameron, Marvin Heiferman, and Thomas W. Sokolowski, and artists Kiki Smith and Ross Bleckner all agreed to 45-minute, semi-structured, topic- centered interviews.130 In March 2012, written correspondence with Susan Wyatt, the director of Artists Space at the time Witnesses was shown, provided important information on the genesis of the exhibi- tion and on the confl ict with the NEA.131 Transcriptions of these inter- views and a statement on scientifi c treatment of these primary sources in the history of contemporary art can be found in the appendix.

130 Due to poor quality, the transcription of the interview with Thomas W. Sokolowski is only partial. The qualitative research interviews were conducted using Bernhard Russel’s method of semi-structured interviews (see Russel, Research Methods, 212).

131 The correspondence can also be found in the appendix (see p. 345).

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