5 pages reaserch essay

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CONCEPT and CONTEXT of WITNESSES: AGAINST OUR VANISHING

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 08:38:46.

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ACT UP / Silence = Death Project Silence = Death, 1986 Offset Poster 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.

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66Junge, 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 08:38:46.

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Names Project Memorial Quilt Installation at the National Mall Washington D. C. , 1992 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.

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Exhibition Catalogue Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (Cover) Artists Space, New York, 1989Junge, 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.

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Gran Fury The Government has Blood in its Hands. One AIDS Death Every Half Hour, 1988 Offset PosterJunge, 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.

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TABBOO! Stephen Tashjian Portrait of Mark Morrisroe, 1985 Acrylic on Canvas, 171,5 × 90,1 cmJunge, 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.

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Edvard Munch The Kiss IV, 1902 Woodcut, 45,8 × 40,3 cmJunge, 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.

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Nan Goldin Gilles and Gotscho embracing, Paris, 1992 Cibachrome, 76,2 × 101,6 cmJunge, 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.

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Nan Goldin The Hallway of Gilles‘ Hospital, 1993 Cibachrome, 76,2 × 101,6 cmJunge, 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.

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Nan Goldin Gotscho kissing Gilles, Paris, 1993 Cibachrome, 76,2 × 101,6 cmJunge, 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.

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Nan Goldin Gilles' arm, Paris, 1993 Cibachrome, 76,2 × 101,6 cmJunge, 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.

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Gran Fury All People with AIDS Are Innocent Banner at Henry Street Settlement New York, 1989

Visual AIDS Electric Blanket Installation at Cooper Union New York, 1990Junge, 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.

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Visual AIDS Guggenheim Museum at Day Without Art, Dec. 1. New York, 1989Junge, 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.

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Gran Fury Kissing Doesn‘t Kill, 1989 Colored Postcard

Gran Fury Kissing Doesn‘t Kill, 1989 San Francisco Municipal Transport AgencyJunge, 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.

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Gran Fury Art is not Enough, 1988 Offset PosterJunge, 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.

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Andres Serrano Piss Christ, 1987 Cibachrome, 152,4 × 101,6 cmJunge, 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.

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Robert Mapplethorpe Jim and Tom, Sausalito, 1977 Gelatin Silver Print, 40,6 × 50,8 cmJunge, 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.

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84 Artforum (Cover) September 1989Junge, 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.

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David Wojnarowicz A Fire in my Belly (Film In Progress) 1986 – 87, Super 8-mm FilmJunge, 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.

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The exhibition space itself and two people in particular are key to this analysis of Witnesses: Susan Wyatt, the director of Artists Space from 1985 to 1991, and photographer Nan Goldin, the show’s curator. The main focus is on Goldin’s exhibition concept, her choice of artists, and the way in which the works were displayed. The main argument derives from the thesis that Goldin did not choose works, but rather artists with whom she was friends and who were affected by AIDS. She thus created pictorial confi rmation of her threatened artists’ community, whose intimacy with the issue was refl ected in the hang- ing of the works. Goldin’s own photographic works of the late 1980s and early 1990s aimed at visibility for and consolidation of her community, which included many gay people with AIDS. An excursus therefore ex- amines some photos by Goldin in order to compare her exhibition con- cept with her own artistic strategies.

The chapter ends with a comparison with three exhibitions: Images & Words: Artists Respond to AIDS, The Indomitable Spirit, and From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS, all of which opened in New York City shortly after Goldin’s show. This comparison confi rms the thesis that the artists involved were members of a close cultural network.

Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing was shown in Artists Space, a non- commercial exhibition space in Tribeca, Manhattan.132 From the 1970s, Artists Space shaped the New York alternative art scene independent of established Uptown and SoHo galleries. The venue provided space for the shows of artists including Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and Andrea Fraser, as well as thematic exhibitions such as Pictures, curat- ed by Douglas Crimp in 1977, which sought new (pictorial) concepts of post-modernity.133 Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times art critic, underscored the venue’s excellent reputation in November 1989, when Witnesses was shown: “one of the most respected and infl uential of the so-called alternative galleries in the United States […] best known for the diversity and open-mindedness of its activities.” 134

Artists Space was founded in 1972 /1973 by Trudie Grace and Irving Sandler to support unknown and promising artists without access to commercial galleries.135 Grace and Sandler received funding from their employer, the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA); Grace was director of the NYSCA Visual Arts Program, and Sandler a consultant.136 Artists Space was independent and experimental, giving artists the op- portunity to curate their own exhibitions and so retain control over their

132 From 1984 to 1993, Artists Space was located at 223 West Broadway. It thereafter moved to its current location at 38 Greene Street. Further literature on Artists Space can be found in Gould and Smith, 5000 Artists.

133 Williams, “Artists Space,” 151. On the exhibition Pictures, see Crimp, “Pictures” and Foster et al., Art Since 1900, 580 – 583.

134 Kimmelman, “Nonprofi t Gallery in TriBeCa.” 135 http://artistsspace.org/history/ (last accessed Feb. 06, 2016). On the founding of

Artists Space see also Grace, “Artists Space.” 136 http://www.nysca.org/public/about/mission_values.htm (last accessed Feb. 06, 2016).

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work and its presentation. To enable contacts between potential buyers and artists, Artists Space provided a pricelist of all works exhibited in Goldin’s show, although it was not a commercial gallery and thus not pri- marily interested in selling the artworks shown.137 As a non-commercial gallery, Artists Space was and is fi nanced by private and public donors. The total budget in 1989 was 725,000 dollars. 40 percent of this money came from public funding from the NEA, the NYSCA, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Institute of Museum Services. The remainder was fi nanced by benefi ts, members’ dues, and individual donations, sometimes in the form of artworks.138

As a rule, Artists Space showcased works by young and still un- known artists curated by established artists. For this reason, in the sum- mer of 1988, Susan Wyatt invited Nan Goldin to curate an exhibition in the 1989 / 1990 season. As a celebrated photographer represented by a commercial gallery — she had contracted with Pace / MacGill in 1988 — it was clear to Goldin from the start that she would not be presenting her own work in the show, as was Artists Space policy, but only that of oth- er artists. A member of the New York art scene who knew many other photographers through her own work, Goldin perfectly matched Artists Space’s criteria for curators. After graduating from the School of the Mu- seum of Fine Arts in Boston, she moved to New York in 1978 and quickly became a central fi gure in the East Village alternative art scene. The fi rst public presentation of some of her photographs was entitled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and took the form of a slide show for Frank Zappa’s birthday party at the Mudd Club.139

From the mid-1980s, Goldin expanded her horizons beyond Man- hattan to include the rest of the United States and parts of Europe. She began to make a name for herself as a photographer, as evidenced by her exhibition history: after participating in the Whitney Museum Bi- ennale in 1985, she had her fi rst solo show, again entitled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at the Tim Burden Gallery in New York. The photo book published in conjunction with the exhibition had 125 stills and won multiple prizes in the United States and Europe in 1986 and 1987. Nu- merous solo and group shows followed, as well as participation in fi lm festivals in Berlin and Edinburgh in 1986.140 A major retrospective of her work, I’ll Be Your Mirror, was shown at the Whitney Museum in 1996; the catalogue from this show contains material from her entire oeuvre up to that time.141

137 Document Artists Space n. d. 138 Ibid. and Kidd, Legislating Creativity, 84. 139 Alexander, “Nan Goldin,” 107. 140 Alf Bold, programming director of the Berlin art cinema Kino Arsenal at the time, invited

her to Berlin in 1986. Goldin and her camera were with him in the fi nal months of his illness from AIDS-related causes (Sussman, “In / Of her Time,” 36; photo in Sussman, Nan Goldin, 364 – 365).

141 Scorzin, “Authentizität und Fiktion,” 130. For a biography of Nan Goldin see http://www.matthewmarks.com/artists/nan-goldin/biography/ (last accessed Feb. 06, 2016) and Sussman, Nan Goldin. Golden had fi rst come to Berlin at Bold’s invitation in 1982. In 1991 she spent almost a year in the city on a DAAD scholarship.

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Her position in the downtown New York art scene meant she could draw from a large network of artists and — according to Susan Wyatt in 2012 — she had “a good eye” for potential contributors to the exhibition.142 Her central position is attested by her large and ever-growing collection of portraits of her artist friends, which she used to represent her com- munity in slide shows in New York galleries, clubs, and discos. The fi rst shows had no audio track; beginning in 1980, she added personal com- mentary and a soundtrack to her slide shows.143 Goldin thus cannot be limited to a certain photographic or art community — her concept of art transcended the limits of genre and incorporated images, music, and performance. Her success as an artist guaranteed media attention for the Artists Space exhibition, which was propitious for both the unknown artists and the artistic responses to AIDS.144

Artists Space guest curators had complete freedom to decide on the exhibition’s theme, size, and artists. Susan Wyatt very much supported Goldin’s proposal to do a show about AIDS, for one because the New York art scene had been hit so badly by the epidemic, and also because of Wyatt’s own activities in the organization Visual AIDS. This non-profi t organization was planning a national Day Without Art on December 1, 1989, to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic. Goldin’s show fi t in perfectly with the Visual AIDS program and was associated with the Day Without Art from the very beginning, as verifi ed by mention of the latter in the press release on the occasion of the show’s opening.145

142 Email correspondence between the author and Susan Wyatt, March 3, 2012 (p. 345). As mentioned above, I consider the interviews and email exchanges to be pri - mary sources. Wyatt’s statement can therefore not be considered “proof” about her choice of curators in 1989, but is a retrospective commentary made in 2012, in which the history of the exhibition’s public reception naturally also plays a role.

143 For more on the musical accompaniment of the Ballad, see Sussman, Nan Goldin, 33 – 35. 144 Ibid. Wyatt on this subject: “We also thought her name and reputation would attract

people in the art community to come and see a show of emerging artists / photographers that she [Goldin] believed were doing good and important work.” Email correspondence between the author and Susan Wyatt, March 3, 2012 (p. 346).

145 Ibid., 345 and Document Artists Space 1989. Email correspondence between the author and Susan Wyatt, March 3, 2012 (p. 346) and Document Artists Space 1989.

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NAN GOLDIN as CURATOR: PROMOTING the VISIBILITY of her COMMUNITY

Nan Goldin began planning Witnesses in the summer of 1988 while re- covering from addiction withdrawal. Upon returning to New York, she found the art scene had been ravaged by AIDS. Mourning the loss of so many friends inspired the show as a love letter to her community.146 Her personal involvement was key to her concept of the exhibition as a show for and about her circle of friends. The goal of Witnesses was “to celebrate the indomitable spirit of our community.” 147 Goldin wanted to show that although her community had been hit hard by AIDS, it was still very much alive and had a voice. Her catalogue text therefore ended with the imperative: “I have also witnessed this community take care of its own, nurse its sick, bury its dead, mourn its losses, and continue to fi ght for each other’s lives. We will not vanish.” 148 Goldin’s promise of love, friend- ship, care, and safety for her community indirectly referenced common stereotypes of homosexuals found in the moralizing rhetoric of conserva- tive politicians and journalists: that gays were promiscuous, irrespon- sible, and egoistic.149

In the press release for the exhibition opening, Susan Wyatt stressed that the show was above all a tribute to Goldin’s friends.150 She portrayed this circle of friends as representative of a larger cul- tural context that had been affected by AIDS, which can be read as legitimizing the narrow circle of artists selected for Witnesses.151 In her introductory catalogue text, “In the Valley of the Shadow,” Goldin recounted the genesis of the exhibition. The starting point for the show was her recovery from drug addiction in summer 1988, when she began to return to her community. Goldin noticed that her recovery, like the AIDS epidemic, had changed the glorifi cation of a self-destructive sex- and-drugs lifestyle previously cultivated by Goldin and her friends: “We were no longer playing with death — it was real and among us, and not at all glamorous.” 152 AIDS had rid her community of its death wish, as illness and death became all too real for many of her friends. As a result, the community had to change its priorities to include survival, recovery, and healing.

146 Goldin, “In the Valley,” 4. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid., 5. 149 Crimp, “De-moralizing Representations,” 267. 150 Document Artists Space 1989. 151 Ibid. and Wyatt, “Acknowledgement,” 2. 152 Goldin, “In the Valley,” 4: “We can live the same lifestyle but in the light.”

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The importance of recovery is refl ected by Nan Goldin’s fi rst title for the exhibition, Sexuality, Spirituality and Recovery in the Age of AIDS, which she cites in her catalogue text.153 At the same time, the working title shows that a focus on sexuality had always been planned. Sexual dif- ference outside heteronormativity was decisive for Goldin and her com- munity of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals — both as regards representation in art and self-defi nition. Goldin’s photographs of Gilles and Gotscho and, in the exhibition, David Wojnarowicz’s photocollages Sex Series and Clarence Elie-Rivera’s photographs of transsexuals are all proof of this fact.154

AIDS had brought sexuality — and homosexuality in particular — to the forefront of societal attention, branding it as an immoral lifestyle that carried the risk of infection. While homosexuality became more vis - ible — for example in Goldin’s show and in verbal and visual statements by AIDS activists — conservative politicians, particularly Jesse Helms, U. S. Senator from North Carolina since 1973, reacted to the AIDS epidemic with blatant homophobia. They mirrored the general population’s fear of a sexuality that was different and therefore perceived as dangerous, an attitude that AIDS made visible.155 The governments of Ronald Rea- gan and George H. W. Bush also tried to ignore the topics of HI V/ AIDS, sexuality, and sexual minorities so as not to give these issues and people a platform on the public or political agenda. Although HIV/AIDS was a sexually transmitted disease that fi rst spread among socially marginal- ized groups — and therefore brought the taboo subjects of homosexuality, prostitution, racism, drug use, and poverty into the public eye — no public dialogue began on these subjects. To the contrary, the general population met marginalized groups with fear, shame, and disgust and willfully ig- nored the importance of HIV/AIDS education.156

According to Brigitte Weingart, this fear of AIDS served the inter- ests of authoritarian ideologies: the epidemic was an ideal blank screen onto which political paranoia about homosexuality could be projected. This sparked a “culture war against the 1960s,” a period in which more liberal ideas regarding sexuality and self-determination took hold.157 Goldin’s show wanted to bring people with AIDS back to the center of attention. In the societal crisis caused by AIDS, the show became a col- lective clarion call for political resistance, both because of the artists’ proximity to the topic and because Goldin claimed her community’s right to defi ne sexual difference itself.

The months-long debates on public funding of so-called obscene artworks, which we shall examine in the next chapter, also made these artistic representations of homosexuality or by homosexual artists,

153 Ibid. Here it should be noted that this was not the fi rst working title, since Wyatt’s NEA grant application of July 1988 used the title Art in the Age of AIDS; see Document NEA n. d.

154 Goldin, “In the Valley,” 5. Goldin’s photo series and Wojnarowicz’s Sex Series are examined in detail below.

155 Vance, “Misunderstanding Obscenity,” 49 and 55. 156 Watney, “Introduction,” 20. 157 Weingart, Ansteckende Wörter, 123 – 125.

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most of whom had AIDS, into direct political statements. Goldin’s show was thus explicitly against government ignorance of the epidemic and against the marginalization of people with AIDS by politicians like Jesse Helms who — Goldin wrote in her catalogue text — used AIDS and homoeroticism as a means of sexual repression. In light of AIDS, sex- uality became a political tool of power.158 For many people with AIDS, visibility of their oppressed sexuality was therefore decisive, as Goldin underlined in a 1992 interview:

I think it’s especially important now to be showing this group that has been marginalized and allowed to die, and show the reality of them during these plague years. These are people who are being killed, either by intent or by negligence, and they need to be heard from. And I think people need to see what the reality of homosexuality is. 159

Witnesses was driven by the desire to promote politically motivated art that expressed the many facets of sexuality. Goldin wanted “to con- tinue to create and exhibit art that portrays sexuality as a positive force. To prove that a gay aesthetic continues to fl ourish. To prove that sex = death is a false equation. To show that homoeroticism cannot be disappeared.” 160 These words make it clear that for Goldin, positive rep- resentations of sexuality are those that make sexual practices and de- sires visible, thus undermining the hegemony of a heterosexual male outlook on sexuality. In this way, she fought against the invisibility of non- hetero normative sexuality, which she saw as ignoring and revoking the social advances made by gays and lesbians.

Above all, Goldin called in her catalogue for sex-positive images that were not necessarily linked to HIV infection, AIDS symptoms, or death. David Wojnarowicz expressed similar sentiments: “People with AIDS [are] not just diseases walking on two legs but people that also need to continue exploring their sexuality in responsible ways.” 161 Finally, Goldin’s term gay aesthetic has two meanings: it referred both to those artworks that dealt with gay sexuality as well as to those artists on the sexually margins to whom the exhibition lent a voice. By deconstruct- ing the ideological link sex = death, Goldin took a stand against conser- vative and Christian fundamentalist rhetoric, which dubbed anything other than heterosexual sexuality a sin and claimed the deadly scourge of AIDS was God’s just revenge for the failings of homosexuals. At the same time, she was of course alluding to the AIDS organization ACT UP, whose motto, “SILENCE = DEATH”, p. 65, subverted the equation of

158 Villa, “Kritik der Identität,” 172. Nan Goldin shared this wish for more visibility for people with AIDS and homosexuals with ACT UP, who used kiss-ins as one of their main political actions, to end the fear of HIV transmission through kissing and to put homo- erotic desire at the center of their AIDS activism.

159 Interview with Nan Goldin by Stephen C. Dubin, cited in Dubin, Arresting Images, 211. 160 Goldin, “In the Valley,” 5. 161 Wojnarowicz, “In the Shadow,” n. p.

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(homo) sexuality and death. The catchphrase was the collective’s rallying cry for AIDS activism and became the high-profi le trademark of the AIDS movement, displayed on posters, stickers, t-shirts, and buttons.162

Goldin’s use of the equal sign both signifi es the ubiquity of the ACT UP graphic and suggests a certain closeness between the exhibition and the political AIDS movement. Nevertheless, in the catalogue Goldin dis- tanced herself from a purely political show. She wrote that for her, the conceptual heart of the show was the loss of her friends, which moved her to make the show more personal and to allow the artists to deal with the topic in whichever way they chose. Thus within the AIDS discourse, her show was not an expression of political protest, but rather was meant as a collective memorial, a place for communal public mourning, leave-taking, and remembrance.163

Here Goldin was referencing the most prominent example of collective memorials for those who died of AIDS-related causes, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, p. 66 – 67. The NAMES Project, which continues to this day, was initiated by AIDS activist Cleve Jones in 1985 as a collaborative, temporary, nomadic memorial for those who had lost their lives to the epidemic.164 This collective patchwork quilt is made of panels sewn by relatives and friends in memory of their dead, an adaptation of the communal friendship quilts traditionally made by women.165 This “lower” form of art, a handicraft usually considered to be “women’s work” and relegated to the home, mirrors the minor ity status of many people with AIDS.166 Like the unknown creators of quilts that were never recognized as works of art, people with AIDS were also invisible members of society.

In 1987, the 1,920 panels of the memorial quilt were unrolled public- ly for the fi rst time at the National Mall in Washington D. C. By 1992 the quilt had grown to over 20,000 panels.167 To this day, the quilt is regularly rolled out in a ritualized ceremony and the names of the dead are read aloud as a symbol of collective mourning and as an ephemeral memorial for those who often died anonymously of AIDS. As many church congre- gations rejected homosexuality, the project also served and serves as an alternative, secular mourning ceremony for the gay community.168

In 1989, the Memorial Quilt was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. It has thus received a level of public recognition as a form of dealing with AIDS never gained by ACT UP’s activist protest or by “obscene” artworks like those by David Wojnarowicz. Daniel Harris has criticized the social

162 For a detailed look at ACT UP and their AIDS activism see for example Hieber, “Grund- riss einer Theorie” and “Appropriation und politischer Aktivismus,” 216 – 227; Fiss, “Art and Community”; Bordowitz, “Picture a Coalition”; and Halcli, “AIDS, Anger, Activism.”

163 Goldin, “In the Valley,” 5. 164 Sommer, “Time Incorporated,” 38. In more detail also Becker, Art Worlds, 247 – 258. 165 Weinberg, “The Quilt,” 39. 166 Rateike, The American Quilt, 45 – 48. 167 Weinberg, “The Quilt,” 37; see also http://www.aids.org/about/the-aids-memorial-quilt

(last accessed Feb. 06, 2016). 168 Harris, Gay Culture, 228.

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acceptability of this project. It could only lead to the “kitschifi cation of AIDS” and the infantilization of gay people with AIDS as “beseeching poster child[ren]” thus creating, Richard Goldstein agreed, an innocent image of the gay community that the general population would be able to swallow.169 The closeness to American folk art was also criticized as nostalgic sentimentality that prevented any real understanding of and grappling with AIDS.170

Nevertheless, not unlike the quilt, the act of making a previously marginalized social minority public and challenging the negative stig- matization of homosexual relations as promiscuous and irresponsible also played a key role in Goldin’s exhibition. There were other connec- tions as well: some of the artists, including David Wojnarowicz, had cre- ated panels for their friends and lovers and Susan Wyatt even referred to the show as “Nan Goldin’s AIDS Quilt.” 171

Finally, Goldin’s fi nal title for the exhibit also expressed this personal ap- proach to AIDS. Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing calls up the immediacy of the crisis (witnesses) and rallies against forgetting those artists who were ill with or had died of AIDS. Unlike the exhibition From Media to Metaphor, the title of which already bridged varying artistic ap proaches to AIDS, in this case there was no historicization of the artworks, simply contemporary art from the frontlines of the crisis. Despite or because of the fact that the AIDS epidemic had been going on since 1981, Goldin’s title underlined the timeliness and immediacy of the artworks.

Goldin combined this urgency with the topos of witnessing: the exhibition showcased the specifi c experiences of the participating art- ists and their personal losses to AIDS. It presented itself as a kind of witness testimony, suggesting the special authenticity of an artistic community that experienced and dealt with the epidemic as eyewitness- es.172 The show’s title itself thus claimed personal experience as a form of legitimation for the artists and characterized their art as Art about AIDS. The inclusive / exclusive “our” in the title also suggests that the community is raising a collective voice to report on its specifi c crisis. The aim was not only a call to the outside world, but also — as Goldin explained in detail in the catalogue — reassurance for the community. “It’s how we let each other know we’re here,” as Linda Yablonski wrote in her catalogue contribution.173

However this is a specifi c form of witnessing, differing from an auto- biographical report of a past event.174 Unlike the testimony of Holocaust

169 Ibid., 224. 170 Ibid., 227 and Goldstein, “The Implicated,” 310. 171 David Wojnarowicz created a panel for Peter Hujar. On this see Tom Rauffenbart

in Ambrosino and Lothringer, David Wojnarowicz, 144; and Wyatt cited in Loughery, “Frohnmayer’s Folly,” 24.

172 We shall go into more detail below on the meaning and defi nition of authenticity as regards the assessment of the works in Witnesses.

173 Yablonski, “Et Tu Brute?,” 13. 174 Dulong, Le Témoin oculair, 43.

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survivors, only able to recount their traumatic experiences in Nazi con- centration camps after the fact, so that they were seen as also speaking for the dead, the artists affected by AIDS were, in this exhibition, report- ing directly from the frontlines.175 They were (not yet) survivors, many of them were HIV-positive in 1989 and would not live to see the end of the crisis. As people with AIDS, they were, so to speak, those who had not yet died, and often they expressed themselves publicly only in the last second. The urgency of wanting to bear witness has been explained by Alexander Garcia Düttmann with reference to Martin Heidegger’s thoughts on the dialectic of the certainty of death and the uncertainty of when it will come. Only acceptance of the fact that certainty and un- certainty exist together leads to a radical caesura and, fi nally, the urge to bear witness.176

In Witnesses, the asynchrony of the witnesses’ and listeners’ experi- ences played no role since the AIDS epidemic was already characterized by its localization within certain communities. Simon Watney described this phenomenon as follows: “As if the rest of the population were tour- ists, casually wandering through the very height of a blitz of which they are totally unaware.” 177 For this reason, the exhibition was more the “identity policy” of a collective rather than the testimony of witnesses, because bearing witness, in Sigrid Weigel’s opinion, is grounded either in non-simultaneity with the events witnessed or in the (impossible to share) experiences of the survivor of a past traumatic experience or cri- sis.178 One must also differentiate between artistic grappling and witness testimony. Weigel also delineated to the difference between testimony (Zeugnis) and a product (Erzeugnis): Testimony attests to singular ex- perience and is characterized by the asynchrony of witnessing and lis- tening. A product on the other hand is a metaphor for what has been experienced and is expressed on a fi ctional level as art, and thus not as a pure report of experience.179 As the presentation of artistic explorations, Witnesses belongs to this second category.

The use of the term witnesses in the show’s title is thus open to multifarious interpretations: experiencing and remembering, bearing witness, and calling attention to. It is both an expression of being per- sonally affected as well as a condemnation of outsiders. This specifi c link between witnessing, experiencing, and preserving can often be found in connection with AIDS: The 1988 exhibition Bearing Witness: Artists Respond to AIDS at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston also references witnessing in its title. The Witnesses Project, organized

175 Schmidt, Zeugenschaft, 48. The analogy with the Holocaust is a common trope in the American AIDS discourse. I shall take this up again further on.

176 Düttmann, Uneins mit Aids, 32 and Heidegger, Being and Time, 303. 177 Watney, “The Spectacle of AIDS,” 72. 178 Weigel, “Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft,” 117. The photo portraits by David Wojnarowicz and

David Armstrong can be seen as a mixed form of bearing witness. They are explorations of AIDS through art, but at the same time they bear witness to members of the gay com- munity who had died.

179 Ibid., 132.

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by art dealer and Visual AIDS member Simon Watson together with the author Jerry Saltz, also focused on the dwindling of the art scene be- cause of AIDS. In this project, which attempted to calculate the extent of the epidemic, artists who had died of AIDS were tallied, and their art made public to give posthumous visibility to people with AIDS who had often been isolated in their lifetimes.180 During the epidemic, archiving the artworks of artists who had died young of AIDS was given great importance, as evidenced by the archive of Visual AIDS or the Art Mat- ters Foundation for the support of experimental art. Simon Watney de- scribed this desire to archive in conjunction with the wish to write the gay community’s history:

When so few value us in life, it is especially important to re - cord our everyday experience of the epidemic from the per- spective of those who cannot simply go away. We must defi ne this history, or it will not survive us. 181

Goldin’s own viewpoint is refl ected in her title. Her choice of pronoun (“Our Vanishing”) underscored her membership in the community of artists representing itself. While she showed none of her own works, she saw herself not as an outsider, but as a friend. While she did consciously choose the detached stance of a curator, at the same time she selected only works made by members of her own community.

A subtitle suggested by Goldin during the planning phase is tell- ing in this regard: The Family of Nan.182 Playing with the renowned 1955 photographic exhibition compiled by Edward Steichen for MoMA, Goldin wanted a title that refl ected the concentration on photographic works and that placed the show in the American tradition of portrait photography. It is questionable whether she believed in Steichen’s uni- versalism, which presented the conditio humana as a repeated cycle of ahistorical constants — birth, life, and death183 — also applied to the marginalized artists in her show. The specifi c historical situation of the AIDS epidemic, the concrete reason for the show, would be leveled by placing it into the life-death cycle. The Family of Nan instead stressed the closeness of the relationship between Goldin and her community of artists. Nevertheless, in contrast to Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, it would have placed a distance between the curator and the participating artists; it is an outside view and not a personal call in the fi rst person plural, which evokes immediacy and group cohesion.

180 Atkins, “Day Without Art,” 65. Note also the title of the exhibition Bearing Witness (to AIDS): Photographs by Thomas McGovern, Visual AIDS 1999.

181 Watney, “Acts of Memory”, 168. 182 We can also assume that Goldin had seen Marvin Heiferman’s follow-up exhibition at

P. S. 1 in 1985, The Family of Man 1955 – 1984. On this see Solomon-Godeau, “Family of Man” and email correspondence between the author and Susan Wyatt, March 3, 2012 (p. 346).

183 Haehnel, “Menschenbilder,” 29.

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For Goldin’s community, the exhibition was an event meant to create a sense of identity and motivate collective political action.184 As people with AIDS, the artists — like political AIDS activists — stopped being passive social subjects and denounced the ignorance surrounding AIDS. This position of the enunciating subject185 was both aided and consoli- dated in the confl ict with the NEA around funding, and the resulting media attention. It was public interest that fi rst forced the artists to make a political stand beyond their artworks, as seen in the joint declaration in the exhibition and the statements by Wojnarowicz, Goldin, and Yablonski calling for action to raise visibility of their endangered community. While the artworks in the show abstract from and refl ect on AIDS and its con- sequences, these textual statements take a political stance, in particular David Wojnarowicz’s catalogue text.

The 30-page catalogue was edited and printed by Artists Space, p. 68, in conjunction with Goldin’s show. The cover is in glossy red and fea- tures a partial black handprint. The gesture for stop, it underlines the clarion call of the show’s title, while visualizing the community’s disap- pearance, because the handprint can only barely be recognized. Finally, it is reminiscent of a 1988 poster by the Gran Fury artists’ collective: a red handprint in a black frame with “The Government has Blood on its Hands”, p. 69, written at the top and “One AIDS Death Every Half Hour” printed at the bottom. Gran Fury’s artwork railed against the inactivity of the Reagan government with a symbol of the consequences: the bloody handprint is the trace of a body no longer present, a body that — for lack of medical research and care — contracted AIDS and died.

The bloody print can also be read as a symbolic reference to the many people with AIDS who paid for government passivity with their lives. It is quite likely that the cover of the Witnesses catalogue consciously referred to Gran Fury’s graphic, which was widespread after 1988 and printed on ACT UP posters, postcards, buttons, and t-shirts — once again placing Goldin’s show within the context of the political AIDS movement.

In the catalogue, all artists are presented with a print of one of their works and a short statement about its relation to AIDS. The fi rst cata- logue pages feature fi ve texts: acknowledgements by Susan Wyatt, an introduction by Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz’s controversial essay, a short article by art critic Linda Yablonski on the effects of the epidemic on New York’s alternative art scene and, lastly, a text by Cookie Mueller, a poet, actress, and good friend of Nan Goldin. Mueller’s text, which includ- ed the parting letter of a dead friend, was published posthumously — she died of AIDS-related causes on the day of the show’s opening.186

184 Weigel, “Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft,” 111. 185 On this term see Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 95. 186 Mueller, “A Last Letter.”

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Before the opening, David Wojnarowicz’s six-page text “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell” became the cause of a controversy between Artists Space and the NEA over the exhibition’s funding. Wojnarowicz described his personal experiences and everyday life as a person with AIDS. Topics included his physical condition, discrimination he had ex- perienced from landlord and neighbors, and his anger over the fact that society refused to deal with death and mortality:

My rage is really about the fact that WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL. 187

He also spat invectives at the Catholic Church, especially conserva- tive New York Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor, who had been very vocal against abortion and safer-sex campaigns.188 Wojnarowicz called O’Connor the “fat cannibal from that house of walking swastikas” and fantasized about murdering conservative politicians Jesse Helms and William Dannemeyer.189

He also took on the NEA and the artworld, especially museums and collectors, for their “selective cultural support and denial.” 190 Here he referred, as did Goldin, to ignorance regarding artistic explorations of a sexuality that does not fi t in with the erotic fantasies of white heterosexual men. The only way to make sexual difference visible, he posited, and to fi ght the government’s “illusion of the ONE TRIBE NATION” was through texts and images. While revealing private acts and feelings might be a risk considering the current political climate, he felt that

to turn our private grief at the loss of friends, family, lovers and strangers into something public would serve as another powerful dismantling tool. It would dispel the notion that the virus has a sexual orientation or the notion that the govern- ment and medical community has done very much to ease the spread or advancement of this disease. 191

In the end, Wojnarowicz’s text was also a call against the invisibility of a community whose sexual orientation and lifestyle did not fi t in with the hegemonic ideas of the general population. He called upon this commu- nity to end the silence surrounding their suffering from AIDS.

187 Wojnarowicz, “Postcards from America,” 7; emphasis in the original. 188 On this see Zimmermann, Skandalöse Körper, 235 – 237. 189 Wojnarowicz, “Postcards from America,” 7. Like Helms, William Dannemeyer

fought against gay rights. His 1989 book Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in America argued that homosexuality is a disease, and therefore curable.

190 Wojnarowicz, “Postcards from America,” 7; emphasis in the original. 191 Ibid., 9 – 11.

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GOLDIN’S CHOICE of ARTWORKS: The NETWORK on the WALL

Goldin chose almost 100 works by 25 artists — 17 men and 8 women — all of them personal friends.192 The photographs by Peter Hujar (1934 – 1987) were exhibited posthumously as were ultimately the works by Mark Morrisroe (1959 – 1989) and Vittorio Scarpati (1955 – 1989), both of whom died of AIDS-related causes shortly before the opening.

Goldin’s fi rst proposal for the show included 13 artists (David Arm- strong, Tom Chesley, Larry Clark, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jane Dick- son, Barbara Ess, Greer Lankton, Mark Morrisroe, Perico Pastor, Kiki Smith, Janet Stein, Stephen Tashjian aka Tabboo!,193 and Ken Tisa). In the end, all of them except Larry Clark and Barbara Ess were in the show.194 During the planning phase, Goldin added 14 more artists. Each person contributed between one (seven artists) and eight (two artists) works.195 This discrepancy was explained by Susan Wyatt: some of the participants had suffered from late-stage AIDS and were thus only able to create a limited number of pieces for the exhibition.196

Almost all of the artworks were made expressly for Goldin’s show.197 Thus 20 of the 25 artists showed only works from 1989. The exceptions were Peter Hujar, Robert Vitale (whose work is not in the catalogue), Da- vid Armstrong (fi ve of eight of his photographs were from before 1984), Tom Chesley (two of four sculptures were from 1988), and Mark Morris- roe (seven pieces were done in 1982 to 1986, 1988, and 1989).198

This also speaks for the theory that most of the artists shown were still at the beginning of their career in 1989 — their average age was 35.5 — and could not draw from a large oeuvre.199 Their newness to the art world can be seen in the biographies they sent in: only four were written on gallery letterhead (Hujar, Morrisroe, Tisa, and Wojnarowicz). The others were done privately, and two (Pastor and Tabboo!) were even handwritten. Finally, their status as young artists can be seen in said biographies; only four of the artists had had solo shows before 1980 and fi ve had not had their fi rst solo show until after 1985.

192 Reports of the number of artists vary: while 23 artists are represented with one image each in the catalogue, the exhibition’s list of works (Document Artists Space n. d.) names two further artists, Ramsey McPhillips, who contributed an installation on Mark Morrisroe, and Robert Vitale, who had three paintings in the show. Although McPhillips’ work was exhibited as belonging to Mark Morrisroe’s photographs, in the following I treat this installation as his own. Robert Vitale, whose works can be seen in photographs of the exhibition, was not, according to Wyatt, offi cially one of the show’s artists. Never- theless his work was hung (email correspondence between the author and Susan Wyatt, March 21, 2012, p. 347). In the following, I consider 25 artists to verifi ably have taken part in the show.

193 In the following Stephen Tashjian is referred to exclusively by his alias, Tabboo! 194 Document NEA n. d. 195 Document Artists Space n. d. 196 Email correspondence between the author and Susan Wyatt, March 3, 2012 (p. 347). 197 Ibid. 198 In the exhibition’s list of works, the photographs are not dated. See on this however

the photographs in Ruf and Corner, Mark Morrisroe, 139, 144, 157, 173, 222, 345, and 379. 199 20 of the 23 artists in the catalogue were between the ages of 24 and 38.

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100

39 of the artworks shown in Witnesses were photographic portraits; Gol- din stressed their relevance by hanging 28 of them together in the second room. In this room were self-portraits by David Armstrong (born 1954), Philip-Lorca diCorcia (born 1953), Peter Hujar, Mark Morrisroe, and Da- vid Wojnarowicz, together with a painted portrait of the photographer Mark Morrisroe by Tabboo! (born 1959).

In the fi rst room were two self-portraits by Darrel Ellis (1958 – 1992), paintings of photographic portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hu- jar — shown next to Ellis’s work — as well as a photo series by Allen Frame (born 1951): adjacent 1950s and 1980s portraits of gay couples and groups of gay friends, meant to illustrate the continuity of gay communities.200

All of these portraits took on a specifi c meaning in the context of the exhibition. The photos and one painting by Armstrong, diCorcia, Hujar, Morrisroe, Tabboo!, and Wojnarowicz are all portraits of artists in the show. I theorize that this net of relations, more than the content of the individual artworks, refl ected Goldin’s concept of belonging and took on the task of representing her community. It is no accident that these portraits of friends were made only by male artists and show al- most exclusively male artists. Rather we can assume that the aim was to show how hard the gay community had been hit by AIDS. Further- more, it suggests that taking portraits of one another was a specifi c reaction to the disease.

I believe the visual presentation of people with AIDS worked against forgetting in two ways. First, it fought against physical and social death, against forgetting the artists portrayed. These portraits are a kind of me- mento mori of individuals whose selves and bodies have been targeted. Second, they are a public ritual of mourning — comparable to the AIDS Quilt — meant to fi ght stigmatization and relegation of people with AIDS into the anonymity of a homosexual subculture.

In this regard, the personal and societal meanings of the photo- graphs in Goldin’s show can be embedded in contemporary debates around the theory of photography. While postmodern theories of the photographic medium in the 1980s and 1990s — for example Richard Bolton’s 1999 anthology The Contest of Meaning — focused on the con- struction of a supposed photographic truth, newer publications such as Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson’s 2008 anthology The Meaning of Pho- tography have revisited the question of the social relevance of photogra- phy.201 In their introduction, Kelsey and Stimson remarked that despite the postmodern criticism of evidence, photography is still used to gar- ner attention from society. This reaffi rmation of photographic mean- ing neither represses the connection of power and knowledge, nor the indexical guarantee of photography, but expands them. The question of dealing responsibly with the publication of photos continues to be debated because they are still used to raise awareness and to get our at-

200 Reid, “Beyond Mourning,” 55. 201 Bolton, Contest of Meaning; Kelsey and Stimson, “Introduction.”

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101

tention: “Photographs retain promise of a reality to which we can point, and which in turn points, with its demand for accountability, at us.” 202

Photography’s indexicality — the authors see photography as hav- ing a double indexicality as it points outwards to the world and inwards to the photographer — is a value that cannot (any longer) be seen as the valid truth of photography and yet must still be used responsibly.203 After the October Moment (Bettina Gockel) in which photography was inter- preted as a historical construct rather than a mirror of reality, Kelsey and Stimson have returned to photography’s power of defi nition: they argued that photography includes a social dimension that cannot be pushed aside by poststructuralist denials of meaning.204 In this way, the text at hand is part of an ongoing debate on the theory and history of photography and connects an analysis of Goldin’s exhibition with the discourse on the medium.

Goldin’s interest in photographic portraits can also be explained by looking at her own artistic work, since she continually photographed her friends and herself from the 1970s on. Exhibiting the photographic portraits in Witnesses together, so that connections between the people portrayed could be made, shows the quantitative and qualitative impor- tance she gave these images.205

The boom in photography since the 1970s and its recognition as an autonomous aesthetic discipline should also be mentioned. Although in- stitutionalized by museums, the art market, and the academy, photogra- phy in the 1980s was still an experimental fi eld of disparate and dynamic practices, and was a preferred means of expression for feminist and gay and lesbian artists because it was still considered a raw art form without a long art-historical tradition.206

The hanging of the photographic portraits in Witnesses underlined the personal relations of the artists and allowed the visitor to read them and think further about these relations. Thus across from Peter Hujar’s black-and-white photographs (1976 – 1981; room 2, no. 11) were three stills of him on his deathbed, taken just after his passing by his closest friend, David Wojnarowicz (room 2, no. 31). On the other side of the room hung a photograph by Philip-Lorca diCorcia of Vittorio Scarpati in his sick- bed, across from drawings Scarpati had done in the hospital (room 2, no. 33).207 On the wall between them hung David Armstrong’s portraits of friends and acquaintances, including Cookie Mueller, Scarpati’s wife and catalogue author. Two other Armstrong photos portrayed Nan Gol- din and Tom Chesley, another contributor to Witnesses. Armstrong took both photos in 1989 expressly for the show. Another photo was of Tab- boo!, whose large-format portrait of Mark Morrisroe hung in the same

202 Kelsey and Stimson, “Introduction,” xx and xxiv – xxv. 203 Ibid., xxv. 204 Gockel, “Introduction,” xvii – xviii. 205 The portraits were also given special mention in reviews. See Brooks,

“Witnessing a Controversy,” 18 and Nalley, “Witness This,” 58. 206 Batchen, “Camera Lucida,” 86. See also Lebovici, “In the Darkroom,” 235. 207 See the design of the exhibition, p. 307.

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room and created a visual axis with Morrisroe’s self-portraits, which in turn hung next to Wojnarowicz’s work, p. 71. The hanging presented the participants as a group of friends who posed for one another and, as in a family album, were sometimes in front of and sometimes behind the camera. This leveled the hierarchical relationship between photogra- pher and subject; none of the artists retained their authorial authority behind the camera, but themselves became the motif of others. In this way both living and dead members of the group formed an exclusive community of images, an aspect which I shall go into in more detail later.

As regards AIDS, these changing positions worked against reduc- ing the photographic subjects to their status as sick people, separate and isolated from the realm of the healthy. While Philip-Lorca diCorcia portrayed Vittorio Scarpati as a person with AIDS in his sickbed and Scarpati’s own drawings refl ecting on the decay of his body hung on the opposite wall, Goldin’s exhibition ensured that Scarpati remained recognizable as an active individual. Like the curator herself, who in the title of her retrospective, I’ll Be Your Mirror, defi ned herself as the mirror of her community, the varying photographers were chroniclers of a community that was trying to capture its members on fi lm and ex- press solidarity for one another under the threat of death from AIDS. Thus the show not only communicated the desire to be visible to the outside world, it also acted as an event that created a sense of identity for Goldin’s community.208

This analysis of the hanging of the works thus confi rms the thesis that Goldin chose not artworks, but artists. More important to her than the work itself was the maker’s membership in her circle of friends. Not the content of the diverse artistic explorations of AIDS was the criteria for selection, but the HIV status of the artist. The content, form, and quality of the works seem to have played a secondary role — a thesis that must be verifi ed in further analyses of the artworks.

208 Dan Cameron remarked that the aim was not only to become more visible to the general population, but also and explicitly to the art scene in Uptown Manhattan (author’s interview with Dan Cameron, July 11, 2011, p. 319).

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NAN GOLDIN’S PHOTOGRAPHS of GILLES and GOTSCHO, 1991 to 1993

In her concept for the show, Goldin clearly called for a positive repre- sentation of her community. Whether she also fulfi lled this curatorial demand in her own work that dealt with AIDS can give insight into her exhibition concept and help place her ideas in the context of her work as a photographer. An understanding of Goldin’s work is also helpful for evaluating the pieces in Witnesses, as we must assume that the show’s artists were familiar with her photographs. The following short excursus shall have to suffi ce as an introduction to her oeuvre.

From the late 1960s, Goldin compiled a “visual diary,” 209 photo- graphing friends and lovers, and providing insight into life in the ur- ban subcultures of Boston and New York.210 Her photos are observations of social outcasts — drag queens, gays and lesbians, drug addicts, art- ists — the circle of friends who she also brought together in Witnesses. This community makes up almost the entire subject matter of her pho- tographs; she herself is the subjective bystander with a camera. Her in- timacy with her photographic subjects and her desire to make the lives of outsiders visible was infl uenced by the photographs of Larry Clark, whom she originally wanted to include in Witnesses. Clark’s 1971 book Tulsa contained photographic portraits of junkies in his hometown, and refl ected his own status as drug-addicted photographer.211

Elisabeth Sussman, the curator of Goldin’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum placed her photographs in the tradition of social portraiture. She claimed Goldin’s portraits of her milieu are relat- ed to the photography of August Sander (1876 – 1964), whose portraits of types within various milieus, photographed with pseudo-scientific neutrality, was published 1929 in Weimar as Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time).212 But in contrast to Sander, Goldin did not remain an aloof observer of her milieu; she was a critical witness who controlled the moment of her shots. She both reflected her personal environment and acted as a subjective participant by repeatedly photographing her- self.213 Larry Qualls has aptly termed the simultaneity of intimacy and

209 Holborn, “Interview,” 38. 210 Scorzin, “Authentizität und Fiktion,” 132. 211 Becker, Fotografi sche Atmosphären, 53. In the fi lm Nan Goldin: In My Life (video, directed

by Paul Tschinkel) Goldin herself names Clark’s book as a source of inspiration. 212 Sussman, “In / Of her Time,” 25. Grundberg compares Goldin’s work to Walker Evans’

American Photographs (1938) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959) (Grundberg, “Ballad,” 97).

213 Bronfen, “Wunden der Verwunderung,” 379.

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distance that characterizes both Goldin’s photographs and her role as curator as a “performance of her autobiography.” 214

As it played a decisive role in her community, AIDS also was cen- tral to her work. Many of her friends and many members of her chosen family — she herself referred to her “tribe” 215 — died from the infection. Goldin cared for many until their death and accompanied their journey with her camera. These series include the photos of Alf Bold, who fi rst invited her to Berlin in 1982; the Cookie Mueller Portfolio 1975 – 1989; and the portraits of Gilles Dusein and his partner Gotscho, taken between 1991 and 1993 in Paris.216 The latter series is key to the question of an appropriate portrayal of her community and a positive representation of sexuality. Although created two years after Witnesses, Goldin’s artistic strategies remained the same as in her earlier works and thus the series can function as a reference.

Gilles Dusein was a close friend of Goldin’s and owner of her Paris Gallery, Urbi et Orbi, where she fi rst exhibited in 1991. She photographed him and his partner, the artist and bodybuilder Gotscho, for two years until Gilles died from AIDS-related causes in 1993. Like the photographs in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which can be expanded at will and which Goldin continually exhibits in different orders and contexts, there is no set order to the photographs of Gilles and Gotscho.217 However death gives them a chronology and temporal linearity that are constitutive for their interpretation. Goldin shows her protagonists in different settings, in public and private spaces, at home, at the movies, and in the hospital, together and alone. As a whole, the photographs tell the couple’s his- tory, which Goldin does not limit to the time in the hospital and to leave- taking. While the individual photos rarely bring the epidemic closer, the late portraits of Gilles make AIDS the subtext of the entire series.218

For Goldin, the couple’s intimacy and tenderness is at the fore. In Gilles and Gotscho embracing, Paris 1992, p. 73, she creates a strong im - age for the love and affection between the protagonists and references historic iconography. In this photo, the men are sitting next to one an- other. Gilles is facing the camera and Gotscho has his back to the ob- server, so that their torsos and faces are turned toward one another. Gotscho’s head is turned toward the right to Gilles, who in turn looks left and rests his head lightly on Gotscho’s shoulder. Their heads are touching, but their faces cannot be seen, which heightens the intimacy of their pose. Their twisted bodies and touching heads form a spiral with its center near the top. The position of their bodies leads to the intimate convergence of their faces, the focus and apex of the composition: two bodies that meld into a single form as a sign of their unity. This round movement is mirrored in the coffee cup that Gilles is holding in his hand.

214 Qualls, “Performance,” 31. 215 Goldin cited in Nan Goldin: In My Life (video, directed by Paul Tschinkel). 216 Photos of Alf Bold and Gilles and Gotscho in Sussman, I’ll Be Your Mirror,

364 – 365 and 368 – 373. Photo of Cookie Mueller in Goldin, Cookie Mueller. 217 Scorzin, “Authentizität und Fiktion,” 139. 218 Scorzin called this the “melodramatization of the individual image” (Ibid.).

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While Guido Costa has seen an analogy to Michelangelo’s Pietà in this photo,219 another model seems more likely: Edvard Munch’s variations on the theme of The Kiss, p. 72, drawings and woodcuts made between 1892 and 1902.220 Munch, whose variations also infl uenced Gustav Klimt’s oil painting The Kiss (1907 – 1908), portrays a pair of intimate lovers in his compositions; their faces fl ow into one another and become one. The lovers’ bodies also form a single silhouette.221 Munch creates symmetry in his work through the windowpane in the background. Goldin’s work is freed from this symmetry, but she also positions Gilles and Gotscho in front of a window with a light-colored wooden frame.

Particularly in the dark, fl at woodcut, the contours of the bodies and faces are lost completely. It is this unity of two individuals, who, faceless, can no longer be distinguished as such, that Nan Goldin cites in her photography. Here we can see an iconographic connection between Goldin and Munch, whom Goldin in 2001 named as an important source of inspiration.222 Like Munch, she has created a universal symbolism that goes far beyond the love between Gilles and Gotscho. Goldin’s use of a visual convention from painting demonstrates the calculation of her composition and her rootedness in art history. While her snapshot aesthetic evokes the visual language of amateur photography, lessening the distance between camera, subject, and observer,223 her iconographic references controvert her supposed “aura of the authentic.” 224

All shots in the Gilles and Gotscho series are about love and thus center around the protagonists’ physicality. Nevertheless, it is un- clear which role sexuality or gay eroticism plays in their relationship. Knowing the entire series, the viewer might suppose that sexual rela- tions between the two men have perhaps become a problem because of AIDS or that Goldin has decided against showing the couple’s sexual attraction to one another. In the latter case, she would not be follow- ing her own call to positively portray sexuality. It is also possible that she equates contracting HIV with relinquishing sexuality, a position sharply criticized by gay AIDS activists and artists. Alyce Mahon has also noted that Goldin’s portrayal of homosexuality and AIDS is very different from the aggressively sexual images of David Wojnarowicz, for instance. In the universality of her forms, Goldin creates an image of a gay relationship that can easily be presented to the homophobic general population.225

219 Costa, Nan Goldin, 78. Even after exhaustive research I fail to see this connection, as in particular the closeness of their heads is not found in any of Michelangelo’s Pietàs.

220 Munch woodcut in Pahlke, Munch revisited, 78 – 82. 221 Bisanz, “Der Kuss,” 230. 222 Goldin and Jocks, “Glamour der Queer-Sicht,” 312. The exhibition Munch revisited:

Edvard Munch und die heutige Kunst at the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund (2005) also supported the theory on this reference (see Kivelitz, “Nan Goldin”).

223 Lange, “Soap zwischen den Buchdeckeln,” 122. The snapshot aesthetic is accomplished through the use of a 35mm camera, the direct perspective, and the use of a stark, highlighting fl ash that adds glare and contrast to the colors.

224 Becker, Fotografi sche Atmosphären, 53. See also Kotz, “Aesthetics of Intimacy,” 204. 225 Mahon, Eroticism, 235.

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However she never negates her protagonists’ gay identity. Care of and for the sick partner takes place within the relationship. In this way Goldin portrayed her protagonists as a stable couple — countering the usual stereotype of the time according to which gay men were promis- cuous and interested only in short-term, sex-driven encounters — just what she called for in her 1989 exhibition catalogue text.

In the last photographs in the series, Gilles’ impending death is at the fore. The Hallway of Gilles’ Hospital, Paris 1993, p. 75, shows the clinical barrenness of the hospital hall and acts as the beginning of a new chapter in the photographic narrative. Here Goldin’s decision not to photograph people is a visual intimation of Gilles’ slow disappearance and impending death. The artifi cial light and closed doors also convey the claustrophobic seclusion and isolation of a world of sick people that exists apart from the circadian rhythm of day and night in the outside world.

Wavering refl ections on the polished blue-green linoleum fl oor awaken associations with the surface of water. In mythology, the cross- ing between the world above and the underworld is a journey over water; the Styx and the Lethe separate the worlds of the living and of the dead. In this way, the hallway marks a crossing, the border between healthy and sick, between life and death. This is portrayed particularly well in this photograph, which also marks a turning point in Goldin’s series. At the same time, in a hospital, oppositions such as day and night, internal and external or private and public no longer apply. The separation be- tween healthy and sick is so decisive it pushes the other binaries of the world of the healthy aside.

The series ends with a farewell (Gotscho kissing Gilles, Paris 1993, p. 76) Gotscho is tenderly kissing Gilles, who has died, on the nose. Their closeness highlights the difference in their physiques — the emaciated Gilles and the bodybuilder Gotscho. The kiss also symbolizes the con- tinuation of their love beyond death.226 Goldin uses simple iconography here to portray lamentation and the loss of a beloved. It is also possible to read other meanings into this last kiss: a kiss can draw in a person’s soul with their last breath.227 Bion of Smyrna’s late Hellenistic poem about Adonis’ death tells of Aphrodite’s wish for a fi nal kiss to take her lover’s essence into herself.228 This reference to the poetry of antiquity under- lines the impression of the unity of the two lovers unto death.

The use of existing iconographies of mourning in the publication of a private moment of leave-taking is, as Monica Lebovici has attested, the power of this photograph, which is free of any trace of voyeurism or pornography. Instead, Goldin shows the lifeless body without pathos or “morbid aestheticism.” 229 Elisabeth Bronfen in contrast believes that every portrayal of dying is an act of violence because the observer is

226 Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Bion von Smyrna, 4. 227 Faxon, “Kiss,” 471. See also Friedrich Klingner’s (1967) interpretation of Virgil’s Aeneid,

pp. 684 – 685. 228 Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Bion von Smyrna, 4. 229 Lebovici, “An den Rändern,” 67.

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necessarily put into the position of the voyeur, and because the body is removed from its existence and taken out of context, fragmented, and idealized.230 While this argument seems merited, in the discussion about the appropriateness of Goldin’s photography, her intimacy with her sub- jects carries greater weight. The question here — and for the artists who exhibited in Witnesses — is Goldin’s power to defi ne AIDS for herself in her art, a question explored further below.231

One photo in the Gilles and Gotscho series stands out from the soft lighting of the other hospital images: the brightly lit photograph of Gilles’ arm on the white sheets (Gilles’ arm, Paris 1993, p. 77). The image is almost medical, it seems like a sober attestation of physical death. Here Gilles’ corpse is fragmented, and Gilles’ arm becomes an indexical sign of the disappearance of the human body, which seems to have already dissolved into the bedsheets.232 It becomes a last reference to something that is no longer visible in the photograph.

As early as 1963, Siegfried Kracauer noted that a photograph — as opposed to a memory, which carries its own meaning — loses its life when the subject it depicts can no longer be directly referenced. It then becomes a ghost, because “we are contained in nothing and photogra- phy assembles fragments around a nothing.” 233 The presence of death and the absence of life in the last shot of Gilles are accentuated by the characteristics of the medium of photography. For this reason, Susan Sontag has named photography “the inventory of mortality.” That which it portrays is not really there, making it most of all a sign of absence.234 Philippe Dubois also spoke of the deathly power of pho- tography: in the moment a photo is taken, the photographic subject crosses the threshold of the living into the realm of the dead. Photog- raphy thus becomes “thanatography.” 235

The absence of a person becomes particularly clear in photos of a fragment of a body, or of a dead body, because it cannot create a bridge to the living despite the fact that the image attests to the presence of the body.236 Goldin’s photographs of Gilles on his deathbed cannot save

230 Bronfen, “Violence of Representation,” 39 and 45. 231 See also Nord, “Gegen feste Zeichen,” who shows that Goldin creates images that “bring

to the fore the preciosity and precariousness of marginalized existence rather than shamefully denying them” (Ibid., 165).

232 I defi ne an indexical sign, as opposed to an icon or symbol, with Charles Sanders Peirce as having a physical connection to its referent. The index itself (such as pointing with a fi nger) is always without meaning; it derives such only from its relationship to its referent (Pierce, The Essential Pierce, 226 – 228). Philippe Dubois, in his exploration of Pierce, no- ted that in photography, only the moment when light is transferred can truly be consid- ered an inscription (as an index or, with Barthes, a “message without a code”), because the moment the shutter is clicked is always framed by a before and after that is contingent upon cultural and personal factors (choice of subject, reception, etc.) (Dubois, “Der fotografi sche Akt,” 78 – 80 and 88 – 89; Barthes, “Photographic Message,” 196). See also Barthes, Camera Lucida, 77, in which he formulated his often-cited noeme of photography, “That has been.”

233 Kracauer, “Die Fotografi e,” 429 – 431, cit. 431. 234 Sontag, On Photography, 70. 235 Dubois, “Der Schnitt,” 164 and 166. 236 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.

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him, but only show what is already lost. As indexes they provide merely “instant history, instant sociology, [and] instant participation.” 237 Roland Barthes sees here the melancholy of the photographic medium.238

The photographs of Gilles and Gotscho mark the desire to hold on to and remember people by photographing them — while only underscor- ing their impermanence.239 They tell a story against loss and forgetting and at the same time show the truth of the fi nality of death. This turns them into universal images of loss on a higher, iconographic level. Gilles and Gotscho become symbols, a screen onto which mortality and mourning are projected, not only in the age of AIDS.240 This contradicts the thesis that Goldin is portraying Others to counter the hegemony of the white, middle-class general population.241 Rather, Goldin’s photo- graphs present an iconography of love, pain, and mortality that trans- cends purely homosexual connotations. Her art dissolves the borders between homosexuality and heterosexuality, between the private and the public, and between the general population and people with AIDS; it makes these differentiations obsolete. Goldin’s photographs cannot be viewed as only about AIDS or as a purely political statement by an artist who has been affected by AIDS.242

In this way, Goldin’s photographs also criticize the limited vision of the American general public, government, and the conservative media, all of whom viewed AIDS only as a “gay plague.” 243 She counters this stigmatization on two levels: on the one hand, she shows the normalcy of a gay relationship; on the other hand, she transcends this differentia- tion and thus takes from AIDS the power to stigmatize and marginalize. Goldin’s photographs of her community are images of friendship, love, and care, and follow the directives she set in the catalogue for Witnesses.

James Crump has described Goldin’s focus on her protagonists’ intimate moments, to which she has access as a photographer and a member of the community, as “quasi- or insider documentary.” 244 It follows that the photos of Goldin’s community vacillate between sub- jectivity and documentation of her environment and can thus, Susanne Knaller posits, be seen as authentic.245 Goldin’s photographs purpose- fully seem to lack artistic intention. Her snapshot aesthetic appears to negate artistic composition; her subjects and their recognition value

237 Sontag, On Photography, 75. 238 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. 239 Scorzin, “Authentizität und Fiktion,” 136. 240 Bronfen, “Wunden der Verwunderung,” 377 and 382. Bronfen speaks of a

“dedifferentiation” (Entdifferenzierung) by making the private public. 241 Lange, “Soap zwischen den Buchdeckeln,” 123. 242 In particular the ‘us against them’ attitude so important to the activist art of

collectives like Gran Fury is something Goldin avoids. 243 Watney, “The Spectacle of AIDS,” 74. 244 Kruska, Boston School, 29. James Crump introduced the term quasi-documentary

to describe the so-called Boston School, which will be examined in more detail below (Crump, “Quasi-documentary”).

245 Knaller, Wort aus der Fremde, 35.

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create a subjectivity that Wolfgang Brückle has termed Verlässlichkeit (reliability, in this case meaning authenticity).246

Finally, with her photography, Goldin worked to consolidate her community. Particularly the presentation of her photographs as a slide show in which the same faces repeatedly appeared in quick succession (so that the spectator soon recognizes them) supports this thesis. The performative aspect of presentation, which makes the photographs avail- able to a limited audience for a certain stretch of time, highlights the exclusivity of the circle of friends presented. Goldin’s photographs thus can be seen as an extension of her curatorial goals: the affi rmation and visibility of her exclusive community.

246 Brückle, “Quests for Authenticity,” 189.

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COMPARISON with THREE OTHER EXHIBITIONS about AIDS, 1989 to 1994

Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing was the fi rst group show about AIDS, but it was not a singular phenomenon as proven by three other shows from the same period. These shows also presented a wide diversity of artistic explorations of the epidemic and cannot be reduced to a single focus as regards content. In the following, the three exhibitions are in- troduced chronologically, with a short analysis of conceptual approach, selection of artists, and curatorial role. The artworks themselves play no role in this analysis, as they exhibit the typical diversity of Art against AIDS described above. There is one crucial manner in which all three of the later shows, in particular Images & Words and From Media to Meta- phor, differed from Witnesses: Goldin’s show contained no activist art- works focused on the political context of AIDS. As activist art, I mean those works that articulate a decided political opinion, angry protest, and a call to fi ght against AIDS.

IMAGES & WORDS: ARTISTS RESPOND to AIDS, 1989

Like Witnesses, the declared goal of Images & Words was to draw atten- tion to people with AIDS and to the social consequences of the epidemic. The exhibition opened on December 1, 1989 and ran for fi ve weeks at the Henry Street Settlement, a social services and community center on New York City’s Lower East Side. The show was fi nanced by private donations and a grant from the NYSCA. From November 6 to December 8, 1990 it ran at Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia. The show was curated by Humberto Chavez, a New York City artist who — in contrast to Nan Goldin — exhibited one of his own works as well.

This exhibition also ended up in the headlines because of an artwork by Gran Fury. The activist art collective sent in a banner reading “All People with AIDS are Innocent,” p. 78, to be hung not in but on the build- ing. The Henry Street Settlement administration forbade hanging the ban- ner over the entrance, prompting Chavez to initially withdraw the show.247

Altogether, the curator chose works by 47 artists or artist collec- tives, to whom he counted himself in his short contribution to the cata- logue, “This is Our Response.” 248 As the title Images & Words suggests, there was one formal criterion that all artworks had to fulfi ll: the use or integration of text or textual elements. Outside of this stipulation, Chavez had no conditions for selection. Rather he aimed for an open

247 Dubin, Arresting Images, 221. See also Loughery, “Frohnmayer’s Folly,” 25. 248 Chavez, “Our Response,” 2.

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show, as he stressed in a 1990 interview: “I wanted to include all kinds of views.” 249 The formal framework can be explained by his views on the role of artists in a (social) crisis situation:

As artists, we have the freedom to express things that other people can’t, for different reasons. Sometimes we can speak for those who have been silenced in some way by society. I think that’s what this show is about. 250

The declared aim of the exhibition, to which all artworks needed to adhere, was the thematization of AIDS and protest against “AIDSpho- bia, homophobia, and censorship” — a triad that was also fundamental to Witnesses. The belief was that only by (through art) ending the dis- crimination and stigmatization of people with AIDS could a climate be created that promoted scientifi c research on a cure for HIV.251 Artists must, Chavez went on to demand in his catalogue text, put their art in the service of the AIDS movement. They thus carried great responsibility to inform themselves and follow the news about the epidemic so that they could transmit knowledge about AIDS through their art.252

Author and critic Anthony Holbrook also focused on the effectivi- ty of political art in his contribution to the Images & Words catalogue. Using Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica as his starting point, he asked whether art was actually able to call attention to a contemporary po- litical crisis and change the actions of the viewer outside the museum. As regards the artworks in the exhibition that — like Gran Fury’s ban- ner — made a direct call for action, Holbrook answered his own question with yes.253 Like Simon Watney, he believed that the medium of text was more effective than images in fi ghting the AIDS crisis and so positioned activist works in the American tradition of socially engaged art.254 This belief explains why the artist was quoted next to the catalogue image of each artwork. These statements gave the artworks an extra, content- related dimension. However they also suggested that the artworks alone did not speak clearly enough in light of the urgency of the AIDS crisis. Positioning the artists as enunciating subjects in the fi ght against AIDS thus became the show’s declared function.

The INDOMITABLE SPIRIT, 1990 The Indomitable Spirit was both an exhibition and a fundraiser. After the show (February 9 to April 7, 1990 at the International Center of Pho- tography in New York City and May 13 to June 17 at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery), all 94 photographs were auctioned at Sotheby’s.

249 Hirsh, “The Warmth and the Heat,” 31. 250 Chavez cited in ibid. 251 Chavez, “Our Response,” 2. 252 Chavez cited in Hirsh, “The Warmth and the Heat,” 31. 253 Holbrook, “The Clarity of a Mirror,” 3. 254 Watney, “Kunst, die kämpft,” 33 – 34.

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The proceeds of the auction and of the exhibition itself (catalogue, post- ers, postcards, entrance fees) were donated to the non-profi t organiza- tions American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFar) and Northern Colorado AIDS Project (NCAP).255 The show was funded by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and many New York galleries donated photo- graphs to be auctioned.

The Indomitable Spirit was the fi rst project by the non-profi t or- ganization Photographers + Friends United Against AIDS, which sold photos to collect money for HIV/AIDS research and social services. Pa- rallel to the exhibition, a limited-edition portfolio was compiled of works by prominent artists, including John Baldessari, Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cindy Sherman. These 50 portfolios were also auc- tioned.256 The exhibition was curated by Marvin Heiferman, an art critic and curator with a photography focus. He had been director of Castelli Graphics and Photographs since the mid-1970s at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, and he was also close to Nan Goldin due to his interest in contemporary photography.257 In 1989 he curated the exhibition Image World: Art and Media Culture at the Whitney Museum.258

Similar to Goldin’s exhibition, lamentation of the loss of friends and wayfarers and the frustration surrounding this loss was the motiva- tion for The Indomitable Spirit.259 The photographs shown were meant to give hope and courage to uphold the indomitable spirit of those fi ghting against AIDS. Goldin uses the same phrase in her catalogue text, but while Heiferman frames it as an imperative, Goldin meant primarily the continued existence of her community’s will to fi ght.260

Heiferman chose photographs from all areas of the fi eld — com- mercial photography including fashion and sport photography, photo- journalism, and art — to show that the participating photographers were in fact “united against AIDS.” 261 In contrast to the participants of Goldin’s show, the photographers did not belong to a particular lo- cality or social group. Many of them had never had any contact with AIDS and this was the fi rst time they had exhibited their works in the context of the epidemic. Heiferman stressed that he was not looking for representatives of a certain community and described the participating photographers as followed:

255 Photographers + Friends, The Indomitable Spirit, appendix, n. p. 256 John Baldessari, Chuck Close, Jan Groover, Duane Michals, Annette Lemieux, Richard

Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Bruce Weber, and William Wegman. A second portfolio entitled In a Dream… was issued in 1991 in an edition of 25. In this portfolio were works by Tina Barney, Sara Charlesworth, Jenny Holzer, Frank Majore, Thomas Ruff, Andres Serrano, and Jeff Wall (ICP archival material Photographers + Friends, brochure, n. d.).

257 Author’s interview with Marvin Heiferman, June 28, 2011 (p. 332). 258 Hirsh described him as an internationally renowned curator (Hirsh, Review of

“Indomitable Spirit,” 28). 259 Joseph Hartney in Photographers + Friends, The Indomitable Spirit, n. p. 260 In his interview with the author on June 28, 2011, Heiferman expressed dislike of the

title of his exhibition (p. 332). 261 Heiferman, “Introduction,” n. p.

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We asked people to respond to the notion of indomitable spirit. We asked gay and straight image-makers to participate, people who did and who did not have direct exposure and/ or experi- ence with AIDS. The project was not shaped by my going out as a curator and saying: I’ve selected this or that particular work. 262

Neither did Heiferman direct the content. He asked everyone “to celebrate human strength, compassion, and endurance in the face of challenge and adversity.” In other words, he did not want depressing images of people with AIDS, but of stamina and perseverance.263 After all — as art critic Andy Grundberg also wrote in his foreword to the catalogue — many mem- bers of the art world had no need for more images of people with AIDS in order to understand the epidemic, AIDS had long become bitter reality.264 Yet Grundberg also stressed the relevance of the exhibition in his discus- sion of the power of photography to infl uence political opinion. He saw it in the tradition of social documentary photography that reveals societal ills and works to address social injustice.265 However in this he was refer- ring only to the function of the exhibition and not the content of individual works, which did not portray misery or the visible symptoms of AIDS.

Heiferman’s aim in choosing the 94 participating photogra phers was to raise as much money as possible; name recognition and market value were the most important criteria. As Heiferman was quoted in a 1990 New York Native article: “I had to be careful that we’d be able to raise money. So it was basically putting together a Who’s Who list in the photographic world and soliciting people.” 266 Like most curators, he stayed in the back- ground and allowed the photographers he approached to choose their own contributions for the show. In a 2011 interview, he even said that at the time he would have found it disrespectful to shape the exhibition according to his own concept. His main aim, with an eye toward the auction, had been “to bring together as many photographic perspectives as we could.” 267

Of the artists involved with Witnesses, Nan Goldin, David Wojnaro- wicz, and Dorit Cypis donated a photograph to the show.268 Heiferman had already worked together with Goldin on various projects. They had edited The Ballad of Sexual Dependency together in 1986 and he had worked along- side Goldin and others on the 1990 Visual AIDS’ Artists Caucus project, The Electric Blanket.269 Thus in this case too, the personal networks and friendships of both Heiferman and Photographers + Friends played a deci- sive role in getting well-known photographers to participate in the project.

262 Author’s interview with Marvin Heiferman, June 28, 2011 (p. 334). 263 Heiferman cited in Grundberg, “Preface,” n. p. 264 Ibid. 265 Ibid. 266 Hirsh, Review of “Indomitable Spirit,” 28. 267 Author’s interview with Marvin Heiferman, June 28, 2011 (p. 334). 268 Eight artists who had exhibited in From Media to Metaphor were also present in The

Indomitable Spirit: Nancy Burson, General Idea, Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michaels, Donald Moffett, Rosalind Solomon, Brian Weill, and David Wojnarowicz as well as Ann Meredith (who had shown in Images & Words).

269 Author’s interview with Marvin Heiferman, June 28, 2011 (p. 333).

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From MEDIA to METAPHOR: ART ABOUT AIDS, 1992 to 1994

The fi nal comparison shall be with the travelling exhibition, From Me- dia to Metaphor: Art About AIDS, curated by art critic Robert Atkins and Thomas W. Sokolowski, at the time director of NYU’s Grey Art Gal- lery. The show opened on January 20, 1992 at Hamilton College’s Emer- son Gallery in Clinton, NY and travelled to nine stations in the United States and Canada until February 1994, ending with a two-month run at Sokolowski’s Grey Art Gallery in New York City. The show was a project of Independent Curators International (ICI), a non-profi t orga- nization founded in 1975 for the production of contemporary art exhibi- tions, and was fi nanced by the NEA, the ICI Exhibition Patrons Circle, and private donations.

Atkins and Sokolowski wanted to show the variety of Art about AIDS — the curators mentioned 500 American artists. This art ran the gamut from pub- lic representations of people with HIV/AIDS (“from media”) to more indi- rect and personal artworks (“to metaphor”).270 Their thesis was that this range of artistic approaches followed a linear history: while mostly por- traits of people with AIDS were created after 1985 — they specifi ed the pho- tography of Rosalind Solomon and Nicholas Nixon, shown in the exhibition as a kind of prelude — approaches later became more diversifi ed at the end of the decade. The exhibition focused on this second phase and aimed to present an overview of the artworks’ medial and thematic diversity.271

The show explicitly aimed at the historicization of Art about AIDS and at placing this art within the history of the epidemic and within art history as a whole. This can be seen in the curators’ catalogue text, in which they linked Art about AIDS to the way in which the Black Plague was dealt with in art in fourteenth century Siena, and also claimed that AIDS activist art built upon the visual tradition of Andy Warhol.272 Final- ly, Atkins and Sokolowski situated the exhibition in the contemporary obscenity debate of 1989, of which Witnesses was a part. They saw their show as a follow-up to the 1991 Whitney Biennale, which they called the emotional barometer of artistic explorations of AIDS.273 In so doing, they both placed their show within the framework of previous exhibitions and also suggested a (temporal) distance to these debates about art, legitimiz- ing their periodization and historicization of artworks about AIDS.

This distancing, in comparison with Witnesses, can also be seen as regards the curators. Atkins and Sokolowski were chosen as guest cu- rators by ICI. Both were part of the New York City art world and mem-

270 The curators stressed that the term media referred not to artistic means of expression, but to representation in the (mass) media (Atkins and Sokolowski, “Art About AIDS,” 19).

271 Ibid. See also author’s interview with Thomas W. Sokolowski, July 1, 2011 (p. 344) and Document ICI.MM.3.

272 Atkins and Sokolowski, “Art About AIDS,” 25. 273 Ibid., 26 and 24. In the exhibition’s documentation is a list of selected group shows in

non-commercial exhibition spaces, supporting this contextualization of the exhibition (Document ICI.MM.4).

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bers of Visual AIDS — Robert Atkins was a Village Voice columnist and Thomas W. Sokolowski was director of the Grey Art Gallery — yet neither articulated their personal loss. Instead, their attitude to the artworks and artists was reserved; they saw their position as ordering, in contrast to Nan Goldin, who stressed her own membership in the community. Atkins and Sokolowski also held back as regards selection of the artworks. They did not place any thematic limits, justifying this decision with the AIDS crisis itself: “There is little room for the sonorous voice of authority, in- cluding the art historian’s often refl exive impulse to categorize.” 274

In contrast to Witnesses, artists were not chosen so they could rep- resent themselves as a particular community. From Media to Metaphor was aimed at a larger public. The curators wished to reach both the gen- eral population, meaning people who had not necessarily had personal contact with the disease, as well as AIDS activists and people with AIDS. They used a thematic division to speak to such a heterogeneous audi- ence in an attempt to be both art exhibition and provide AIDS education. The exhibition included not only the artworks, but also educational ma- terial on the risk of infection, protection against HIV, and services for people with AIDS. Many books accompanied the artworks across the country, including Douglas Crimp’s special issue of October, exhibitions catalogues such as Rosalind Solomon’s Portraits in the Time of AIDS (1988), and multiple binders with educational material.275 This gave the exhibition an additional function, blurring the borders between art, ac- tivism, and AIDS education.276

Besides these New York City exhibitions, there were many other shows in the United States with varying curatorial concepts that pre- sented artistic explorations of HIV/AIDS in the course of the 1990s.277 Unlike the three shows examined above however, they were not in New York City and opened at least fi ve years after Goldin’s show. In light of my research interest in the self-representation of a group of New York City artists, their perusal is not relevant to this study.

274 Atkins and Sokolowski, “Art About AIDS,” 17. 275 See Document ICI.MM.2 and Document ICI.MM.5. In addition, Atkins and Sokolowski

wrote to the organizers of the local shows asking them to set up a program of screenings, lectures, and actions by local AIDS organizations to augment the exhibition (See Document ICI.MM.6).

276 Atkins and Sokolowski stressed this in their catalogue: “Maybe this exhibition is unusual because we acknowledge a sometimes blurry divide between art and activism; we don’t always see them as synonymous” (Atkins and Sokolowski, “Art About AIDS,” 27).

277 These include the exhibitions Signifi cant Losses: Artists Who Have Died From AIDS at the Art Gallery at the University of Maryland; Art’s Lament: Creativity in the Face of Death at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; and Consecrations: The Spiritual in the Time of AIDS at Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (all 1994).

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VISUAL AIDS’ DAY WITHOUT ART and WITNESSES, 1989

Like the other exhibitions examined above, the Day Without Art also shows that Witnesses was an integral part of a network of similar proj- ects to promote artistic processing of AIDS and the visibility of people with AIDS. Day Without Art: A National Day of Action and Mourning in Response to the AIDS Crisis took place on December 1, 1989, the second World Health Organization AIDS Awareness Day, and thus during the run of Witnesses. It was a pilot project organized by the non-profi t art organization Visual AIDS, founded in mid-1988 in New York City, where it is active to this day.278

Visual AIDS aimed and aims to bridge the art scene and the direct political activism of ACT UP.279 The Day Without Art thus linked politi- cal protest and personal loss as reactions to the AIDS epidemic. In 1989, AIDS theorist Douglas Crimp demanded that any broad cultural reaction to AIDS must include just such expressions of both mourning and mili- tancy.280 While in 1987 he had radically supported militancy alone, two years later Crimp stressed that not only activism was urgent, but also mourning for the many who had died of AIDS. Activist militancy alone led to suppression of personal experience and was therefore dangerous, because it could only lead to AIDS activism fatigue over the long term.281

To this day, Visual AIDS continues to raise awareness about AIDS through art projects and — in contrast to AmFar — not to see artworks “only” as commodities to be sold at auctions. The organization supports art projects by HIV-positive artists, archives the works of artists with HIV/AIDS in an enormous database, and takes part in education and pre- vention campaigns. 282 Visual AIDS was founded by members of the New York City art community to fi ght the stigmatization of people with AIDS in the press; founding members were Robert Atkins, William Olander, Thomas W. Sokolowski, and Gary Garrels. Garrels was curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis at the time and Olander, who died in March 1989 from AIDS-related causes, was curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City.283 All members of Visual AIDS,

278 Founding member Thomas W. Sokolowski called Visual AIDS “an information-gathering service on AIDS-related programs at arts institutions” (cited in Yarrow, “Day Without Art”). See also http://www.thebody.com/visualaids/index.html (last accessed Feb. 06, 2016).

279 Atkins, “Visual AIDS,” 214. 280 Douglas Crimp’s eponymous article fi rst appeared in 1989 in October

(Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy”). 281 Ibid., 149. 282 Atkins, “Day Without Art,” 63. Visual AIDS organizes exhibitions and other events by

and about HIV-positive artists, thus connecting the New York art scene and AIDS activ- ism, as in their exhibitions Not Over (2013) or Party Out of Bounds: Nightlife as Activism Since 1980 (2015) at La MaMa Galleria, New York City.

283 Author’s interview with Thomas W. Sokolowski, July 1, 2011 (p. 343); see also Atkins, “Visual AIDS,” 124 and Baker, Art of AIDS, 164 – 168.

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including Nan Goldin and Susan Wyatt, used their contacts to artists and art institutions to promote the organization’s visibility. As Philip Yenawine, then director of education at MoMA, explained to the New York Times in 1989: “We want to use the prestige and credibility of cul- tural institutions to dramatically call attention to how widespread and serious the problem is.” 284

Goldin had various personal connections to Visual AIDS: active in the organization since its founding in the summer of 1988, in 1989 she formed the Artist’s Caucus of Visual AIDS together with Allen Frame, Frank Moore, and Paul H-O. The caucus organized the Elec- tric Blanket project on December 1, 1990 as a continuation of the Day Without Art. Electric Blanket, p. 78, was a slide show that ran for many hours made up of political slogans, AIDS statistics, statements by poli- ticians, and photographs of people with AIDS and of ACT-UP demon- strations. It was projected on the façade of the Cooper Union in New York City.285 Like ACT UP, it rejected separate spaces for art and used the public-protest strategies of the political AIDS movement by choos- ing projection as its medium.

Originally, the Day Without Art was planned as a national moratorium. Museums, commercial and university galleries, alternative art spaces and theaters were all called upon to close their doors, cover paintings, or interrupt performances. This cultural void was to be a memorial to those in the art world who had died of AIDS and remind people of the artistic losses yet to come.286 Around 600 art institutions, most of them in New York City where Visual AIDS had the strongest presence, fol- lowed the call, interpreting it in myriad ways.287 Many museums covered individual paintings, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which took down Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein for fi ve days, replacing it with a poster with information about AIDS. The Guggenheim Museum put a black mourning band around the building, p. 79, and many galleries, including commercial galleries like Mary Boone and Leo Castelli, closed their shows for the entire day.288

284 Yenawine cited in Yarrow, “Day Without Art.” 285 Williams, “Artists Space,” 149. Electric Blanket was conceived as a project that could be

expanded indefi nitely and after 1990 toured through the United States and Europe. One thing that came out of it was the designation of the red ribbon as a symbol of the struggle against HIV and AIDS. For more on the AIDS ribbon see Finkelpearl, “Interview” and the author’s interview with Thomas W. Sokolowski, July 1, 2011 (p. 343).

286 Author’s interview with Thomas W. Sokolowski, July 1, 2011 (p. 343). 287 Estimates vary between 400 (Deitcher, “Day Without Art,” 125) and 700 institutions

(Snow, “Country Without Art”). In the following, I look only at institutions in New York City. These numbers also vary between 225 (Snow, “Country Without Art”) and 150 (Yarrow, “Day Without Art”). Thomas Rhoads of the Santa Monica Museum of Art in Los Angeles said on this topic: “If you live in New York, you’re much more conscious of that impact of ACT UP on the community. You sense the strength of the crisis of AIDS much more in New York than you do here. It sort of dominates the consciousness of peo- ple there. I think Los Angeles has a lot of catching up to do in terms of consciousness” (cited in Snow, “Country Without Art”).

288 Yarrow, “Artists Offer.”

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Other institutions used the day to express their affl iction, lamentation, and anger regarding AIDS with exhibitions, readings, performances, or memorials. For example the Whitney Museum in New York gave out 8000 postcards printed with Gran Fury’s graphic Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do, p. 80.289 Many art spaces showed works by gay or HIV-positive artists, for example the P. P. O.W Gallery, which screened German fi lmmaker Rosa von Praunheim’s documentary about how AIDS had hit the New York City art scene, Silence Equals Death.

Finally, in many places including New York City, parts of the AIDS Memorial Quilt were laid out.290 MoMA screened a documentary about the NAMES Project, Common Threads; actress Elizabeth Taylor, who had advocated for research and education from the inception of the AIDS epidemic, introduced the fi lm.291

For Witnesses, planned as a small, intimate show, the link to the public action of Visual AIDS meant a clear contextualization within the AIDS discourse. Press coverage of Witnesses also mentioned the upcoming Day Without Art. Shauna Snow for instance, in an article for the Los Angeles Times, linked A Day Without Art to Witnesses and Images & Words. She posited that the debate about funding art rested on a funda- mental homophobia within society, which the three projects were now fi ghting.292 Artists Space and thus Goldin’s show closed on December 1, 1989, as the press release at the occasion of the show’s opening had announced. Clearly, the opening of Witnesses had been timed to allow participation in the Visual AIDS action.293 Furthermore, on November 28 and 29, Nan Goldin and the author Barbara Barg organized read- ings with texts by David Wojnarowicz, Linda Yablonski, Cookie Mueller, and others — proceeds were donated to ACT UP. Both of these readings were radio broadcast on December 1 as part of the Day Without Art program.294 On the same day, Susan Wyatt spoke on the TV show Good Day New York about the NEA controversy, and Artists Space em - ployees volunteered for the day at AIDS organizations such as People With AIDS Coalition or God’s Love We Deliver.295

Finally, Goldin took part in a discussion in Washington D. C. with John Frohnmayer, then president of the NEA, and 30 other Visual AIDS members, some of whom were HIV-positive artists. The 90-minute dis- cussion had been organized by Visual AIDS, as a result of the controver- sy surrounding Witnesses, to discuss with Frohnmayer ways in which the NEA and art community members could raise awareness around AIDS

289 Ibid. 290 The quilt was shown for example at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (in cooperation

with the Bronx AIDS Community Service Project), at the Museum of American Folk Art, and at the New-York Historical Society (Deitcher, “Day Without Art,” 126).

291 Atkins, “Visual AIDS,” 217. The fi lm was based on Ruskin, The Quilt. 292 Snow, “Country Without Art.” See also Atkins, “Day Without Art,” 65. 293 Document Artists Space 1989a. 294 WBAU, 99.5 FM Radio. Document Artists Space / Day Without Art n. d. 295 Ibid.

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and meet the needs of people with AIDS.296 Because of the Witnesses con- troversy, the topic of the following chapter, Goldin played an important role at the meeting and automatically brought questions about censor- ship and freedom of opinion to the debate about federal support of art.

296 Yarrow, “Artists Offer.”

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EXHIBITING ART about AIDS

Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing was the fi rst New York City group show of artistic explorations of AIDS, but it was not unique. As we have seen, three group shows followed between 1989 and 1994 that had similar con- cepts and exhibited signifi cant commonalities. These exhibitions all an- chored artistic responses to the epidemic in a political discourse on AIDS related to other social, political, and medical discourses. None of these shows were relevant because of the value of the art alone; they were functionalized in the service of the AIDS movement.

(1) All of these exhibitions, as canonizations of Art about AIDS, were rather late reactions to the epidemic, which had been raging in the United States since the early 1980s. The artworks presented were very hetero- geneous, because Art about AIDS was defi ned not through criteria immi- nent to the works themselves, but was a label used fi rst and foremost for the works of artists who have been affected by AIDS and / or infected with HIV.

(2) All three exhibitions were temporary and were curated by people won expressively for this purpose. None of the shows were created by cu- rators responsible for their museum’s regular program. Rather they were special projects shown in alternative art spaces such as university gal- leries and community centers. Between 1989 and 1994, as an art topic, AIDS was (still) at the margins of the mainstream art world and was not a topic for traditional art institutions. Thus these fi rst exhibitions about AIDS took place on the artistic and social margins, the territory of homosexu- als and people with AIDS. Not until 1994, when Art’s Lament: Creativity in the Face of Death ran in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, did the theme of AIDS enter traditional and established art institutions. The Indomitable Spirit, shown in the New York International Center of Photography, was an exception to this rule. It also differed from the other three group shows in that it was planned as a fundraiser.

(3) Without exception, the curators chose artists and not artworks. Many artistic responses to AIDS were commissioned for the exhibitions. This strategy makes one key constant visible: in all three shows, neither content nor form of the work was important, nor choosing artworks that fi t together. Content took backstage to the representation of a group of artists who had been affected by AIDS. At the same time, these artists were found within the curators’ artistic and personal networks; Goldin for instance chose her friends to help her represent their community, and Heiferman at- tempted to win over renowned artists from his circle of friends and acquaint- ances in order to have works that he could sell for a lot of money. Chavez and Atkins / Sokolowski on the other hand, tried to fi nd artists who were as different as possible in order to show the wide variety of Art about AIDS.297

297 A note scribbled on Atkins und Sokolowski’s fi rst list of artists (Document ICI.MM.I) illustrates this well. After Ross Bleckner’s name, who was to be in the show, is a handwritten margin note: “Best works yet to come”, which shows the diffi culty of choosing by artist, rather than by work.

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However Sokolowski too stressed that it was not the artworks, but having the “right” names that was decisive for the choice of artists.298

Having the artists belong to a certain network as a specifi c cri - teria for the canon of Art about AIDS functioned to help create identity both for the community itself (Witnesses) as well as for the public (From Media to Metaphor) and brought together relevant social and moral art- works regardless of their artistic quality. This theory is supported by the fact that some artists were in more than one of the three exhibitions. Jo Shane and David Wojnarowicz, for example, were in Goldin’s and in Chavez’s shows, while Gran Fury exhibited in Images & Words and in From Media to Metaphor.

(4) That all four exhibitions reacted to the epidemic relatively late should be placed within the context of the AIDS discourse of the time. Activists such as Douglas Crimp demanded that art become politicized and artworks and exhibitions put in the service of the AIDS movement. Crimp explicitly stipulated that art — because of the lack of government education and the spread of false information about HIV and AIDS by the mass media — disseminate information, create visibility, and mobilize for direct action until a cure was found.299 He named Gran Fury’s activist art as paradigmatic, especially their emblematic poster Art is Not Enough, p. 81, which expressed precisely Crimp’s message. Crimp’s stipulation stemmed from his infi nite unhappiness about the many deaths within the gay community. Leaning on Sigmund Freud, he defi ned this sadness not as mourning, but as melancholy, which, Freud said, unlike mourning does not include a return to normality.300 The loss of friends and lovers can only end in melancholy for gays and people with AIDS, because for them as stigmatized minorities, no return to a “normal” life was pos- sible.301 This argumentation makes it clear why Crimp believed it important to foster a sense of identity beyond isolation, silence, humiliation, and death. Judith Butler also called for radical AIDS activism and a politicized language of AIDS when she wrote: “As grief remains unspeakable, the rage over the loss can redouble.” 302

Thus the exhibitions about AIDS were more than just a presenta- tion of artworks; they were also political evocations within the AIDS discourse. In the show Images & Words, whose title already named a characteristic of activist art, curator Humberto Chavez called on the presenting artists to rise up and raise their voice. His politically motivat- ed show was a direct answer to Crimp’s “Art is Not Enough.”

298 Sokolowski in Yarrow, “Day Without Art.” 299 Crimp, “Cultural Analysis,” 6 – 8. 300 Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” 141. On this see Sigmund Freud: “The distinguishing

mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that fi nds utterance in self- reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punish- ment” (Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 243).

301 Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” 134. 302 Butler, Psychic Life, 132. See also Eng, “Value of Silence,” 89.

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The Indomitable Spirit in contrast had another goal: its task was not to incite political action through art, but to auction the works of renowned photographers to raise money for AIDS research and the medical sup- port of people with AIDS. Art historian Robert Rosenblum saw the func- tionalization of art as countering Crimp’s 1987 position. Rosenblum did not believe that art could save lives. He thought it was important in or- der to deal with the epidemic on an emotional level and as an expression of love for and solidarity with people with AIDS. Nevertheless he called on artists and curators to sell their works as commodities to raise money for scientifi c research.303

(5) Finally, the four exhibitions have a common thematic denomi- nator. All curators placed the visibility of marginalized groups at the center of their shows. Like Nan Goldin in her photographs, they thus created visible support for a community that had been stigmatized and decimated by AIDS. These exhibitions were meant not only to represent minorities, but to give them a voice and work to meet their needs. The statements by the individual artists in the catalogues of Witnesses and Images & Words, adding to their artworks their political opinions about AIDS and personal expressions of mourning for friends and lovers, must be understood in this light. They give the impression that the artwork alone was not strong enough in the struggle for visibility or was too open to misinterpretation, necessitating these verbal positionings within the AIDS discourse. Taking this one step further, it seems as if the works themselves were reduced by their creators to their AIDS-related message. Thus Greer Lankton wrote in Goldin’s catalogue: “I have found it very diffi cult to relate my emotional responses to my art work. It seems like nothing I could make would adequately describe the grief I feel.” 304

Both Goldin and Chavez saw themselves as members of the art community they exhibited. Witnesses took a special standpoint in this respect, because the show was a call to Goldin’s own circle of friends not to give up in the fi ght against AIDS, a desire refl ected in her choice of artists who knew one another and who produced images of each other for the exhibition. Heiferman and Atkins / Sokolowski took a more dis- tanced position. The broad scope of art shown in their exhibitions drew less attention to the traumatic experience of the epidemic. Rather they aimed to present the wide variety of artistic responses to AIDS. From Media to Metaphor must be seen as a show that historicizes, rather than a show about the epidemic itself. However this approach was balanced by the dissemination of educational material that spoke to the urgency of the epidemic. It should also not be forgotten that From Media to Meta- phor ran from 1992 to 1994, three years after Goldin’s show. This explains in part its distanced position, as the creation of a historicizing overview of Art about AIDS also implies that it belonged to a limited (and past)

303 Rosenblum cited in Crimp, “Cultural Analysis,” 5. The focus on the auction is also refl ected in the comparatively expensive catalogue, the only one of the four exhibition catalogues to have color reproductions.

304 Artists Space, Witnesses, 22.

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period. That perhaps mirrors a fundamental fatigue in cultural respons- es to AIDS. Beginning in the early 1990s, a clear drop in media interest in AIDS could be observed. In the mid-1990s, activist collectives such as Gran Fury disbanded. Their militant activism had lost its drive in light of George H. W. Bush’s loss of offi ce to Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992, and the introduction of combination therapy. An HIV infection was no longer a death sentence but, with medication, a chronic but treatable disease.

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WITNESSES in the CONTEXT of the CULTURE WARS

In contrast to the three exhibitions discussed above, Witnesses received national press even before its opening. As a study of the archival ma terial shows, in November 1989 the exhibition found itself in a public confl ict with the NEA, which threatened to withdraw support for the exhibition. The NEA’s reason for no longer wanting to fund was supposedly obscene images and texts in the exhibition and in the catalogue.

In the following I shall go into this confl ict in more detail, as it is exemplary for the linkage of art and politics — not just during the AIDS epidemic. Thanks to previously inaccessible archival material, the complete chain of events from the NEA grant application in 1988 until the show’s opening in November 1989 can now be presented for the fi rst time. By placing the confl ict and the way in which it was seen by the media, the artists, curator Nan Goldin, and Artists Space director Susan Wyatt, we can place the exhibition and its work in the context of the so-called culture wars.

This term refers to the confl icts between American liberals and conservatives / Christians in the 1980s, which fl ared up again as a result of the AIDS epidemic. The confl ict between Artists Space and the NEA had been preceded by the ‘art battles’ surrounding the photography of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe. These confl icts allow us to see Goldin’s group show not only within the discourse on AIDS, but in the cultural and political context of the late 1980s, which set the stage for the artistic responses to AIDS presented in Witnesses.

In November 1988, Susan Wyatt, as director of Artists Space, applied to the NEA for a project grant for the group show Witnesses. The show’s working title at the time, The Age of AIDS, already made its focus on the epidemic clear.305 On July 13, 1989 they were granted 10,000 dollars for the show, one-third of the total budget for exhibition and catalogue.306

The grant had been approved by NEA president Frank Hodsoll (1981 – 1989), who was at the end of his term. His successor, John E. Frohnmayer, a lawyer from Oregon, had been appointed by George H. W. Bush in July 1989, and began his term on October 3, 1989. He had had nothing to do with the authorization of the grant for Witnesses, but im- mediately after taking offi ce entered the controversy about the NEA’s funding policies, including support of Goldin’s exhibition.307 From early

305 Document NEA n. d. and email correspondence between the author and Susan Wyatt, March 2, 2012, p. 345.

306 Document Wyatt / Art in America n. d. und email correspondence between the author and Susan Wyatt, March 2, 2012, p. 346.

307 Kidd, Legislating Creativity, 101. On the history of the NEA and the role of federal funding of art in the United States see Camp, “Freedom of Expression,” 54 – 58; Dubin, Arresting Images, 278 – 293; and Brenson, Visionaries and Outcasts, 109 – 139. On the prehistory and founding of the NEA see Larson, Reluctant Patron, 202 – 231.

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1989, the NEA had been a target of criticism by Republican senators and members of Congress including Jesse Helms, Dana Rohrabacher, and William Dannemeyer. Together with fundamentalist Christian groups, they accused the NEA of funding obscene art.308

The nationwide controversy was sparked by Piss Christ, p. 82, by New York City photographer Andres Serrano, a close-up photograph of a white crucifi x in a yellow liquid. The highly aesthetic image itself does little to incite outrage; the provocation comes from the title, which iden- tifi es the liquid as urine. The photograph was fi rst shown with seven more of Serrano’s works in the Southeastern Center of Contemporary Art (SECCA) exhibition, Awards of Visual Arts 7 in Winston-Salem, NC. Every year, SECCA chose ten artists from ten regions and awarded them with participation in the exhibition and 15,000 dollars each.309 SECCA re- ceived 75,000 dollars annually from the NEA for promotional programs; thus Serrano’s photography was indirectly funded with federal money.

In April 1989, the president (Reverend Donald Wildmon) and several members of the Christian fundamentalist American Family Association protested in U. S. Congress against NEA support of this “anti-Christian bigotry.” 310 This religious mobilization triggered action: one month lat- er, senators Jesse Helms and Alfonso D’Amato voiced their indignation over NEA support of Serrano’s “deplorable, despicable display of vulgar- ity.” 311 D’Amato’s short speech focused on the burden of art funding on the American taxpayer. Accordingly, the words “taxpayer,” “tax payer’s money” or “people’s tax dollars” appeared six times in the page-long text.312 D’Amato avoided any mention of curtailing freedom of speech or freedom of opinion, to prevent the opposition from accusing him of conservative censorship of Serrano’s artistic freedom.

The debate fl ared up again in June 1989 on the occasion of a retro- spective of the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, who had died of AIDS in March 1989. In 1988, the NEA had promised the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) a sum of 30,000 dollars for the trav- elling exhibit of Mapplethorpe’s work, The Perfect Moment.313 After the

308 The 1989 defi nition of obscene art had been set by the Supreme Court in 1973 (Miller v. California, 413 US 15 (1973), cited in Vance, “Misunderstanding Obscenity,” 49). Helms’s accusation implied among other things that something obscene could not be art and therefore did not deserve support. For a deeper discussion of the pornography debates in the 1980s and 1990s see Heartney, “Pornography” and Meyer, “Rock Hudson.”

309 The travelling exhibition was in Los Angeles and Pittsburg in 1988 and 1989 and ended on January 29, 1989 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, NC. On the debate about the photographs see Fox, “NEA under Siege” and Pindell, “Breaking Silence.”

310 Letter by Wildmon from April 5, 1989 in Bolton, Culture Wars, 27. Wildmon sent a total of 380,000 letters, 178,000 of which were sent to church congregations (Phelan, “Money Talks,” 5 and Meyer, “The Red Envelope,” 4). On the AFA and Donald Wildmon see Hunter, Culture Wars, 228 – 237 and Dubin, Arresting Images, 226 – 248. On the AFA and its use of publicity see Bruce, Pray TV.

311 Congressional Record (May 18, 1989) National Endowment for the Arts, S5594 – S5595, cited in Kidd, Legislating Creativity, 10.

312 Ibid. 313 The exhibition’s entire budget was 200,000 dollars. After showing in D. C. , the exhibition

was planned to be shown in Hartford, CT, Berkeley, CA, Cincinnati, OH, and Boston, MA. However after the controversy it travelled only to Cincinnati (Kidd, Legislating Creativity, 12).

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show had already been at the University of Pennsylvania in December 1988 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in February 1989, it became the center of a national debate on federal support of obscene art when it was about to open at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D. C. on June 8, 1989. In this case too, the controversy was sparked by individu- al photographs. The images in question were from the series X Portfolio, p. 83, sexually explicit portraits of members of the gay sadomasochistic subculture, which made up 13 of the show’s 175 photographs.314

The director of the gallery, Christina Orr-Cahall, bowed to pres- sure from Jesse Helms, other conservative politicians, the AFA, and the Christian Coalition, and cancelled the show on June 3, 1989. Beth Eck explained Orr-Cahall’s move, criticized by artists and members of the art world as self-censorship, as motivated by fear of future funding cuts. The Corcoran Gallery had no independent foundation and was depen- dent upon federal funding.315

On the evening of the planned opening date, people protested the can- cellation of the exhibition. As part of the protest, slides of Mapplethorpe’s photographs were projected from the street onto the gallery’s entrance, including an early self-portrait (1980) of Mapplethorpe. A photo of the projection appeared on the September 1989 cover of Artforum, p. 84.316 Richard Meyer named this process an example of the dialectical moment of censorship. Censorship of artworks does not make the works disap- pear, but brings them even more into the public eye. Censorship generates limits (of visibility), but at the same time also reactions to those limits. While silencing artists, it provokes reactions to the silence.317 Here Meyer drew from Judith Butler’s thesis on the censorship of texts, in which she spoke of a “productive form of power.”318 Forbidding or closing the exhi- bition led to a reinterpretation of Orr-Cahall’s self-censorship and drew the public’s attention to the discredited works. Mapplethorpe’s self-por- trait on the cover of Artforum supports the thesis that this attempt to take his images out of the public eye led to their increased dissemination.319

Five weeks after the Corcoran Gallery’s cancellation, the exhibition ran for almost three weeks at an alternative art space, the Washington Project for the Arts, and was seen by 40,000 people, an overwhelm- ing public response.320 Rather than next go to Hartford, Connecticut as planned, the show was brought to the University Art Museum in Berkeley and opened at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati in April 1990. As a result, the center’s director Dennis Barrie was charged

314 Meyer, “Jesse Helms,” 136. These photographs were to be exhibited in high tables so that children could not see them. For a detailed examination of the Mapplethorpe controversy see Crimp, “Painful Pictures”; Dubin, Arresting Images, 171 – 193; and Kidd, Legislating Creativity, 52 – 80.

315 Eck, “Cultural Confl ict,” 93. See also Meyer, “Barring Desire,” 208. 316 The protest was led by the DC Gay and Lesbian Activist Alliance, the National Gay and

Lesbian Task Force, and Oppression Under Target. 317 Meyer, “The Red Envelope,” 15. 318 Butler, “Ruled Out,” 251. 319 Meyer, “Barring Desire,” 208. 320 Phelan, “Money Talks,” 7.

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with obscenity and using minors in pornography.321 He was found not guilty after a ten-day trial in fall 1990.322

In reaction to NEA funding of Serrano’s and Mapplethorpe’s photo- graphs, on July 26, 1989, Jesse Helms proposed an amendment to the guidelines for NEA grants and a general ban on funding “indecent or obscene art.” To Helms, this meant works:

1. including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homo- eroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts; or,

2. material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion; or,

3. material which denigrates, debases or reviles a person, group, or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age, or national origin.323

Helms also demanded decreasing the NEA budget to 400,000 dollars an- nually and barring both SECCA and the ICA, organizers of the contro- versial exhibitions, from receiving further NEA grants.324 Fundamental to what was known as the Helms Amendment was its defi nition of ob- scene art. It was based on the 1989 Supreme Court decision that defi ned an artwork as obscene when it fulfi lled all three of the following — broad- ly interpretable — conditions:

1. the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would fi nd that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest, and

2. the work depicts, or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifi ed by the statute, and

3. the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, politi- cal, or scientifi c value.325

On October 7, 1989 the Helms Amendment was modifi ed and a more mod- erate version was passed for a period of three years.326 The law combined Helms’ fi rst demand with the Supreme Court’s third defi nition and left the NEA with power of discretion: “[material], which in the judgment of

321 Mahon, Eroticism, 229. The photo in question was a portrait of fi ve-year-old Jesse McBride from 1976, in which the boy sat naked on the back on an armchair (on this see Meyer, “Jesse Helms”).

322 Meyer, “Barring Desire,” 213. This was the fi rst time that charges had been brought against a museum in the United States. For more extensive information see Zimmer- mann, Skandalöse Körper, 202 – 203 and Carr, “Mapplethorpe,” 264 – 280.

323 Helms cited in Phelan, “Money Talks,” 7. 324 Vance, “Misunderstanding Obscenity,” 49; see also Jensen, “Cultural Politics,” 8. 325 413 US 15 (1973), cited in Vance, “Misunderstanding Obscenity,” 49. On the legal defi nition

of obscene art see also Adler, “Post-Modern Art.” 326 On the perception of the Helms Amendment in the art world, especially as regards the

Mapplethorpe controversy see Meyer, “Jesse Helms” and Dubin, Arresting Images, 240 – 245.

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the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities may be considered obscene.” 327 It also cut the NEA budget by 45,000 dollars and barred SECCA and ICA from further funding for a pe- riod of “just” fi ve years. Finally, an independent committee was set up to monitor NEA grant processes. The new law applied to all grants accepted by the NEA after October 1, 1989, which means that the application for Goldin’s exhibition did not fall under the ban on funding supposedly ob- scene art. The show itself however, ran after this deadline, which might explain Frohnmayer’s harsh reaction.

Carole S. Vance in 1990 warned that although the art world celebrated the law as a victory for the freedom of art and of opinions, it could result in increased self-censorship — such as the cancellation of the Mapple- thorpe retrospective. A regulatory law moved the discussion about obscenity in art out of the public scrutiny of the law and into the private sphere of the NEA, where “anxious arts administrators, untrained in law” would ask themselves which works were to be classifi ed as obscene. The Miller Standard, in place since 1973, was now replaced by vague intuition.328

The Helms Amendment was a censure of the NEA’s grant practice with wide-reaching consequences. Although the NEA was still allowed to make its own decisions about artworks, conservative politicians had greatly limited the institution’s scope of action. In 1990, the “obscenity clause” entered into force, forcing all grant applicants to pledge that they would not use NEA money for the production or presentation of so-called obscene material.329

The CONTROVERSY between ARTISTS SPACE and the NEA, FALL 1989

The events described above led Susan Wyatt to contact NEA program di- rector David Bancroft in October 1989 out of concern that Witnesses could lead to a new funding scandal since some contributions — Wyatt did not specify but spoke only of a catalogue text and some photographs — might be construed as obscene.330 Wyatt’s later justifi cation for taking this step was to protect the NEA and, more so, the artists and artworks in the exhibition, from public defamation. She proposed funding the catalogue (with David Wojnarowicz’s incendiary text) and the exhibition separate- ly, since the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation had offered to give 5000 dollars for the catalogue (total cost: 7,000 dollars). Bancroft accepted Wyatt’s proposal with the stipulation that the original exhibition budget be cut from 37,000 to 30,000 dollars to make the separation clear, which postponed the process.

327 Public Law 101 – 121, October 23, 1989, cited in Bolton, Culture Wars, 121 – 123. See also Oreskes, “Senate Votes.”

328 Vance, “Misunderstanding Obscenity,” 49. 329 Zimmermann, Skandalöse Körper, 185. 330 Document Wyatt / Art in America n. d. and Frohnmayer 1989. See also Vince A. Carducci,

who quoted Wyatt as saying the following: “In order for the NEA not to have a controversy on its hands without having an opportunity to get prepared for it, I decided to contact the NEA” (Carducci, “NEA Recalls,” 11).

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While these negotiations were in progress however, the exhibition an- nouncement was sent to everyone on the Artists Space mailing list with the information that the NEA had funded both exhibition and catalogue. While Wyatt and Bancroft were corresponding about changes to the budget, NEA president John E. Frohnmayer was informed by Ana Ste- le, a member of the NEA administrative staff, about the Witnesses case. Frohnmayer then also contacted Wyatt and, on October 31, 1989, sent program director Andrew Oliver to New York City to examine the art- works and the exhibition catalogue.331 At the meeting of the National Association of Artists’ Organizations in Washington D. C. on November 3, 1989, Frohnmayer gave Wyatt a confi dential letter telling her that the exhibition was a “violation of the spirit of the Congressional directive.” He asked her to reject the NEA funding since the exhibition was inappro- priate in light of “our current political climate.” He also demanded that Artists Space openly declared that neither exhibition nor catalogue had been funded by the NEA.332

Before Wyatt could respond to this demand, Frohnmayer published an open statement on the withdrawal of NEA funding:

The show had become so politicized that it no longer met the artistic criteria. There is a certain amount of sexually explic- it material, but the primary problem is the political nature. I can understand the frustration and the huge sense of loss and abandonment that people with AIDS feel, but I don’t think the appropriate place of the National Endowment is to fund political statements. 333

A few days later, the board of Artists Space decided not to retract their grant application, but to insist upon the sum originally offered by the NEA. On November 8, 1989, Wyatt sent Frohnmayer a fax informing him of this decision.334 On the same day, the New York Times reported on the confl ict and printed excerpts from Wyatt and Frohnmayer’s correspon- dence, in which the latter named the political nature of the exhibition as the reason for the withdrawal of funding.335

In a speech before the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies on November 10, 1989, Frohnmayer retracted his statement and claimed that he had inadvisably used the word “political.” He now criticized the show for an “erosion of the artistic content.” 336 This was now — after his charges of ob- scenity and political content — his third justifi cation for rescinding support.

331 Document Wyatt/ Art in America n. d. See also Kidd, Legislating Creativity, 99. 332 Document Frohnmayer 1989. See also Meyer, “Vanishing Points,” 244. 333 Kidd, Legislating Creativity, 100. Frohnmayer cited in Parachini, “Arts Groups.” 334 Document Wyatt 1989. Wyatt gave the fax and Frohnmayer’s letter of November 3,

1989 to the press. 335 Accordingly, the New York Times cited him as saying “I believe that political discourse

ought to be in the political arena and not in a show sponsored by the Endowment” (Honan, “New York Art Exhibition”).

336 Frohnmayer cited in Kastor, “NEA Chief.”

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Five days later, one day before the show’s opening, Frohnmayer visit- ed Artists Space for the fi rst time. In his 1993 memoir, Leaving Town Alive, he described this meeting and the exhibition: “It wasn’t as crude as Drew Oliver had described, but more oppressive and hopeless and depressing.” 337 In an interview following this visit, he made it clear that he believed the Helms Amendment was unnecessary and at fi rst signalized willingness to compromise.338 He offi cially retracted the withdrawal on November 16 and (again) funded the Artists Space ex- hibition with 10,000 dollars. The catalogue was fi nanced by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, as Wyatt had proposed from the beginning. On the evening of the same day, more than 1000 people thronged to the opening.339 In front of Artists Space, visitors protested against the Helms Amendment and the conduct of the NEA. In the fi rst days alone, around 5000 people saw the show. The expected number of total visi- tors was thus exceeded in the very fi rst week. Publicity due to media interest in the confl ict helped to bring a daily average of 600 visitors until the exhibition closed on January 6, 1990.340

This step-by-step overview of the confl ict makes it clear how politi- cally charged art could be in the heated political climate of 1989, and that the NEA was fl oundering in its role as a federal organ of the Repub- lican-led government that still wanted to support a broad spectrum of art. The discussion surrounding Serrano, Mapplethorpe, and Witnesses show how inescapably this situation led to controversy in the late 1980s, although the artworks in Goldin’s show had not even been seen by the public during the confl ict.

337 Frohnmayer, Leaving Town Alive, 83. 338 Kidd, Legislating Creativity, 102. 339 Loughery, “Frohnmayer’s Folly,” 23. 340 Shepard, “The Arts.” See also the press release on longer opening hours from December

26 to 30, 1989, because already the show had had more than 9000 visitors (Document Artists Space 1989b).

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FUNDING WITNESSES: PERCEPTION of the CONFLICT

The confl ict with the NEA brought enormous publicity to Witnesses. Na- tional press followed the confl ict as demonstrated by the multitude of articles, news items, and commentaries. It is important to remember that at the time of the confl ict, neither the catalogue nor the artworks were available to press and public. The supposition that the exhibition and catalogue contained obscene material was enough to reignite the public controversy about federal funding of art that had surrounded Serrano’s and Mapplethorpe’s photos. We can therefore divide the perception of the confl ict between Artists Space and the NEA into two phases: in re- ports before the opening, when it was only possible to make presump- tions about the content of the artworks (and which therefore concentrat- ed on the confl ict between Wyatt and Frohnmayer), and in reports after the opening, in which the often hysterical statements made previously about supposedly obscene art were, on the whole, relativized.

The CONTROVERSY in the PRESS The fi rst articles on the funding confl ict found in the exhibition’s archive are from November 8, 1989. They presumed the show included explicit images of homosexuality and named it the fi rst test of the Helms Amend- ment, although Witnesses did not yet fall under the directive.341 At the same time, support of the exhibition with its assumedly obscene content was named as the fi rst challenge for John Frohnmayer, whose actions the press was following closely. On the one hand, most reporters recognized the diffi culty of his position in upholding the ban on funding so-called obscene art and at the same time supporting artists, including alterna- tive exhibitions. On the other hand, he often met with critique and malice and was called inconsistent and a laughingstock.342 Both the press and the art community doubted his integrity and many news reporters de- scribed him as a weak NEA president. Nan Goldin herself was quoted on Frohnmayer in the New York Tribune: “It seems he’s playing to the people with the most infl uence. But the show has gotten the attention it deserves. It’s too bad it had to be this way.” 343 In his large-scale 1992 study on the American controversy around federal funding of art, Stephen C. Dubin found that Frohnmayer could only lose this confl ict.344

341 Honan, “New York Art Exhibition.” 342 Robinson, “NEA Restores Grant”; Kramer, “Art Show on AIDS”; and Kastor, “NEA Panel

Fears.” 343 Watson, “NEA Switches.” 344 Dubin, Arresting Images, 207. In 1991, Frohnmayer was cited in the Los Angeles Times as saying

“I screwed up” about the confl ict around Witnesses (Parachini, “NEA Chief Admits Misstep”).

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The press branded Witnesses as the “latest art-versus-obscenity contro- versy,” which took place immediately after the debates about Serrano’s and Mapplethorpe’s photographs.345 These earlier confl icts on funding so- called obscene photographs were continually cited by the press, for ex- ample in Ben Currie’s claim that a new confl ict had erupted between the “country’s best-known homophobes” and the art community or its cur- rent representative, David Wojnarowicz.346 These early articles focused on the confl ict between Wyatt and Frohnmayer, who were both directly quoted. As director of Artists Space and president of the NEA respective- ly, they were decision-makers and representatives of their institutions. Before the opening, neither Nan Goldin nor the participating artists were asked to give opinions. In an article for the Washington Post, Elizabeth Kastor did quote the NEA’s Visual Arts Organizations Panel, the com- mission that originally decided to fund the exhibition, which expressed concern that Frohnmayer was undermining their decision and acting of his own volition — something he could do by virtue of his offi ce.347

These reports circled around the fundamental question of whether Goldin’s show was an artistic or a political statement. John Frohnmay- er’s three different justifi cations for withdrawing support were often cit- ed,348 while Susan Wyatt’s counterarguments were quoted. “It [ Witnesses] has not changed from art to politics. It is art.” 349 she stated, as well as: “The Congress is setting up a situation of ‘offi cial’ and ‘un offi cial’ art. And that is just what we criticize the Soviet Union for.” 350 With this she took up the topics of censorship and freedom of opinion, opposing the common charge — brought in particular against Serrano’s photogra- phy — that the NEA was squandering American tax money to support art of dubious value.

While the press usually remained objective and informative or sup- ported NEA funding of the exhibition, some conservative authors were quite critical. William H. Honan for example spoke against NEA funding of the catalogue because David Wojnarowicz’s text disparaged public fi gures (Helms, O’Connor, Dannemeyer) and wrongly blamed them for AIDS.351 James Gardner also expressed criticism in an article for the Na- tional Review which began as follows:

How many times does it need to be stated that the government never sought to prohibit the display of these works of art, only that it questioned, for a moment, the necessity of its sponsor- ing them? 352

345 Currie, “Gay Artists.” 346 Ibid. 347 Kastor, “NEA Panel Fears.” 348 Frohnmayer cited in Russell, “Images of Grief.” 349 Wyatt cited in Honan, “Arts Endowment Withdraws Grant.” 350 Wyatt cited in Treen, “A Mixed Bag.” 351 Honan, “AIDS Show Opens with Grant.” Honan mainly reported on the controversy

for the New York Times. 352 Gardner, “False Witness.”

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Right-wing columnist Patrick Buchanan, whose explicitly homophobic rhetoric had brought him a loyal following of conservative readers, argued in a similar vein. In an article for the New York Post he accused the gay and art communities of an “infantile disorder” when they demanded federal funding for their “fi lthy speech.” He further called for the erection of a wall between “the arts and the gay community on one hand, and the U. S. Treasury on the other hand,” because the former had already alienated themselves from the general population. He believed the AIDS epidemic and the many deaths in the gay community were the deserved punishment of these immoral outsiders and wrote: “Surely a showdown is coming.”353

This kind of defamation led AIDS activists such as Douglas Crimp to insist that the debates about supposedly obscene art had nothing to do with the social meaning or legality of art, and everything with the oppression of gays and people with AIDS. In Crimp’s view, many members of the art community had already accepted the language of the Helms Amendment, and with it the equation of obscenity and homoeroticism.354

Neither Wyatt and Frohnmayer nor the press attempted to answer the diffi cult question about the border between art and politics. There were simply no criteria for an objective judgment of legally obscene art that was per defi nition void of any real value. This wording shows how useless the Helms Amendment was for the appraisal of artworks and exhibitions, and that its main purpose was determent and upholding conservative values.355 An examination of the content of artworks was secondary for Helms and his cohorts.

In general, the American press mirrored the heated political climate sur- rounding art that had existed since the fi rst controversy about Andres Serrano. However in the case of Witnesses, lack of information about the suspect artworks encouraged a rather hysterical discussion on the pres- entation and promotion of so-called obscene art. Many authors, such as Patrick Buchanan, used the press as a vehicle for the promotion of their own political views. In contrast, the New York Times presented a broad spectrum of confl icting personal views with long articles by journalists including Grace Glueck, William H. Honan, and John Russell.

After the opening of the exhibition, the media rhetoric died down and the tone became much less emotional. In these reports, the main question was whether or not the artworks were legally obscene. Most of the articles answered this question with a clear “no,” and made a point of stating that the turmoil surrounding the show could not be explained by the works shown. When the doors opened to the public, it became clear to most that the charge of obscenity was unfounded: “None of the works

353 Buchanan, “Why Subsidize Defamation.” 354 Crimp cited in Glueck, “Border Skirmish.” 355 Barnes, “Art Grant Ping-Pongs.” See also Adler, “Post-Modern Art,” who argued

that the legal defi nition of obscene art could not be applied to postmodern strategies of appropriation and the combination of images and texts.

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seem particularly political,” wrote Joseph Treen in the Boston Globe,356 and Paul Richard remarked fl ippantly in the Washington Post on Mark Morrisroe’s photographs: “That is as threatening as it gets.” 357 The show was seen as neither obscene nor scandalous but as “no better, and no worse, than most young artists’ group shows seen in urban alternative spaces.” […] It is a surprisingly innocuous, often amateurish, cry of lam- entation.” 358 Richard shared this view with other authors who (depend- ing on their political views) described the exhibition as unremarkable and unimportant or as personal and emotional.359 In general, these re- views focused not on the individual works, but on the show as a whole as a communal expression of a group that had been affected by AIDS, as John Zeaman also emphasized: “It is the sense of community, more than the quality of any specifi c work, that gives this show its power.” 360

In the controversy surrounding Serrano and Mapplethorpe, the site of contention was individual works. While this underscored the impact of these works, necessitating their removal from the sphere of the gener- al population, reports on Witnesses belittled the power of the individual artworks, reading them only en masse as a statement by artists affect- ed by AIDS. This perception of the show had much to do with David Wojnarowicz’s invective in the catalogue. His clear political stance was read as representative for the entire exhibition. After the uproar sur- rounding the NEA grant, the works themselves were pushed to the back- ground and media interest centered on Wojnarowicz’s text. Few articles even referred to individual artworks. Whether this disinterest was due to the one-dimensionality of the works, or whether it was the youth of the artists themselves — gays, lesbians, and bisexuals who were themselves (mostly) HIV-positive — some of whom had never before exhibited and who failed to meet the criteria of the established art scene or the general population, shall be explored in the following through a closer look at the individual works.

The confl ict between the NEA and Artists Space was of greater inter- est to the American daily newspapers than to art journals and maga- zines. The latter’s response to the exhibition, positive without excep- tion, came rather late, in January 1990. In Art in America, Calvin Reid praised the show’s social relevance as an attack on the repressive social climate in which people with AIDS must live each day.361 John Loughery in New Art Examiner and Sylvia Hochfi eld in Art News also underlined the exhibition’s importance and exalted Susan Wyatt as the heroine of the controversy who had exposed Frohnmayer’s inexperience and

356 Treen, “A Mixed Bag.” 357 Richard, “Witnesses.” 358 Ibid. 359 See Gibson, “Art, Moral and NEA”; Kramer, “Art Show on AIDS”; Lipson,

“Controversial AIDS”; and Honan, “AIDS Show Opens with Grant.” 360 Zeaman, “Beyond Politics.” 361 Reid, “Beyond Mourning,” 56.

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weakness.362 As expected, the art scene supported Artists Space and read the Witnesses controversy as an attack on free speech and freedom of opinion.363 But like the daily newspapers, the art magazines also failed to examine the individual artworks or the exhibition concept, treating the show instead as a sign of the visibility of Goldin’s community. The authors did give the works themselves some attention, but Reid too spoke of a modest and personal show that did not merit the attack it suffered from the George H. W. Bush administration.364

The CONTROVERSY in the EYES of ARTISTS SPACE and GOLDIN’S COMMUNITY

Susan Wyatt, Nan Goldin, and the participating artists also made state- ments about the confl ict with the NEA, whether in articles, letters, or interviews. These statements show that although they presented a unit- ed front, they held very different opinions about the NEA, and about Wyatt’s actions.

Not unlike the art journals, Wyatt in her January 1990 interview stressed her worries about the threat to freedom of opinion and of ex- pression. She compared her exhibition to a public library, which is also fi nanced by taxes even though not every taxpayer agrees with the politi- cal opinion of every book. But it is this diversity that is key to the vitality of a democratic society.365

Wyatt was criticized sharply by David Wojnarowicz and other artists for separating the exhibition and the catalogue. He felt that as the person in charge of the show, she had a responsibility to stand up and support the artists involved, which included standing up for his catalogue text.366 He said her compromise was egoistic and accused her of bowing to a law made to silence homosexuals.367 In doing so, Artists Space was helping a law that promoted AIDSphobia and (self-) censorship and deliberately prevented AIDS education out of a fear of budget cuts, giving more power to conservative politicians and funda- mentalists.368 While most of the artists who contributed to Witnesses, like most members of the art and gay communities, had signalized support for the fight against the NEA and for freedom of speech, Art- ists Space had acted in a way that implied that “the structure of the

362 Loughery, “Frohnmayer’s Folly,” 23 and Hochfi eld, “Caught in the Crossfi re,” 148. 363 As an aside in this vein, after the controversy, composer Leonard Bernstein demonstrat-

ed his protest of the NEA by turning down the National Medal of Arts, which was to have been presented to him by President George H. W. Bush on the day of the exhibition’s opening (see for example Robinson, “NEA Restores Grant”).

364 Reid, “Beyond Mourning,” 55. 365 Wyatt cited in Stix, “Interview,” 51. 366 Document Wojnarowicz 1989a. 367 Wojnarowicz was referring here to the Helms Amendment, which came into force in early

October 1989. 368 Document Wojnarowicz 1989a. Wojnarowicz also claimed that the NEA’s retraction would

not have held up in court. On this see also his interview with lawyer Steven Pico, who said that basing the retraction of the exhibition’s funding on political grounds put the NEA on weak legal standing (Interview on Jan. 15, 1990, cited in Dubin, Arresting Images, 215).

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art world will not go to bat for people’s rights beyond a certain extent; and that that is acceptable.” 369

Wyatt justifi ed her actions as motivated the wish to avoid a de- structive controversy such as the ones around the works of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe. Both artists were defamed as vul- gar, their works labelled “morally reprehensible trash” and SECCA and ICA besmirched as irresponsible institutions. Wyatt wanted to protect the artworks in Witnesses from the consequences of such debates; after all, Serrano’s photograph did not become the subject of controversy un- til after the exhibition was closed.370 Her forthrightness with the NEA was motivated by the desire to give Frohnmayer a chance to make up his own mind about the exhibition without pressure from the outside.371 She also believed it important that the NEA continued to exist. It ful- fi lled an important function within a democratic society and should not let its decisions be clouded by the contemporary climate of fear.372 The same was true for the art community, which could not simply hope for a better political climate, but needed to stand up for the freedom of speech, opinion, and art. The art community should not make conces- sions out of fear of Jesse Helms’ slander. Such cowardice could only end in witch-hunts such as those against SECCA and ICA, and in the worst case in a fascist or totalitarian society.373

Wyatt’s actions were also condemned as cowardly, Dubin explained, because of the confl ict of interest between the fi nancial security of Art- ists Space and the needs and desires of the artists. Dubin claimed the Artists Space fi nancial policy, which stipulated that new sponsors be found each year, contributed to Wyatt’s cautious behavior as regards her institution’s public stance, forcing the director to react defensively.374

In a declaration released on November 16, 1989 Nan Goldin backed Wyatt’s decision to fi nance exhibition and catalogue separately, but she also expressed disapproval of John Frohnmayer. Like Wyatt, she used the controversy to call for an increased struggle against the re- strictions of the Helms Amendment.375 Unlike Wyatt, she was not de- pendent upon future support from the NEA, nor did she have to deal with the effects of the confl ict on Artists Space. As guest curator, she represented only herself and the artists in her show and could afford to express more biting criticism of the NEA.376 Wojnarowicz shared Goldin’s disdain of Frohnmayer and called his behavior the “legalized

369 Document Wojnarowicz 1989a. See also Document Goldin et al. n. d. 370 Document Wyatt / Fear or Freedom n. d. 371 Wyatt felt that it was dangerous to draw national attention to the small exhibition space,

which had forced Artists Space into the eye of a political fi restorm: “The risk of such attention is deadly serious for an organization which strives to present the non-fl ashy aspect of art” (Ibid.).

372 Document Wyatt / Art in America n. d. 373 Document Wyatt / Fear or Freedom n. d. 374 Ibid. 375 Document Goldin 1989. 376 Dubin, Arresting Images, 212.

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and systemic murder of homosexuals and their legislated silence; it is about the legislated invisibility and silencing of people with AIDS.” 377

Like Wojnarowicz, catalogue author Linda Yablonski in a November 12, 1989 letter to the editor of the New York Times, stated that Frohnmayer’s defunding of art exploring AIDS could and must be defi ned as political.378 In her text for the catalogue, “Et Tu Brute?,” she called for a war against AIDS in which exhibitions and artworks are the weapons. Yablonski used this war metaphor to describe both the fi ght for the rights and visibility of people with AIDS and for the medical fi ght against HIV.379

This use of the language of war and siege — metaphors that Susan Sontag found in particular in descriptions of cancer380 — is a sign of the lack of fi tting terminology for the discussion of AIDS and its meaning, also after 1989. The sudden appearance, unknown origin, and deadly dan- ger of the HIV virus all contributed to the inability to fi nd an appropriate language for the discussion of the epidemic; recourse to the metaphor of war shows the helplessness of the speakers.

Brigitte Weingart has therefore also diagnosed AIDS as a linguis- tic crisis. Speechlessness in face of the epidemic led to the use of war metaphors that anthropomorphized the virus in order to describe it as an active subject to be fought.381 Judith Williamson also spoke against the virus as a subject, because a virus has no meaning and is fi rst ac- corded certain characteristics and functions through its entry into a culture that is already encoded as homophobic and focused on blame and guilt. It is not the virus that provoked the hysterical and fearful reactions to AIDS — its lack of meaning made this impossible — but its embeddedness in pre-existing concepts of perception was fed by socie- tal horror scenarios.382 HIV/AIDS thus became an independent subject that intentionally attacked certain people, i. e. actively sought out its victims. Those infected thus must be guilty of something that justifi ed their infection and legitimized their ostracization from society.383 This belief, which Williamson criticized, is exactly what can be observed in statements by the religious right.

Lack of knowledge about the origin of HIV and AIDS’ sudden ap- pearance — Weingart continued — led even medical jargon to become mixed with similar linguistic constructions and the borders between metaphoric and scientifi c language became permeable. She dubbed this language “contagious words” that move between medical, political,

377 Document Wojnarowicz 1989. 378 Yablonski criticized the NEA for endangering the living situations of HIV-positive artists.

Their ignorance about the exhibition allowed them to simply equate art by people with AIDS with obscenity and thus deny its funding (Document Yablonski 1989).

379 Cookie Mueller, in her catalogue text, also spoke of AIDS as a war zone in which her friends were dying (Mueller, “A Last Letter,” 14).

380 Sontag, Illness and Aids, 64. Philipp Sarasin too has clearly shown that since the time when Ludwig Fleck worked on bacteriology, war metaphors have been used to describe microbiological processes in the human body (Sarasin, “Infi zierte Körper,” esp. 192 – 193).

381 Weingart, Ansteckende Wörter, 21. 382 Williamson, “Every Virus,” 69 – 70. See also Willen, “Viren.” 383 Williamson, “Every Virus,” 74 – 76.

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and social discourses.384 The continuum of metaphorical and biomedi- cal discourse was upheld and stereotyping language found its way into science, transporting societal prejudices against homosexuals.385 AIDS does and did not exist without the linguistic system that theorizes and represents the epidemic.

Susan Sontag, in her seminal essay AIDS and its Metaphors, also discussed the history of the military metaphor in the discourse of medi- cine, for example terms such as the body’s “defenses” or the “invasion” of viruses.386 She also pointed out the damage to and stigmatization of people with AIDS because of this metaphorical demonization of illness as foreign, the enemy or invader, and called for describing illnesses with- out recourse to metaphors.387 She also saw the body itself as a metaphor for society.388 If the body is ill and no longer functions, this mirrors the social condition. Thus these metaphorical meanings apply not only to AIDS, but to every illness. Particularly in Western societies, which treat illness as taboo, sickness is explained with metaphorical rather than medical language, although “nothing is more punitive than to give a dis- ease a meaning — that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.” 389

The artists in the Witnesses show signed a militant joint statement that was hung in the exhibition space.390 Because of the continuing dec- imation of their community, they proclaimed their right to self-expres- sion and promoted an authentic and diverse artistic response to AIDS. They stressed the credibility of the artworks because of the artists’ in- timacy with AIDS. Like curator Nan Goldin, the artists themselves be- lieved that art about AIDS should fi rst and foremost send a message to speak for their specifi c community. Membership in this group seemed to have been key to “authentic” art that derived its legitimation through personal experience with AIDS.

It was the controversy with the NEA that made Goldin’s show into a mouthpiece for people with AIDS beyond the exhibition itself. But its political potential did not come from the artworks shown. Goldin had encouraged the artists in her show to worry less about making a politi- cal statement and rather deal with the impact AIDS had had on them through their art; the politicization of the show came through the public debate about its fi nancing.

384 Weingart, Ansteckende Wörter, 30 – 34. 385 Ibid., 21. Jan Zita Grover also noted that social and historical processes are mirrored in

language. AIDS is thus a cultural construction, not only a physical disease, but also an artifact of social and sexual transgression, fragile identities, and other projection screens (Grover, “AIDS Keywords,” 17 – 18).

386 Sontag, Illness and Aids, 97 – 99. 387 Ibid., 99. 388 Ibid., 94. 389 Ibid., 58. 390 Document Goldin et al. n. d.

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UNDERSTANDING and CONTEXTUAL- IZING the ART BATTLES of 1989

In general, the cultural and political controversies centered on whether and how art should be political and whether political art should receive funding from a federal foundation such as the NEA.391 Fundamental to these questions was the search for a universal defi nition of art and the question of who had the authority to defi ne art as such. Important to the 1989 controversies and to their position within the American culture wars was that these questions were debated in the very different dis- courses of politics, media, law, and art.392

Some fundamental differences between the three art battles can be observed: Serrano’s Piss Christ was shown in SECCA’s travelling exhibi- tion until early 1989 and did not inspire protest during the show. Donald Wildmon (AFA) became aware of the photograph after the exhibition had closed, so that the debate began without direct connection to the work in question. The photograph had been on public display before- hand and was presented in material on the exhibition. Mapplethorpe’s photographs also came into crossfi re from conservative politicians and Christian groups after Orr-Cahall reacted to the criticism and cancelled the show. Both photographs had thus been open to public view, at least temporarily, before the debate about their supposed obscenity began. Furthermore, the controversy was about one photograph and one photo- graphic series, which were attacked and politicized, while the other works in the exhibitions played no role.393

The controversy about Witnesses in contrast found its way into the public eye after what had originally been an internal confl ict between Wyatt and Frohnmayer. Unlike the controversies about Serrano and Mapplethorpe, characterized by pressure from conservative politicians on the exhibiting institutions and the NEA, Wyatt and Frohnmayer act- ed of their own volition without political pressure from the outside. Not until the confl ict with Frohnmayer peaked did Wyatt go public.

At this point in time, the show was open neither to the public, nor to the NEA. While concrete accusations of blasphemy and pornography were made about Serrano’s and Mapplethorpe’s works, such charges could not be made against the artworks in Witnesses. The obscenity of their content was a matter of speculation. This explains why the NEA demanded the entire exhibition be closed rather than individual works — which Frohnmayer had not yet seen at the time — removed. The exhibition as a whole was simply deemed too political for the reigning

391 Kidd, Legislating Creativity, 81. 392 Zimmermann, Skandalöse Körper, 10 and Mahon, Eroticism, 229. 393 Dubin, Arresting Images, 207.

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societal climate. That this reduction of the individual works to their common statement continued after the opening was more than any- thing a result of Wojnarowicz’s catalogue text. Its provocative message seemed to validate the NEA’s accusations and made what was a rather introspective and personal art exhibition more political.

It is also important to look more closely at the relationship between the political character of Goldin’s show and the charge of obscenity. Witnesses was discussed in the media as an exhibition of so-called ob- scene art, but Frohnmayer had only objected to its political character. Both accusations — against politicization and against supposed obscen- ity — were meant to classify the exhibition as unworthy of funding and thus elicited the same reaction. Frohnmayer’s accusation and his unease with Goldin’s show was related to its exploration of AIDS and, as a re- sult, with the issue and presentation of homosexuality: in the artistic theme of the exhibition, in the fact that most of the artists were affected because they were gay or bisexual, and in David Wojnarowicz’s catalogue text in which he described his life as an HIV-positive gay man.

In the Mapplethorpe confl ict as well, his homosexuality and death from AIDS-related causes dominated the discussion about the homoerotic and pornographic content of his photographs. Jesse Helms spoke of the images as “spreading obscenity,” equating the artist’s homosexuality and HIV status with his photography.394 In Witnesses too, the artists’ sexual orientation and their personal encounters with AIDS were carried over to the works even before they were shown. In both cases, the biography or sexual orientation of the artists was equated with the exhibition or the works. To counter this lack of differentiation, Richard Meyer underlined the fact that artworks have no sexual orientation, but are (unnecessarily) sexualized through their reception and associated with their content.395

Here we can see a decisive phenomenon as regards the Art about AIDS presented by Goldin. While the biographical interpretation of the works was criticized in retrospect by queer theorists such as Meyer, the artists themselves, and Goldin as curator, brought just this personal ex- perience to the fore. They stressed the authenticity of the works due to their specifi c experiences as a gay minority affected by AIDS, and de- manded their personal crisis be integrated into interpretations of their artworks. As the analysis of the individual works that follows shall show, outsiders were not allowed to judge this Art about AIDS using the same criteria as Goldin’s artists.

The joint opinion of those opposed to the exhibition could thus be at- tributed to their clearly homophobic attitudes which made them see (homo)sexual content in the works in Goldin’s show.396 Carol S. Vance

394 Meyer, “Jesse Helms,” 137. 395 Meyer, “The Red Envelope,” 22. 396 The theory that the equation of sexuality and obscenity formed the foundation of the debates

is borne out in Vance, “Misunderstanding Obscenity,” 51 and Phelan, “Money Talks,” 13.

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has described the AIDS epidemic in the United States as a time of anti- sexual hysteria, expressed in the controversies surrounding federal funding of art.397 What had formerly been in the realm of the private and the intimate — sexuality, illness, and death — was brought to the sur- face in artworks about homosexuality or in works by homosexuals. This threatened long-held cultural orientations, as illustrated by Serrano’s attack on the Catholic Church, which was anti-contraception and thus also against effective HIV prevention.398

Finally, the outrage over homoerotic art, which makes diverse sex- ual practices and a sex-positive attitude visible, demonstrated the low level of acceptance for homosexuality in American society in the late 1980s.399 The controversies about federal funding of art, censorship, and freedom of speech mirrored a fear of the power of images that deal with taboo topics. Art about homosexuality became a catalyst for smoldering confl icts and, like the AIDS epidemic itself, could intensify social de- bates. The year 1989 marked a highpoint of a fundamental social and cul- tural crisis in United States, the culture wars. Sociologist James Davison Hunter described them in 1991 as the polarization of American politics and culture in two opposing weltanschauungs: “Culture war emerges over fundamentally different conceptions of moral authority, over dif- ferent ideas and beliefs about truth, the good, obligation to one another, the nature of community and so on.” 400

These debates about societal values were headed by two opposing camps in the late 1980s: fundamentalists (religious traditionalists such as Jesse Helms and the religious right), who subsumed themselves un- der a higher moral instance (religion), and progressive, secular pro- tagonists (marginalized groups such as homosexuals and people with AIDS), who defi ned moral authority as rational, subjective, and subject to discursive negotiation.401

Hunter saw the origins of these culture wars in the transformation from an industrial society to an information society, expressed in the so- cial changes that began in the 1960s.402 Dubin on the other hand lo cated the start of the culture wars in fi n-de-siècle-America, characterized by the secularization of society in the 1960s and 1970s and the federal ex- cesses of the Reagan government. He described the culture wars as an effect of Reagan’s policy of New Federalism, which dictated the political and social climate through economic liberalization, tax cuts, increased military spending, and anti-communist ideology: in other words, through radical neo-conservatism.403 As a result of this policy, the gap between the rich and the poor grew; homelessness, drug traffi cking, criminality,

397 Vance, “Misunderstanding Obscenity,” 49. 398 Zimmermann, Skandalöse Körper, 236. 399 Phelan, “Money Talks,” 13. 400 Hunter, Culture Wars, 49. 401 Ibid., 44. 402 Ibid., 62 – 63. On this see also Zimmermann, Skandalöse Körper and Eck, “Cultural Confl ict.” 403 Dubin, Arresting Images, 197.

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and an overburdened health system had been problems in American ur- ban centers like New York City well before the outbreak of AIDS.404

Concretely, Reagan’s political line was expressed by the return to the conservative values of family, church, and patriotism spurred by a desire to turn back the “general decadence since 1968.”405 Reagan shared his aggressive condemnation of abortion and his ignorance about sex- ual minorities and AIDS with fundamentalist conservative politicians such as Senator Jesse Helms, who fought for banning foreigners with HIV/ AIDS from entering the country and against dissemination of edu- cational material about HIV and AIDS. He successfully stopped federal funding of safer sex comics, including those by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York.406

The struggle for freedom of speech and minority rights were in- formed by two very different value systems, fought on the territory of the body and self-determination (abortion and gay rights), and on questions of social responsibility, for instance health care and social services for people with AIDS. These culture wars became visible in the art battles about decent and respectable art that is worthy of federal funding:

Ultimately the battle over this symbolic territory reveals a confl ict over world views — over what standards our communi- ties and our nation will live by; over what we consider to be ‘of enduring value’ in our communities; over what we consider a fair representation of our times. 407

Art and culture became political targets and, by defaming them, con- servatives sought to win over voters.408 In the end, the war over funding and the NEA’s open attacks were only covering deeper social ressen- timents.409 The offense of the “offensive” artworks by Serrano and Mapplethorpe and the Witnesses artists was that they made visible sex- ual minorities who were not supposed to have a social or political voice. Cynthia Carr has therefore claimed that Jesse Helms and the religious right acted out of fear; they understood these artworks as symbolic challenges to the reigning sexual and religious order.410 Thus seen, the controversy over funding so-called obscene art stems from a funda- mental fear of boundary-crossing. In the case of Mapplethorpe and the Witnesses artists, thematization of homosexuality and AIDS dissolved the boundary between private and public, threatening conservative

404 Ibid., 15. Dubin compares the late 20th century in the United States with Italy in the late 15th century, which suffered from government overspending and syphilis outbreaks.

405 Heideking and Mauch, Geschichte der USA, 264 – 265. This swing to the right was compa- rable with Margret Thatcher’s politics and her upholding of Victorian values during her time as Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990 (Mahon, Eroticism, 227).

406 Poirier, “AIDS,” 147 and Dubin, Arresting Images, 241 – 242. See also Meyer, “Barring Desire” and Meyer, “Jesse Helms.”

407 Hunter, Culture Wars, 248. 408 Document Wyatt / Fear or Freedom n. d. 409 Eck, “Cultural Confl ict,” 89. 410 Carr, “Sexual Politics,” 252 – 253.

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value systems. Serrano too overstepped bounds by mixing in his photo- graph the sacral iconography of a crucifi x with profane human bodily secretions, or waste products, which suddenly, because of AIDS, sym- bolized a life-threatening danger.

Mary Douglas has said that this merging of private and public or of sacral and profane can be seen as a danger to the social or Christian order, which Serrano, Mapplethorpe and the Witnesses’ artists sym- bolically destroyed. For Douglas, the human body — which makes these transgressions visible — is a model “which can stand for any bounded system. The boundaries can represent any borders which are threatened or precarious.” 411 Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject and Kiki Smith’s installation All Our Sisters embody just this view.

Summing up, the culture wars of the late 1980s were mostly an at- tempt by the religious right to defend their traditional Christian and pa- triarchal value system from the so-called threat of visible homosexuality within a society that had already become very secularized.412 The fi ghts around the funding of controversial art acted as a symbolic mirror of boundary-crossings that stood for the dissolution of traditional values and orders. They were also paradigmatic of the AIDS epidemic, which is why Witnesses could, for the third time, reignite the American culture wars with a debate on NEA funding, making AIDS the starting point of the confl ict for the fi rst time.

These culture wars have not lost in intensity since the 1980s, as can be seen in two more recent debates on the inclusion of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in a 2011 exhibition in Avignon, and a screening of David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly, p. 85, which he shot during a trip to Mexico in 1986 – 1987.413 Serrano’s photograph was part of the exhibi- tion Je croix aux miracles at the Collection Lambert from December 12, 2010 to May 8, 2011. In April 2011, the fundamentalist Christian group Institut Civitas held protests after which the photograph was attacked and destroyed.414

Wojnarowicz’s circa 20-minute fi lm was part of the group exhi- bition HIDE / SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D. C., which opened on October 30, 2010. The controversy was sparked by a shot of around ten seconds which shows ants crawling over a crucifi x that is lying on dark stones or coal.415

411 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 142. 412 Eck, “Cultural Confl ict,” 94 – 97 and 103. 413 Curator Jonathan D. Katz added a soundtrack to the video for the exhibition: a recording

of an ACT UP demonstration found in Wojnarowicz’s estate in the NYU Fales Library. David Deitcher believed this change was a breach of Wojnarowicz’s rights as an artist and linked it to the censorship of his work in 1989 and 1990: “The issue of censorship is all too familiar for lesbians and gay men because our history is constantly being denied or erased or dis- torted.” (Author’s interview with David Deitcher, May 23, 2011, p. 325).

414 Le Monde, “Une Photographie.” 415 Colucci, “All I Can Feel.”

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Shortly after the show opened, protests by the conservative National Catholic League put such great pressure on the Smithsonian Institute that Wojnarowicz’s work was removed from the exhibition one month after the opening. Across the country, museums — including MoMA, the New Museum in New York City, and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh — reacted to this act of self-censorship by screening the movie in their spaces, confi rming Meyer’s theory about censorship. Finally, the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington both offered to show the complete exhibition when it left the Smithsonian. It opened in New York City in November 2011 and in Tacoma in March 2012.416 What reads like an extension of the 1989 art battles shows the artworks’ continued evocative power to provoke on the one hand, and how topical the debates on political content in art, on cen- sorship, and on freedom of opinion remain, independent of the specifi c situation of the AIDS epidemic on the other hand.

416 Smith, “Gay American Life.”

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