 Good evening everybody, thank you for joining us and welcome to the 25th Annual Graduate Student Symposium in the History of Art, hosted by the Barnes Foundation in partnership with Bryn Mawr College Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. My name is Martha Lee and I'm Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation, and Education at the Barnes. This is the Barnes' fourth time hosting this symposium and I have to say it's become one of our favorite programs of the year because we get to connect with colleagues from all over the region, but most of all because we get to hear exciting new research from being done in the field of our history from graduate students in nine of the top programs in the area and those talks happen tomorrow and next Friday. Tonight we kick things off with our keynote lecture by Dr. Jonathan Katz. Welcome Jonathan. In a few moments my colleague Tom Collins will introduce Jonathan, but first I need to thank several people. Thank you to our co-organizing institutions at Bryn Mawr Temple and UPenn. This year Bryn Mawr was our lead partner so a special thanks to Professor Lisa Saltzman. Thank you of course to all the students who will be giving papers tomorrow and next Friday and to their advisors for being here, being here to introduce them. Thank you to the Barnes Foundation's amazing AV team, especially Gillan Riggs and Thomas Costello. Our AV team always plays a big role in any symposium that we present, but never more than this year when everything has to be done through screens and technology. So just thank you to you guys for being so good at what you do and so pleasant to work with always. And finally a huge thank you to my talented colleague, Alia Palumbo, who did an incredible job of organizing this whole event. It was an especially complicated undertaking this year and the amount of detail and planning that went into it was truly staggering. So now I will turn things over to our fearless Barnes Foundation's Newbauer Family Executive Director and President Tom Collins. Good evening everyone and Martha thank you for the kind introduction. I can't say that I've been fearless this year but I appreciate the props and thank you to you for all of your work coordinating this program. It is my great pleasure this evening to introduce my delightful friend and brilliant colleague Dr. Jonathan Katz, an art historian, curator and activist. Dr. Katz is a scholar of modern and contemporary art and a pioneering figure in the development of a queer art history. In the 1990s he became one of the first full-time American academics to be tenured in gay and lesbian studies at SUNY Buffalo. He is now Associate Professor of Practice in the History of Art and Interim Director of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Katz is well known for his cutting edge curatorial projects at museums all over the country. In 2010 he co-curated the groundbreaking exhibition Hyde Seek, Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. This was the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American art. Hyde Seek won the Best National Museum Exhibition Award from the International Association of Art Critics and the Best LGBTQ Nonfiction Book Award from the American Library Association. His next major exhibition entitled Art, AIDS, America, traveled to five museums across the United States. In 2019 he curated About Face, Stonewall, Revolt and New Queer Art at Rightwood 659, a new museum in Chicago. It will be available in book form in 2021. Jonathan is currently organizing a major exhibition called The First Homosexuals, which explores the very first representations of sexual difference after the coining of the term homosexual in 1869. Dr. Katz has certainly made his mark as a queer activist as well. He was the founding director of Yale University's Larry Kramer Initiative in Lesbian and Gay Studies, the first in the Ivy League. He founded the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association. He founded the Harvey Milk Institute, the world's largest queer studies institute. And he is the president emeritus of the new Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City. Jonathan is now at work on two new books, Hiding in Plain Sight on the Queerness of Contemporary Art and The Silent Camp, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and The Cold War. He is also editor of the forthcoming Rutledge Companion to Queer Art History. Jonathan's lecture tonight, A Viral Theory of Art, AIDS and the Aesthetics of Protest, looks at the AIDS pandemic and its connection to art and contemporary activist art, exploring how and why protest today so often resembles the very forms it works against. Will you please join me in welcoming the truly excellent Dr. Jonathan Kessler. Thank you, Tom. I appreciate that very much. A very kind introduction. And my thanks to Tom and to the Barnes in General for hosting this and a special thank you to Aliyah and to Martha, to Hommay and to Lisa from Remar for making all of this possible. So let's begin. This is what disease looks like at the moment immediately before it becomes an epidemic, when it's but a set of disconnected symptoms. As it transforms into an epidemic or worse plague, this cluster of symptoms ceases to be individuated, for it acquires a new social dimension. And the once lone sufferer becomes a carrier. Their body under a threat they can no longer call their own. For now it menaces another body, that collective abstraction we call the social. The minute the social body is threatened, the martial metaphors routine in the fight against disease, assume an altogether different, darker, even sinister cast. For they are now aimed not at the illness, but against its sufferers. Recast not as sick people, but as vectors of contagion. Soon the die is cast, and one is either a friend or an enemy, us or the other. Thus epidemics efficiently turn disease into social pathology and remap the etiology of infection along ruthlessly segregated battle lines. What I'm showing you is literally the first AIDS painting, or at least the first I was able to find over the course of about ten years of research in the field. Painted by the Israeli artist Izzar Patkin, immediately after a routine visit to his dermatologists, it abstractly depicts the blue-black lesions known as Kaposi's sarcoma, breaking through a skin of hair of yellow latex at a human scale of exactly six feet. Kaposi's would soon become a familiar sign of AIDS infection, and I distinctly remember that about half the men in my gym in San Francisco would soon become spotted. But this painting was done. Patkin affirms in 1981, one year before AIDS or even grid its previous utterly symptomatic handle, abbreviating gay related immune deficiency was coined. Patkin reports that at the dermatologist's office, he sat in the waiting room bracketed by three or four men all covered by these unfamiliar lesions. As a gay man, he'd also heard rumors of this new gay cancer attacking the community, so he went home and he painted this work remarkably pressured in moreover naming it Unveiling of a Modern Chastity. It was a very early recognition of how this new affliction would both change gay men's social and erotic lives, which we understood then as if not identical, certainly closely adjoining. While Patkin's title hints at a social dimension to the painting, the image itself is resolutely embodied, phenomenological. For AIDS, not yet a plague, was at this early phase an affliction borne by its sufferers alone. But as David Wonorowicz once said, quote, I didn't realize that when I contracted a disease, I contracted a diseased society as well, end quote. He recognized that epidemic surface inequity, there's nothing like sickness and death to unequivocally materialize one's standing in the social hierarchy, and the more sickness and death you witness, the lower the wrong you occupy. Epidemics, whether AIDS or COVID, do not equalize everyone as potentially vulnerable, but conversely, they work very hard to solidly, materially differentiate one from the other. Epidemics are therefore among the most formative, albeit uncredited, social forces in human history, and they have sadly always worked in one direction to consistently reify extant social hierarchies. They do this through one of the most potent forms of ideological slate of hand, naturalizing repressive social distinctions, offering a biomedical rationale for current social prejudices, then proclaiming this division of the haves from the have-nots as but a necessary health precaution. Whether we're talking about AIDS or COVID-19, ideological continuum and social segregation are as much symptomatic of any epidemic as the disease itself. I often hear that we have AIDS to thank for the resurgent attention to and victories in the queer rights struggle today. AIDS, the thinking goes, moved queerness into general discourse and thus enforced a renewed political attention to our causes, a harbinger of our more recent victories such as marriage equality. But nothing could be further from the truth. For AIDS actually set back the queer rights movement by decades. It did so first by reifying a divide, at least in discursive terms, of the at-risk from the not-at-risk, in effect shoring up the cleaving of one America from the other at precisely the moment when this opposition was finally beginning to break down. In the late 1970s, after all pleasure palaces like Studio 54 soared precisely because they mingled celebrities with hot gay men running in public. When a famous old gay bathhouse, the continental baths, where a young Bette Midler once entertained, became Plato's retreat, a straight sex club, and the village people became a huge crossover hit, it was clear that the pre-AIDS buffer between gay and straight culture was finally eroding. Even as a young gay man, I felt that. But soon AIDS would not just rebuild but strengthen that dividing wall. Through instrumentalizing the notion of contagion and its always unspoken, unversed purity. In its wake, musty stereotypes associated with queerness, including the notion of an invisible taint that sickened the young and tailing a miserable life in an early tragic death, all came roaring back. Horrifically made real through AIDS. In facilitating the creation of a false binary between the inherently diseased and the inherently healthy, AIDS allowed people to temporarily forget the legion of other threats to their well-being, from the savings and loan collapse to the erroneous contrast scandal, while rallying around a vision of necessary social hygiene that has been responsible for many of the greatest of human qualities. We can see this play out in real time. Watch what happens. In 1981, the year Patkin painted his unveiling of modern chastity but long before there was any general awareness of the new epidemic AIDS, Bob Colicella would write in his book on Andy Warhol quote, at the end of summer, Andy and I were on the eastern shuttle on our way to the Reagan State Dinner for Ferdinand and Emel de Marcos. That same year, as I'm showing you, Nancy Reagan graced the cover of Warhol's interview magazine, giving readers the very first interview with the new First Lady since she moved into the White House, an interview conducted by Colicella. This was a highly politicized placement, as numerous periodicals wanted that first interview, but Warhol's interview won it largely on the belief that they could recast boring old Republican conservatives as hip, cool, youth oriented, and even gay adjacent, as she was literally in the pages of the magazine where her interview shared copy space with the work of an emerging photographer named Robert Maple Thorpe, along with homoerotic imagery by the great historical queer photographers George Platt Lines and Herbert List. Clearly, absent play, the now familiar battle lines did not yet exist. But by 1982, but a year later, with the emergence first of grid, then AIDS, everything had changed. And of course, by the end of that decade, it was a completely different world, with the Christian right in rapid ascendance, AIDS mowing down huge swathes of my age group, and the queer community maligned as having brought about happily, for far too many, its own destruction. So when on June 12th, 1989, Christina O'Reilly, director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, canceled the Maple Thorpe retrospective the perfect moment a few weeks before its opening and a few months after the photographer's death from AIDS, she was, in her own words, protecting the institution she directed from sensorious congressional oversight, apparently doing so by doing the censoring herself. Undeterred by her performative self-censorship, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, nonetheless, then took to the Senate floor and proclaimed, quote, it's an issue of soaking the taxpayer to fund the homosexual pornography of Robert Maple Thorpe who died of AIDS while spending the last years of his life promoting homosexuality, end quote. So you're looking at the cover here of Art4 Magazine chronicling our protest against the Corcoran's cancellation by projecting the images of that band exhibition on the light marble walls of the museum at night. By this point, the question of federal support for any art that even tangentially acknowledged AIDS had been so brilliantly and repeatedly manipulated into a wedge issue by the Christian right and the Republican Senate that no less an authority than Ronald Reagan's spokesperson, Gary Bauer, would remark on TV in 1987 that the reason the president hadn't so much as uttered the word AIDS until 1985, at least three years into the epidemic was due to the fact that, quote, it hadn't spread into the general population yet, end quote. That's why in the famous first museum work about AIDS, Grand Fury's public-facing window let the record show from 1987, Reagan is featured alongside other AIDS criminals, as the window called them, superimposed over a photograph, you can see that in the background of the Nuremberg trials that assessed Nazi guilt after World War II. But the placard, as you can see, in front of Reagan is empty, for he had nothing to say. Not so some of the other AIDS criminals, such as an anonymous surgeon, who was quoted as saying, we used to hate faggots on an emotional basis, but now we have a good reason. Or televangelist Jerry Falwell's AIDS is God's judgment on a society that doesn't live by his rules. Bill Olander, a friend and the openly HIV-positive head curator of the new museum when it really was the new museum and not yet sutured to the art market told me that he commissioned the window installation because at that point five years into the plague there had been literally no museum engagement with AIDS anywhere in the country. Much more characteristic of the museum field were the remarks of the celebrated director of the National Gallery of Art, J. Cargo Brown, when asked about the Maplethorpe controversy as it was blooming. And he said, we have to keep the First Amendment rights apart from the controversy as if the decision to cancel wasn't already a First Amendment issue. But it was Senator Jesse Helms who repeatedly and aggressively worked to twin queerness and AIDS into one single collective threat against America. From his call for the creation of federal quarantine camps for the HIV-positive in defense of which he said, quote, we used to quarantine for typhoid and scarlet fever and it didn't ruin anyone's civil liberties to do that, end quote. Through his infamous Helms amendment to a huge AIDS bill that in the terms of the amendment, prohibit the use of any funds provided under this act to the center of disease control for being used to provide AIDS education, information or prevention materials or activities that promote, encourage or condone homosexual activity or the intravenous use of illegal drugs, end quote. He thus managed to turn a funding bill for AIDS not only into a frontal attack against its two most at risk population queers and IV drug users, but then rob them of the information necessary to save their lives. In a truly chilling barometer of the national mood, Helms' flagrant discrimination passed the Senate by vote of 94 in favor and two against. This was in essence a national law against art about AIDS and its effects were immediate and profound. Effectively making the representation of either coordinates or AIDS a violation of federal law. But Helms wasn't done. On June 23rd, 1989, he gave a speech on the Senate floor, arguing quote that instead of denouncing the homosexual lifestyle, countless politicians some in this chamber fall in line with the repugnant, organized political movement attempting to persuade American people that this is desirable way to conduct their lives. As thousands more in this country continue to die from AIDS while the homosexual continues to proclaim the virtues of his perverse practices and court. No wonder David Wonorowicz produced one day this kid a few months later. It reads in part, one day politicians will enact legislation against this kid or one day this kid will talk. When he begins to talk, men who develop a fear of this kid will attempt to silence him with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape, intimidation, drugging, ropes, guns, laws, menace, roving gangs, bottles, knives, religion, decapitation and emulation by fire. Doctors will pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus. This kid will lose his constitutional rights against the government's invasion of his privacy. All this will begin to happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another group and court. Four years later, A. A. Bronson, formerly one of the three men who made up the group general idea, took this photograph immediately after his partner Felix Parts had died of HIV infection. He then elected to blow it up to almost billboard size so people couldn't turn away, couldn't avert their eyes. Perfectly capturing the horror of the plague, it's the first image I can remember that transposed the gut-wrenching, graphic horror of watching my friends die so familiar from my daily life in the 20s and 30s into art world terms into representation. And what a representation. The lively clashing colors and patterns of cloth and livening everything saved the sunken face of the corpse frozen in the unavoidable materiality of death. Yet for all its power and political force, Felix, June 5, 1994 is exactly the obverse of the kind of AIDS art I will address in the rest of this talk. That is to say, I won't be addressing the AIDS activist art we usually see, whether act-ups, brilliant graphics or David Warner-Rowich's poignant works or the work of furious mourning that's on view in this photograph. Instead, I want to address the many works of art about AIDS that don't look at all like art about AIDS, such as this one, Scott Burton's two-part chair from 1986. Seen from the front, it looks like a sturdy piece of modernist office furniture, and that's exactly what it was, for it was available to decorate corporate skyscraper lobbies in Manhattan. But look at it as here from the side and it tells a different story. Burton's chair insinuates gay sex so obliquely that it deliberately reads as furniture, not politics, a winkingly subversive take engineered to smoothly find its place in the lair of the enemy, such that a businessman could and did sit comfortably on it unaware of its other implications. And quite movingly, should either half of this chair become separated from its partner, it will fall over and cease to function as a chair. True quotes from two of the leading AIDS-informed artists of the day, Fanny Holzer and Felix Gonzalez-Torres can help us understand what's going on here. Holzer said in her 1983 to 1985 survival series among the earliest works of art about AIDS and I'm showing you some of them, use what is dominant in culture to change it quickly, that's her quote. Use what is dominant in culture to change it quickly. Here you can see in her statements printed on condom wrappers evidence that she practiced what she preached. Her idea was to use what was dominant to change culture quickly, manifest faith in the power of appropriation to infiltrate dominant culture, a primer on how to breach the wall that Helms was so viciously working to construct between two Americas. Tellingly, she here avoids any subcultural address acknowledging AIDS as a threat across the board. The other quote from Felix Gonzalez-Torres amplifies how appropriation which is after all a kind of strategic amplification of significance can function as an activist. Consider for example, his perfect lovers of 1991, two identical clocks that gradually fall out of sync with one another made in full consciousness of the artist's loss of his partner and the cock that year quietly elegiating but looking so much like a standard museum clock that many visitors didn't even register it as a work of art, the deafness of its political address was nothing if not intentional. As Gonzalez-Torres noted in an interview and I quote him here you realize quickly that the most effective ideological constructions are the ones that don't look like it. If you say I'm political, I'm ideological, that's not going to work because people know where you're coming from but if you say hi my name is Bob and this is it then they say well that's not political it's invisible and it really works end quote and then he continued in the same interview the right is very smart he said and that is the one thing that bugs me about artists who are doing so called gay art and their limitation of what they consider as an object of desire for gay men when I had a show at the Hirshhorn Senator Stevens who was one of the most homophobic anti-art senators said he was going to come to the opening and I thought he was going to have a really hard time explaining to his constituency how pornographic and how homoerotic two clocks side by side are. He came there looking for dicks and asses but there was nothing like that now you try to see homoeroticism in my piece as Gonzales told us a statement under scores artists at this time were faced with a stark trace under the helms amendment they could make straightforwardly engaged in political art but the price they paid was exclusion from the mainstream art world enjoying from participation in the networks of museums galleries and collectors that is the ladder to success in today's art world worse still overtly dissident work could certainly feed the repressive machinery of the far right as Gonzales Tours underscored in his comment about Senator Stevens wanting to politicize his work the alternative approach entailed camouflaging your political intentions thus circulating within the museum I'm sorry within the mainstream art world and reaching a vastly greater audience than the more overtly politicized artist ever could. This 1992 work called Untitled Blood Gonzales Tours has the viewer walk through a curtain of blood red beads at a moment of national hysteria about blood-borne HIV transmission but note there's no direct reference to AIDS to be found in either its title or its imagery like all of Gonzales Tours' work in much of the other work I'll be discussing its official title is merely Untitled but a parenthetical here the word blood helps direct signification with a light touch I wonder so much AIDS art doesn't look like AIDS art for ever more draconian laws and ever more subtle art world norms work to outlaw any art that addressed either queerness or AIDS directly as a result an entire generation of artists began to think about their representational practices first and foremost strategically evaluating the array of forces marshaled against them while seeking to circumvent, confront or flout the now codified prohibitions against any representation of AIDS or of same-sex desire these artists were forced to engage in a complicated countenance whereby any work of art was tested against a reading of discursive conditions prejudices and stereotypes laws, customs and institutional parameters to yield the work precisely calibrated to function in the space between possibility and foreclosure influence and censorship supremely aligned to the discursive affect of their work this AIDS generation learned expertly how to read the weather frequently tacking even the simulating if that was what was required shortly before his death in 1996 Gonzalez Torres articulated his credo as an artist and an activist and this is what he said quote, at this point I do not want to be outside the structure of power I don't want to be the opposition, the alternative alternative to what? Power? No! I want to have power it's effective in terms of change I want to be like a virus to the institution all the ideological apparatuses are in other words replicating themselves because that's the way culture works so I function as a virus an imposter, an infiltrator I will always replicate myself together with those institutions end quote when an HIV positive artist not only allied himself with the virus but sought to personify something important is happening when HIV infects the body its evolutionary stroke of genes is to turn the immune systems own defenses against the host the AIDS virus attaches onto the CD4 white blood cells responsible for fighting infections and inserts its own RNA into these cells thus infected the white blood cell rather than fighting AIDS now produces and releases millions of AIDS viruses into the body viruses that then repeat the process with other cells and because the infection is housed within the host's own white blood cells the body's remaining healthy disease fighting cells can't recognize it and thus do not attack as the immune system is eventually overcome the host dies from one or another opportunistic infection in the context of an art world immune system that under pressure of the Helms amendment frame both homosexuality and AIDS as dangerous invaders to be eliminated numerous artists beginning with the very first turns of what would become a full scale culture war pioneered a new viral approach to confronting the exclusionary infection fighting mechanisms aimed against them in one of the great historical ironies of the era these artists took HIV the very virus that was killing as the blueprint and the battle plan for a similarly clandestine and camouflage attack in their hands the very glossary of AIDS words like viral clandestine camouflage infection became the lexicon of an art world revolution that knew that like HIV itself the immune system was the best vector to attack precisely because once infected it can't attack itself formally and theoretically sophisticated spare and elegant artists as different as Gonzales tourist and general idea evaded the art world's immune system precisely to the degree that their work became the material obverse of a recognizable image of either queerness or AIDS I'm showing you here general ideas a year and a day of AZT conjoining the daily and annual doses of what was then the only approved AIDS drug in place of hot politics or messy embodiment a figuration relevant of sex and leaking potentially infected bodily fluids general idea chose a cool post-minimalist abstraction that's safe for the time seemingly bears no relationship to AIDS that is unless you know what AZT looks like two years later general ideas white AIDS is even more viral the word AIDS now typographically identical to the word love in Diana's famous sculpture printed on each of the canvases in Ciri Rose but always in white on white the canvases are themselves then hung on a white wall filled with white wallpaper itself repeatedly printed with word AIDS in white again on white in its overarching clinical whiteness AIDS is everywhere in this installation and yet it remains invisible obviously indexing a larger social dynamic Glenn Ligon's untitled I'm turning into a specter before your very eyes and I'm going to haunt you is a black requiem that anticipating white AIDS it was done the year before rose increasingly illegible as the eye moves down the canvas like the word you in its title it's a shifter it's meaning a result of the interaction between viewer and artist that illegibility also animates and Meredith's 1987 photographic series of largely black women with AIDS the first such documentation of women with AIDS in the United States but when she went back to show her subject this picture her subject had a change of heart and asked her not to show it worried that she frankly had enough challenges in her life without becoming the public face of AIDS as well so they compromised on this work one in which the subject meticulously scratched out her on face the pretense that any given work was not about AIDS could be paper thin or even as in the case of Rudy Lemke manifestly intended to be found out it is exquisite artist book Finnegan's Wake its title punning on James Joyce's great experimental novel Finnegan's Wake Lemke poignantly multiplies terms associated with ending and with death borrowing the strategy from the queer composer John Cage who deployed Finnegan's Wake for a series of masostics a poetic format in which a term is spelled down vertically in the middle of a poem Lemke upended Cage's chance-based operations in favor of deliberately searching out words in Joyce's novel that it were resonant of HIV and then as you can see here carefully putting those words in these masostics you see how he spells the names of AIDS drugs right down the middle AZT in the first instance on the left selecting words resonant of greed of course referencing AZT's exorbitant cost or on the right it spells fuzz-carnate a drug used to treat AIDS-related blindness early in the plague with words of course related to sight or here how the artist Jack Pearson takes found letters from trade signs and reassembles them into a cross-reading desire despair twinned emotions for gay men like Pearson in 1996 a year before the first effective AIDS drug regimen appeared even as a challenge then prevalent ideas that AIDS was confined on to certain populations as in anyone coterminous with the advent of this viral AIDS art a new kind of post-modernist criticism was coming to the fore the central tenet of this new critical tendency was to view the idea of authorship and intention with suspicion a short text above all came to assume a position of prominence Roland Barthes the death of the author although initially published in the legendary American avant-garde journal Aspen in 1967 it would achieve new currency and a permanent spot on college syllabi only after it was anthologized in Barthes image music text in 1977 the same year as Doug as pictures exhibition at an artist space in New York the group of artists featured in that exhibition named by crimp as the pictures generation embolism this turn toward a new anti-authority through images largely appropriated from the work of other photographers countering the common notion that it was the author who determines the meaning of the text Barthes had argued that instead it is us readers who make up any text meaning in the act of reading it in the death of the author Barthes elevated what he termed readerly activity the interpretive act even going so far as to claim as the essay's title underscored that we had no need for authors since all meetings were inherently made by the audience were inherently readerly despite the fact that Foucault then effectively gutted many of Barthes claims in his much more socially historically grounded what is an author a year later in 1969 the notion of the death of the author proved defining in the development of American art criticism in the 80s a moment, not coincidentally I would argue that also represents something of a high water mark in the policing of the American art world so when Sheri Levine as here photographed Walker Evans famous Dustbolt images first published in Evans and Aegee's book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and showed them without commentary as her own work in a 1980 exhibition at Metro Pictures simply called After Walker Evans she was seen as materializing Barthes influential ideas on the death of the author although these photographs were originally intended as a form of progressive politically engaged reportage albeit in a particularly refined form and Evans's partner Aegee underscored their activist intent when he wrote in the forward to the book above all else he wrote in God's name don't think of this as art yet no critic at the time noted the peculiar irony of restaging Evans's fervent call for social justice in a postmodernist commentary in the white walled confines of a commercial art gallery but then again since meaning was now declared to be entirely readerly Levine and her double irony even quoted parts of Barthes death of the author essay as her own artist statement apparently what Evans and Aegee intended was of little consequence as the pictures generations chief critical move appropriation became a hallmark of postmodernist art in the early 1980s it spurred a revolution that derided modernism's ostensible elevation of originality in favor of the appropriated the contingent the manifest the ironic or disingenuous already at this relatively early stage in its development we can glimpse the liniments of what would shortly become postmodernism's peculiar relation to the social world that it would claim to demystify ironically for a critical method rooted in the exposing hidden ideological values apparently postmodernist criticism did not see or did not care that these were once activist images and more to the point and this is central that there were activist images would have been viewed as a critical weakness for activism with its heavy overlay of moral intention and its assumption of a linkage between art and social affect was seen as dangerously naive a self-consciously activist art reproduced a simplistic account they argued of expressive intention that ignored the many ways a statement is always already bound up in a complex web of social meanings that tend to contain if not vitiate of producing social change indeed activist art was often seen as a kind of false consciousness for its implicit claim to a direct which is to say unprivileged or unmediated relationship between authorial intent and the social world but eight changed things to put it simply what happens to the death of the author when authors actually begin to die when it ceases to be memorable it was after all exactly the circumstance that caused Douglas crimp to quit October's editorial board after 13 years in 1987 publishing a book that aggressively linked his criticism with his activism even in its title that book AIDS cultural analysis cultural activism while illustrating grand fury's window my point is that AIDS artists counting on an unorthodox I'm sorry on an orthodox post-modernist anti-authority and a concomitant refusal to credit their intentions were thus able to cede their work with a range of personal and expressive meanings that they knew a theoretically sophisticated art world trained in the death of the author would not see or if seen would not recognize at the same time they also knew that a broad general public would find these other more authorial or political meanings compelling not least for their connection to traditional artistic values like narrativity or expressivity then in preciously short supply in the post-modern art world remarkably this attitude allowed artists to address AIDS if done with the right touch directly under the noses of Philistines like Helms and art sophisticates like Rosalind Krauss confident that the viral meanings of such art would always operate either above or below their frequencies either too high or too low to be detected and even more the art world could point to the post-modernist theories denigration of the reality to rationalize its refusal to articulate the now fraught queer AIDS politics that Helms and company had sought to police in the context of post-modernism that same art world could then frame its silence not as cowardice an unwillingness to confront but as the more progressive political position and here's the kicker in the face of the presumption that art about AIDS helped fast will woesily un-theorize or under-theorize belief in expressivity and intention an art that refused to articulate a politics around AIDS was actually deemed the more engaged the more of the moment and finally the more resistant or dissident it should now be clear that there were two powerful streams converging on AIDS art in the first decade and a half of the epidemic the aggressively homophobic discourse of a resurgent religious right enabled by Reagan and Bush and a much less of a two per two but equally chilling theoretical discourse that worked hard to place expressive intent out of bounds and with it any dissident account of authorial context biography or politics together these two vastly different social forces policed the representation of AIDS one brutally the other with kid gloves but the net effect was that helms and crowds from their opposite purchase and with very different agendas nonetheless produced a virtual art world omerta in the face of the most vicious attack on freedom of expression since McCarthyism in the United States and once so many authors had died their double deaths once literally and once figurative few remain to puncture that expedient and self-satisfied silence indeed a strategic fully intentional authorial camouflage constitutes one of the enduring legacies of this AIDS era of art an AIDS generation talk contemporary artists that making a statement did not necessarily entail forthright admission and that clues silences and delusions could possess in the right context an unusually expressive eloquence here I'm showing you Andres Serrano's milk blood looking like nothing so much as hard-edged abstraction after the model of someone like what, Elzary Kelly this photograph has nothing of AIDS about it save the title but with that title we begin to revise our understanding of its formal terms we see that it is also representing two dominant vectors of HIV infection just like this work semen and blood does albeit in this instance looking more like gestural painting AIDS in short brought about a new kind of art pregnant with associative content but never declarative an art in its own tongue let me illustrate this point in untitled buffalo even the activist artist David Wanorovich makes a viral work here photographing a diorama in New York City's Natural History Museum concerning indigenous hunting strategies to suggest of course an equivalency between queers and buffalo in the early days of westward expansion when whites thoughtlessly slaughtered millions and pushed the brie to extinction or near extinction and here is facing extinction work by Ronald Lockett a young prodigiously talented African American African American artist born in Bessemer, Alabama a town named for the Bessemer furnaces used in steel production as a physically slight artistically inclined man from a blue collar rust belt community Lockett kept his illness to himself and only said he had a cold or the flu when anyone asked until his first and sadly fatal battle with pneumonia in 1998 poor, not formally educated as an artist albeit utterly convinced of his gifts Lockett's work is only now emerging into the public eye decades after his death an image of a lone buffalo instriated sheet metal struggling to emerge out of the rust red surface of the work facing extinction poignantly echoes the one Rovich yet it's highly unlikely that in 1994 Lockett would have known it today we firmly understand AIDS as a highly politicized disease whose etiology is utterly inseparable from discrimination in fact it has become the textbook case of the intersection of social and medical pathology but before this moment before AIDS was marked as communal it was not only solitary painfully isolating and debilitatingly secretive so virulent was the social and political hostility that many people including Lockett never once disclosed their sero-status and US newspapers were filled with euphemisms about unmarried young men who died after short respiratory illness dying of AIDS wasn't something to mourn it was something to hide before an activist community aggressively fought back against this refusal to name and specify AIDS and in the process forged a wildly successful collective politics around the disease AIDS was in the closet just as surely as homosexuality had been several generations before yet the same imagery manages to bridge the enormous gulf between an urban professional largely middle class majority white AIDS activist culture and the very different trials of a black man living with AIDS in the rural south it can do so precisely because there is a shared collective recognition around the idea of the American Buffalo and its bloody history a history that connects these two very different artists Frank Moore's masterful lullaby that appropriates this self-same appropriated buffalo and sets it to graze on the sheets of a hospital bed in winter this image then contains yet another appropriation this time of arguably the most emblematic work of AIDS art ever made Gonzales Torres' untitled bed one of a number of billboards that sprouted in New York without any initial commentary looking frankly more like a sophisticated ad campaign for bed bath and beyond than any work of art only gradually did the work's significance dawn and this bed with its empty impression of two bodies accrued slowly power as a sign of all we had lost then Joy Episala's bed number on pillar number five pushes off from Gonzales Torres' elevated pristine white bed now placing the pillars on the floor making one dirty putting one pillow atop the other in a much more socially historically accurate recognition of the conditions of AIDS in America then Ronnie Horn's gold mats paired for Ross and Felix it's coming up momentarily I hope oops there we go we seem to have a problem okay great then Ronnie Horn's gold mats paired for Ross and Felix exploits the same idea of a pairing and of sheets in tribute to Felix who had himself succumbed to AIDS the year after this work was completed it takes advantage of the mechanical properties of thinly beaten gold leaf with its attraction and repulsion and susceptibility to shift in response to a viewer's movements and thus this work is as sensitive to viewer's presence as Gonzales Torres' was albeit in a different key and here you can see those are two thinly beaten gold sheets on top of one another and if you walk past it it just moves then Dean Samashima an artist who was a generation younger and who literally grew up with AIDS takes the very same image vocabulary and turns its resonance from loss and death to life and pleasure here photographing the beds in bathhouses where he had sex with random strangers pointing to a continuing unapologetic eroticism even in the face of the plague my point is that there is a dialogue in and through these images going on here so to vote it if you concentrate you can hear it and it speaks collectivity and politics let's take as an example Gonzales Torres' largest candy spill untitled placebo from 1990 work one work that like the other candy spills invites the audience to take and eat a piece of candy thereby inaugurating an act of threefold significance as a resistance to a highly politicized other ring of people with AIDS as an echo of Catholic communion and as a literal contact with the infected at a moment when AIDS protocols still work powerfully to isolate people with AIDS but at 1200 pounds it is by far the largest of types of work and its massive silvery elegance makes it one of the most beautiful but here the parenthetical in the title placebo also instantiates a problem why use a term that in pharmaceutical studies refers to the ineffective substitute of a drug that's supposed to work and why is placebo at a scale that totally dwarfs the other candy spills to hear the Gonzales Torres foundation tell it this is mere happenstance with no political intent a reading frankly now echoed across the art world but according to the CDC itself the upper limit of the CD4T helper cells that are the initial target of the HIV virus is about 1200 exactly the same weight as the weight in pounds the placebo as we are invited to take and consume the candy that number of course diminishes just as the body's CD4 cells themselves diminish following infection and as we eat the candy we are the ones responsible for the destruction of this immune system a political charge nonetheless leveled with the gentlest touches but if the scale of the work is related to an optimal healthy CD4 count why then call it placebo in this context the artist himself was eloquent known in a 1993 interview with reference to his then deceased partner Ross Leica quote in a way this letting go of the work this refusal to make a static form a monolithic sculpture in favor of the disappearing unstable and fragile form was an attempt on my part to rehearse my fears of having Ross disappear day by day right in front of my eyes end quote so according to this frame of reference placebo operates as a placebo for the artist's own loss a means of rehearsing his grief before the real horror of loss could take hold as Gonzalez probably intended untitled placebo has become at once an irritant and a joy a riddle to be solved and something to be valued purely in aesthetic terms put all versions of this work my interpretation and the fields Gonzalez forces foundations must ultimately bow before the social situation placebo engenders that social experience that act of encounter collective and individual calls upon some of us so inclined to plummet possible depths while at the same time letting others enjoy it as generous and even democratic a celebration of an art that invites rather than excludes on this latter form of meaning to Gonzalez Taurus is eloquent and it's worth quoting him at length to convey something of his emotion he said quote when I saw the show one particular guard who was standing with the big candy floor piece untitled placebo and she was amazing there was this suburban white middle class mother with two young sons who came into the room and in 30 seconds this woman who was a black maybe church going civil servant in Washington in the middle of all this reactionary pressure about the arts there she was explaining to this mother and kid about AIDS and what this piece represented what a placebo was and how there was no cure and so on then the boys started to fill their pockets with candies and she sort of looked at them like a school mistress and said you're only supposed to take one just as their faces fell and they tossed back all but a few she suddenly smiled again and said okay well maybe two and she won the mover completely he continued the whole thing worked because they then got the piece they got the interaction they got the generosity and they got her it was great end quote in this account AIDS social interaction generosity forms of race and class inversion and the sheer force of the guards personality all conspired to animate a work of art about AIDS for children in the context of AIDS plague and they forced other ring that our enemies sought to engender here is art that reaches across the aisle and touches are better invites our touch it does not seek to segregate some experiences meanings from others for experience itself is an undifferentiated state only hierarchized upon reflection children above all know this and so they were the artist model and talking about the work my point is that these works of art address us hopefully seeking relationship and not just relationship but a form of contact of visual and embodied relationship relational aesthetics doesn't know where it began but it began here in a socio-political context in which the mere act of touching was so fraught so loaded with the terrors of contamination and infection that it became a political act while most AIDS active as art tended towards the confrontational unintentionally reifying the divide between us and them here and there that very defied that helms and company were so busy stoking this viral art instead held fast to faith and co-activity and community so that even a work of art about AIDS spoke to children in a language they could understand under plague conditions a viral art not only brought us together but it made that fraught contact over into a form of politics that didn't divide but unified my point is that strategically speaking we are all the children of AIDS even those of us who disown any knowledge of it that I can still speak of a collective of a we after the experience of AIDS is evidence of its discursive success read if you can the ephemeral word behind Jimmy Desson's extraordinary late photograph who spares who is dying at the time he made it but if you look closely you'll see what it can read, what it reads deathlessness a dying man photograph deathlessness because he knew he would read it long after he was gone the word barely visible behind the lanterns that illuminate the image in the face of his demise after so much suffering Desson knew that in our looking at this photograph some of us would register a paradoxical hopeful sadness while some of us would see nothing but the lanterns themselves he knew that he the artist would die but that is a voice and the collective the community and that saw and registers a voice that would live on damning those who predicted even encouraged our extinction the final triumph it seems is his promise thank you can you hear me? that was so beautiful I'm a little bit in shock that was just so powerful and so beautiful and poetic and political and everything and I think it was totally convincing and I want to hear from other people so please invite everybody to write questions or comments into the chat in Google or YouTube and then I will read them out loud but I think that this idea of there's just so much to unpack here or to sort of grapple with I guess the idea of artists functioning like a virus and working invisibly and working under the surface and just how threatening that is I think that one question that I had was about the relationship between appropriation artistic appropriation and whether you were really making a maybe and maybe you were and I missed it but really making a connection between that the strategy of appropriation and the idea of contagion it's absolutely the case that there's a play with the strategy of contagion that it's thematized in so many of these works through various acts of taking and of reciprocation and that one of the things that these AIDS artists were looking to do was of course to break that initial barrier which was being promoted by culture almost across the board that AIDS was untouchable and so of course appropriation was one means of so doing and and I also should say that and this is something that I didn't bring up but I really want to stress that I think there's something quite significant that this strategy of an anti-authorial death of the author kind of postmodernism is emerging at precisely the moment in American culture when long silenced voices are beginning to be heard queer when civil rights when activist forms of art are finally claiming territory boom all of a sudden right it no longer becomes theoretically sophisticated to pay attention to author intent and frankly call me paranoid but I see a connection there I was also interested in what you said right at the end about touching becoming a political act and because I was thinking about that when you showed the Gonzalez-Torres the blood piece which is an incredible piece and I was of course thinking about touch when I was looking at that I think especially because of living in the age of COVID it's like oh my god are people really going to walk through that now I don't know I just didn't know if you want to talk more about that well I will say that when I saw it installed one of the striking things I saw was people hesitating before they could go through the curtain they had to like screw up their courage to do so they knew it was just plastic beads but it was still so visceral and Gonzalez-Torres makes a very interesting demand on institutions that show the work he doesn't care how it's going to be shown in other words it can be in any opening but it has to cover the complete opening so that there's no way around it you have to talk that's so powerful would you looking to see if there are any questions does anybody have any questions or comments I see Homei King saying beautiful talk Jonathan thank you Jonathan Pinkett says yo John Jonathan Pinkett says yo John and John Wilk says yay I mean do you think that it's right that it's like fair to say that if you said that AIDS was in the closet that this art was in the closet yeah I mean in many respects of course by design this art was in the closet right and what I find so striking is that when we think about AIDS art we tend to think about activist art and this whole other genre that I would argue represents the vast bulk of art about AIDS doesn't get considered I mean it was so convincing and as somebody who previously thought that there just wasn't that much AIDS art out there I mean now I see it totally differently I'm sorry go ahead I was just going to say that one of the striking aspects here is that the Phyllis Gonzalez Forest Foundation has long worked to prohibit any kind of discussion of AIDS or the politics of Felix's work which I find obviously reprehensible but when I was negotiating and ultimately failing loans of Felix's work for Art AIDS America one of the things that they told me was that there was no more AIDS content to Felix's work than there was content about the troubles in Northern Ireland and his work was about all forms of conflict and I kept thinking hell of a planet are you on right but that's the way the artwork still operates right and as if you can control that meaning okay here's some questions Matt Phyllis says thanks so much for this powerful talk I was especially taken by your discussion of camouflage and the way in which camouflage plays with the relationship between figure and ground thank you Hong-Zen Han says thank you Dr. Katz what an amazing talk can you relate the discrimination of the queer community of AIDS epidemic to the increasing anti-Asian sentiment during COVID-19 absolutely I mean as I tried to suggest at the beginning the one thing we know from epidemics is that they are going to reify extant social hierarchy and they're going to produce ever more powerful social technology and so what we see now is a contemporary victimization which has to locate right under scourge, under epidemic you have to locate right some source, some origin something, something that can be othered so that you can be safe and unfortunately mutations mm-hmm yeah, boundaries categories um David Kim says for many of the works you show the title serves as a point of entry could you comment on the role of the linguistic marking of the work yes, I think in many respects what this art sought to do of course had it not had those titles I wouldn't have been doing a lot of the interpretive work that I was able to do it clued me in and it clued a lot of other people and the work was picturing, working towards but importantly titles are often not read by museumgoers and so museums could also put this work on the wall confident that they wouldn't be in any obvious way violating the helms prescriptions or in other words showing art about AIDS or homosexuality well, I'm waiting for more questions but not seeing any more coming in so might be a good time to wrap up but I think that you can continue leaving comments and questions here in the chat oh, wait, here comes one Lisa Salzman Jonathan, given that the word influenza holds with it the idea slash etymology of influence as an art historian would you want to make a larger claim about notions of influence and art history of a good one very interesting, very complicated question very Lisa, thank you Lisa I think the way I would answer it is by saying this that that the idea of making meaning often requires input through influences and that we have to understand something fundamental about art that I think is not well understood which is that art speaks to multiple audiences with multiple competencies some of us are historians right, no influences, others don't and one of the things that's so extraordinary about art is its ability to communicate to everybody in that list those who are extraordinarily aware of the influences and those who have no knowledge whatsoever that is in fact the sort of democratic possibility of art and one of the reasons I love it so so you were saying before we started that you thought that there might be some I don't know, sort of pushback against what you were saying from the audience I anticipated it yeah, yeah, come on guys come on people what I was anticipating would be that there would be pushback at the idea that I was advocating a form of art that wasn't aggressively dissident and resistant, what was instead in some ways through its use of appropriation in other terms could be misunderstood as complicit but I think what needs to be said about that critique is that the context of the 1980s and early 1990s was such that we can't judge that art by the standards right maybe that can be true after listening to your talk I see it as totally activist art, just very sneaky very clever and sneaky and insidious David Kim, Jonathan have you oh sorry, there are a couple of before David's Francesca, Bolfo I'm thinking about the buffalo as a polysemic symbol I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right that signifies varyingly different viewers can we see this kind of visual dialogue as a sort of chain of metanemic signifiers endlessly pointing to something that cannot be articulated or simply as part of a coded language that's beautifully put, Francesca and yes, that's exactly the point right for some people the buffalo is going to be literal for some people it's going to be a kind of argument about whites and indigenous populations for some people it's going to be about queers and the Republicans and that it can be all those things at once is in fact the point and its encouragement is not towards no mean which is what postmodernist criticism would say, oh it's just an individuated meaning and everybody has different meanings no, it means according to certain tendencies certain social constructions are arguments then current and we group or understand our meanings based in part upon our own life experiences and of course we can have multiple meanings some of us can see intersectional connections and others of us can't David Kim says Jonathan have you identified similar strategies in the art produced beyond the US it's very interesting there is a connection to the art produced for example in England and Germany at the time but it seems to me that it's the most pronounced in America precisely because the federal and local conditions were most hostile it's striking to me for example that you know, when Helms produced that amendment 94 to 2 right? that's what it was to live in America at that time to feel like the community in which I existed a community that had seen nothing but horror and death a community in which my 20 year old self was having the same conversations that my great grandmother was having about funerals and memorial services and at that time there was almost no recognition of the horror that we were going for that division of the United States was profoundly unnoted by anybody who wasn't part of this country has the argument that you're making that you made tonight has it been been expressed in any of your exhibitions? so Art Aids America was in some sense an attempt to illustrate this but I've continued to work on it and develop it and will eventually push it in other directions but I'm also sort of I'm interested in thinking more about something that I confess I slighted which is the role of forthright activist art and whether it in fact does what a postmodernist critique says it does which is to reinforce boundaries and continue to produce conflict in which both sides of the equation are reinforced in their opposition I need to think more about that and I'm just beginning to well thank you so much this has been just incredibly stimulating and a lot to think about here and you will be back tomorrow to chair questions of the symposium so to everybody watching please join us tomorrow we've got three sessions I think we start at 10 o'clock you can find the program here if you scroll down on YouTube and you can also find it on our website so thanks to everybody for listening and for your questions and thank you so much Jonathan you gave us all so much to think about beautiful talk