INTE 398 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: General Idea, The New York Times, Connotation
5 May 2018
School
Department
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Ffar 291/Inte 398 – Intro HIV Class
Lesson 6
6.1 Introduction
-artistic and cultural responses to HIV/AIDS = very powerful, numerous
-many specific artists devoted large portion of their work to HIV/AIDS
-ongoing fascination in tv, film, etc looking at the q of HIV/AIDS
-in large part bc many artists affected by it esp in early years of the pandemic
-how cultural production represented HIV/AIDS since the early yrs of the pandemic
-reflect on how cultural and artistic responses have shaped the meanings and ideas associated
with HIV/AIDS
-understand the context of and contribution of activist art work and cultural analysis produced
in response to HIV/AIDS
6.2 How AIDS Changed Art Lecture
The Importance of Representation
-"Yet the AIDS epidemic - with its genuine potential for global devastation - is simultaneously
an epidemic of a transmissible lethal disease and an epidemic of meanings or signification" -
Treichler
-"AIDS is a war, not just of med and politics but of representations - we must reject dominant
media discourses and forms in favor of a radical new vocabulary that deconstructs their
agendas and reconstructs ours" - Greyson
-HIV opened up bunch of opportunities to speak about marginalization, diff types of aspects, in
wake of devastating illness
-in a way, cultural rep around HIV/AIDS led to competing set of reps
-general public, outsiders, not directly involved by the pandemic and their perceptions and
prejudices VS
-insider pov too - what's it like when affected by the virus
-how they both provide diff pov's
Camouflage
-"Fully aware of the politics of the moment, they knew that to address AIDS directly in their art
was to be, by definition, excluded, and so they made the audience their expressive ally,
capable of reading meanings that were never stated directly." -Katz
-ppl inside directly affected, ppl outside but outside only in relation to ppl w HIV (the
mainstream)
-this grp had more power in society in terms of resource allocations, etc
-artists that wanted to address AIDS in their art
-often ppl w insider position felt the need to camouflage their relation w HIV, either tell their
story thru metaphor or other terms OR connect it to larger terms to move it to mainstream
6.3 How AIDS Changed American Art Reading
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-AIDS erupted in NA consciousness at around same time that generation of academically
trained artists were confronting the exhaustion of modernist art practices
-shared assumption that AIDS has left American culture largely unchanged
-tragic tangent NOT generative force
-so AIDS = historical threat, that barely grazed us collectively (AIDS became their disease,
not ours)
-to make it an active historical protagonist, requires understanding that it is ours, a collective
trauma w a collective impact
-bc of AIDS, entire generation of artists began to think about their representational practices
first and foremost strategically, trying to understand the array of forces marshaled vs them and
seeking to confront a series of newly codified prohibitions vs any rep of AIDS or same-sex
desire
-forced to engage in complicated calculus - any work of art tested vs a complex reading of
extant social networks and discursive conditions, prejudices and stereotypes, laws, customs
and institutional parameters
-to have work that functions in the space btwn possibility and foreclosure, influence and
censorship
Infected Meaning
-all works seem to have little in common and yet all artists found a way to instrumentalize and
put them in political content and expressive possibility
-found a way to make the art address AIDS connotatively (rather denotatively)
-strategic, fully self-conscious self-positioning - along w corollary denial that any work is
identical w its maker's life, meanings, or intentions - constitutes one of the enduring legacies of
the AIDS era of art
-clues/hints/silence could possess (in the right context) unusually expressive eloquence
-in rare instances that AIDS enters art history, restricted to one of 2 vectors of consideration:
-AIDS in the context of art censorship and political contest
-or in terms of the many sig artists it has killed
-each invites self-serving redemptive narrative that leads to the conclusion that we are much
more enlightened, fairer and altogether better now than we were then
-to challenge silence, must attend to the micro effects of AIDS - to the way it redrew artists'
strategic thinking as they sough to rep their response to AIDS
On Spies
-artists took HIV as the blueprint and battle plan for a similarly clandestine, camouflaged attack
-glossary of AIDS (viral, clandestine, camouflage, infection, unwitting replication, and
subsequent spread beyond the host) = become lexicon of an art world revolution that knew
that the immune system was the best vector of attack, precisely bc, once infected, it cannot
attack itself
-the same metaphors used to describe AIDS had their origin, a few decades before, in the
metaphors used to describe homosexuality
-both invisible until too late for treatment, outcast status, tragic and lonely death
-to call yourself a gay artist = death of career but it was an occupational necessity
-in a way, epidemic pulled art world together but in other way, separated gays from the
regular heterosexual crowd (pretty dominant in the art world now)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Infected Bodies
-ex artists all showed pics of ppl w Kaposi's sarcoma lesions (one of most charact of the
opportunistic infections engendered by AIDS)
-for each artist, signifies diff things
Infected Politics
-content restrictions turned on q of the rep of sexuality and homosexuality esp defined as
inherently obscene
Infected Critique
-in NY Times in 1981, addressed unusual outbreak of Kaposi's sarcoma, in previously healthy
younger gay men - first called "gay cancer" and then GRID (gay-related immune deficiency)
-even today, AIDS still really associated w homosexuality
-new kind of art - postmodernism
-challenged notions of originality, universality and authenticity as just so much ideological
mystification
-every discourse engenders a counterdiscourse, a new way of thinking and framing that
challenges the initial oppression in new, often unpredictable ways
-new communicative situation created - new forms of mediation or meaning making (poetic
postmodernism)
-poetic bc indeterminate and open ended, but also connotes poetic justice
Infected Appeals
-AIDS art frequently appeals to our physicality, our own bodies
-makes the term of our embodiment to some extent its subject
Infected Coalitions
-to make the private into smth public is an action that has terrific repercussions in the pre-
invented world
6.4 Postmodernism Lecture
Postmodernism
-under postmodernism, absent any grand plan or design, meanings are determined the
operations of often-camouflaged ideologies
-these postmodern thinkers thus challenged notions of originality, universality, and
authenticity as just so much ideological mystification
-countering the common notion that it is the author who determines the meaning of a text,
Barthes argued that instead it is us, the readers, who make up any text's meanings in the act of
reading it -Katz
-movement that suggested meaning is in large part already socially constructed and largely
dependent on the person who is viewing or listening to or experiencing the cultural prod
-nothing original - have ideas/feelings that already coded into how we understand things
-coded by meanings society has put on them
-so its not the author that determines the meaning but the relationship btwn the author and
the viewer
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
