Posters by Kent Monkman and Daryl Vocat
A few weeks ago, I moderated a panel discussion at the Art Gallery of Ontario on General Idea, and someone asked about General Idea’s relationship to AIDS activism of the ‘80s and ‘90s. World AIDS Day was yesterday, December 1, and the AGO has been promoting their event commemorating it, A Day With(out) Art. All this is to say that I have been thinking a great deal recently about AIDS and AIDS activism.
The AIDS activist movement, particularly as embodied in the United States by the various branches of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), and in Canada by AIDS Action Now, strikes me as one of the great success stories of grassroots activism. Through relentless campaigns of civil disobedience, education drives and tireless organizational efforts, they caused a medical and political sea change; they won. AIDS became part of the public discourse, massive funding for research was garnered, access to treatment became more-or-less widely affordable (at least in the Western industrialized world). The interesting question is: why? Why did they win?
The answer that always occurs to me is that it wasn’t merely that their campaigns were relentless; they were relentlessly creative. These acts of civil disobedience – die-ins, chaining themselves to government offices – were public spectacle: brutal, haunting street theatre, characterized by a vicious gallows humour, performance art of the most urgent kind. And it wasn’t limited to public demonstrations: ACT-UP had its own art propaganda wing, Gran Fury, an affined group that produced streams of arresting, confrontational posters. Some of the most enduring images to come out of the AIDS crisis were Gran Fury productions, famously including the SILENCE=DEATH posters.
Poster by Ceclia Berkovic
If you are walking through the Queen West strip or the Gay Village, you will come across similar posters, whole grids of them plastered edge-to-edge on any surface that can take wheatpaste. These posters will tell you to “fuck positive women,” or remind you that it’s “your stigma, not mine.” They were created by six artists – Daryl Vocat, Kent Monkman, Cecilia Berkovic, Allyson Mitchell, John Greyson and Mikiki (in collaboration with Scott Donald) – and are a part of AIDS Action Now’s POSTER/virus campaign, officially launched at the AGO’s Day With(out) Art event.
It’s worth considering General Idea’s renowned Imagevirus campaign – their reappropriation of Robert Indiana’s LOVE logo to read “AIDS” – in this context. Activist responses to the Imagevirus campaign have shifted over the course of the 23 years since it first appeared. At the time, it was controversial and reviled: thought to be at best in poor taste, at worst, so subtly polemical that it was read as a homophobic equation of queer love with AIDS (Gran Fury actively campaigned against them). By the time I came to know of it, the worst part of the AIDS crisis was over and its subtleties gained greater depth from the shift of context. To my mind, it’s political art at its strongest: viciously clever, not only upending and repurposing a cloying emblem of nave sentimentality, but narrating the seismic cultural and sexual shift that AIDS wrought.
AIDS Action Now’s POSTER/virus posters exist somewhere between Gran Fury’s direct, urgent polemics and General Idea’s sly coding, though they lean more towards the Gran Fury end of the spectrum.
By and large, their aesthetic sophistication confounds their impact; these kinds of posters should be graphic, flat, and punchy (think of Gran Fury’s image of Ronald Reagan’s scalding yellow face with highbeam-pink eyes). Some of the more pictorially dense posters get lost, in situ, amidst the other visual noise of the busy city streets.
Posters by Allyson Mitchell and Mikiki with Scott Donald
The best of them marry sophisticated aesthetics with a kind of propagandistic simplicity: Daryl Vocat’s two-toned line drawing of a boy-scout scrawling the words “we are not criminals”; Kent Monkman’s poster combines a lavishly detailed illustration of two angels wrestling in mid-air with the phrase “THE CREATOR IS WATCHING YOU, HARPER,” in hot pink block letters. Some of the posters are outright confrontational: Mikiki and Scott Donald’s poster declares, “I Party/I Bareback/I’m Positive/I’m Responsible.” The already-heated reaction to it brings to the fore a broader discomfort around how HIV-positive people assume agency over their own sexuality.
Artists have always played a central role in the AIDS activist movement; the two most influential activist organizations – The Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP – were founded by writers and playwrights. AIDS Action Now’s poster project stands as the inheritor of a potent lineage of artist-led activism, and affirms that artists should be at the forefront not only of cultural change, but of political change as well.
Sholem Krishtalka writes regularly about art for Toronto Standard; get more of him (is there ever enough?) at Sholem.ca.
