The stuff life is made of: five group shows in New York recently celebrated the work - and in many cases the memory - of artists caught in the HIV/AIDS epidemic - includes related article on AIDS/arts organizations - Art & AIDS

Art in America, April, 1997 by Hollad Cotter

When accounts of American art in the late 1980s and 1990s are written, recurrent themes will emerge: the body, sexual identity, childhood, mortality. And all of them, directly or indirectly, link up to the AIDS pandemic, the protracted medical emergency that has scarred the era.

The list of artists who have died of the disease is incalculable. Some names are known, but many are not, either because their careers lay outside the mainstream gallery network, or because their art has been lost or destroyed. A scenario repeats itself: an artist dies, an apartment has to be emptied, personal effects get bundled into an attic, a basement, a trash compactor. The work of a lifetime vanishes.

Last fall and winter, in observance of Day Without Art/World AIDS Day, a harvest of such potentially fugitive material was on view in five group shows in New York. All of the work was by artists who are either living with or have died of HIV/AIDS and who, with two exceptions, have had their careers documented, at least in rudimentary fashion, by the Archive Project, the grassroots arm of the advocacy and service organization known as Visual AIDS. (See sidebar.)

The exhibitions had their strengths and weaknesses, though their overall quality was bracingly high. And together they gave a vivid picture of the wealth of art being produced in the shadow of AIDS, and of the immense toll the disease continues to exact.

"A Living Testament of

the Blood Fairies"

Of the five shows, the most ambitious and polished was at Artists Space. "A Living Testament of the Blood Fairies" was a gathering of 12 artists organized by Geoffrey Hendricks, Frank Moore and Sur Rodney (Sur), all of whom are Visual AIDS board members. The work embraced a wide range of mediums. Some of it was AIDS- or gay-specific; most of it, though, centered on themes of vulnerability, self-scrutiny and community. The approach was oblique, poetic, funny, a far cry from the polemical heavy weather usually associated with "political art."

The bittersweet tone was set in two pieces by Elliott Linwood which opened the show. One was a slide projection of words from Sir J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan: "When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and spread over the entire world, and that was the beginning of fairies. But all the faries are dying now because children know such a lot they don't believe or laugh anymore."

The other, titled Initiation, is an immense glass jar filled with 200 pounds of honey in which uncapped syringes float. The amber color of the liquid is alluring but disturbing (it suggests clouded urine); the syringes are reminders of life-saving medication but also of intravenous drug use through which the AIDS virus can be transmitted.

Linwood's blend of whimsy and edginess had a counterpart in small paintings by Copy Berg that were part Paul Klee, part Keith Haring. The central cartoon form in POOF: For All My Friends Who Have Disappeared is a cross between a pansylike flower and an explosion. In Die You HIV Scum pills are flushed with a Lichtensteinesque "Splash!" Much of Berg's work, though, took the form of cartoonlike drawings which spilled from a fax machine in the gallery (they were free for the taking), and are reminders of a time in the recent past when the artist faxed work daily to his lover from a hospital bed.

Cartoons also figure in Mike Parker's large off paintings with their amalgam of art history and pop culture. Bambi appears in one, Batman in another, and the artist's CoCo adroitly turns Charles Demuth's I Saw the Figure Five in Gold (1928) into a high-gloss homage to Chanel. (Demuth, it will be remembered, turned out homoerotic depictions of New York gay life between the wars.) Also interlacing Pop with camp were photo-collages by Joe De Hoyos which emblazoned the names of gay icons -- Haring, and the porn star Al Parker, both of whom died of AIDS -- on fields of bright flowers and candy-colored geometric shapes.

All the work in the show, in fact, was text-based, though the texts took many forms. David Nelson's beautiful, time-infused If Ida Knowd carries a single regretful sentence. He handwrote the words, which he remembered his grandmother saying when he was a child, in fluid script across a scroll-like series of photograms, using the sand from broken hourglasses in place of ink. Nelson created the work while his lover, the artist David Knudsvig (1947-1993) was dying; little hourglasses, bandaged with silk tissue and hanging from the bottom edges of the paper, were the sources of the sand but they also served as temporal markers for the progress of the piece as it was written over several days.

In Robert Blanchon's Untitled (The Act of 1648), sheets of typewritten words alternate, in grid formation, with head shots of men facing away from the camera, each wearing a garment label affixed to the nape of his neck. The typed words -- dim, as if produced by a worn ribbon -- quote from a 17th-century English ordinance dictating the kinds of cloth permitted for making shrouds for plague victims; the labels on the men's necks, cut from brand name shirts, correspond to those materials.