40 million lives later: The dangers of erasing AIDS from the works of art it inspired

Since the personal is political, this article – which is about political issues – will begin with the personal.

On a table in the foyer of my house, there’s a ceramic bowl containing a handful of candies wrapped in blue cellophane. They were part of the installation art piece Untitled (Blue Placebo), by the Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres. This was displayed in 2021 at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, in a retrospective dedicated to the artist. He was born in Guáimaro, Cuba, in 1957 and died in Miami in 1996.

I didn’t commit a crime by taking those objects: the artist’s intention was precisely that the public would gradually diminish the work, candy by candy, as indicated by the corresponding label. González-Torres died as a result of medical complications from the HIV/AIDS virus. His works – made with sweets – are often interpreted as memories of the victims of the disease.

I recently held a party at my house and, the next morning, I noticed that the little mountain in the bowl had shrunk. That seemed good to me. I decided to think that these candies would be in other houses and that, therefore, the work of art would continue to fulfill its commemorative function in a wider circle.

Another of Fernández-Torres’ works is called Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). It’s also made of candies. This time around, however, the sweets add up to the exact weight of Ross Laycock – the artist’s partner – when he was infected with HIV at the time of the work’s creation. He died in 1991, five years before Félix.

Once again, spectators are invited to take these candies with them. The explanation for this is that the work has to do with the progressive consumption of a person as a consequence of a disease, which was also decimating the environment in which the artist worked. The human will to keep the memory of the victim alive is encapsulated by the taking of the candy, as well as by the possibility for endless replenishment.

Apparently, the people responsible for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. — which belongs to the Smithsonian Institution — have decided that the public information about this work shouldn’t mention either Laycock or the disease that he succumbed to. This has raised controversy among several activists and critics — such as Ignacio Darnaude, an art critic at OUT magazine, aimed at LGBTQ+ audiences — who have referred to “queer erasure” to describe this case.

This isn’t the first time that this has happened. Back in 2022, the Art Institute of Chicago was accused of making a similar reformulation on the piece’s label, which it later had to rectify due to protests.

But this time around, the matter is occurring at a delicate moment. In January, Donald Trump signed an executive order describing the diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) initiatives of his predecessor Joe Biden as “discriminatory and illegal preferences,” before stating that they’ve entailed “immense public waste and shameful discrimination.”

It’s within this context that recent decisions made by the Smithsonian Institution are being interpreted. The group of 21 public museums — which obtains two-thirds of its budget from the federal government — has announced the sudden closure of its Office of Diversity. Nor does it seem to be a coincidence that, just a few weeks ago, a long article published in Harper’s Magazine by critic Dean Kissick went viral in the contemporary art world. The article’s thesis is that, lately, so-called “woke” content and identity politics are destroying the quality of art. He claims that, a decade and a half ago — when Kissick began to work within the cultural sector — artists were valued only for the creativity of their work.

This article has been widely challenged for the blatant way in which it omits that art has never renounced political content — not even in the supposed golden times that Kissick recalls — as well as for the somewhat confusing and often contradictory way in which the critic presents his argument. But its publication and the attention that has been paid to it are in step with a broader political reality. This alerts us to how the climate of opinion has evolved.

Contrary to Kissick’s claims, it can be argued that art has been a vehicle for memory since its beginnings, especially when it comes to the deceased. And the political dimension is essential in every work of art… even in those that don’t consciously seek it. Therefore, the erasure of the intrinsic and unavoidable dimensions of González-Torres' art not only implies a politically reactionary exercise: it’s also an offense to the artistic relevance of such works.

As for the treatment of HIV in art, as soon as news about the first victims began to spread, there was a rush to make it visible and to report on the pandemic. In 1981, when information about its means of transmission was still vague, the American artist Izhar Patkin exhibited a painting that made indirect reference to the physical manifestations of the virus. Shortly afterwards, between 1983 and 1985, the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer created her series of condoms, with wrappers bearing messages such as “I will see you again” or “Live now.” Another work by Holzer, consisting of a granite slab engraved with verses from Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself, is part of the New York City AIDS Memorial, erected in 2016 in Greenwich Village, Manhattan.

In 1985, the Silence = Death project was founded. Also based in New York City, the collective consisted of Avram Finkelstein, Oliver Johnston, Brian Howard, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione and Jorge Socarrás. They made a black poster with a pink triangle — like the one used in Nazi Germany to mark homosexual prisoners — which became an icon of political action against the disease. In 1988, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), an activist organization dedicated to direct action, in order to assist and give visibility to those infected with the virus, created the artistic collective Gran Fury, dedicated to developing artworks and performances in public spaces.

In those early days, during the Reagan administration — which mostly ignored the crisis and its victims — artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe or Paul Thek, who both died as a result of complications from AIDS, made veiled allusions to the pandemic in their work. Peter Hujar, who was Thek’s lover, took a series of photos of the calm waters of the Hudson River. When they were presented at the Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing exhibition at New York’s Artists Space — which was organized in 1989 by photographer Nan Goldin, who has also captured AIDS victims in her work — they took on obvious connotations about the disease that would also claim Hujar’s life. Today, the photos can be seen in an exhibition (dedicated to Hujar) at London’s Raven Row art center.

Another of Hujar’s lovers and friends was the artist David Wojnarowicz, who died of the same disease in 1992. During his lifetime, he created an explicit and combative body of work, driven by the urgency of the death sentence that the virus represented at the time. Following his express wish, his funeral became a public demonstration in Manhattan’s East Village. It was organized by his inner circle and presided over by a banner that read: “David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992), died of AIDS due to government negligence.” In 2019, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid dedicated a major exhibition to him. When, months earlier, the exhibition arrived at the Whitney Museum in New York, members of ACT UP protested at the museum’s door, because Wojnarowicz’s activist side was somewhat blurred in the curatorial approach.

Keith Haring was another American artist known for incorporating the disease into his artistic narratives and personal demands, as represented by the mural Together We Can Stop AIDS. In 1989, it was painted next to the MACBA at the suggestion of his friend, the Catalan hotelier Montse Guillén. The ephemeral work has since been reconstructed.

Another notable name is the writer, artist and experimental filmmaker Gregg Bordowitz, who was infected with HIV in 1988, at the age of 24. He’s still active and currently has an exhibition at the Camden Art Centre in London. Among the younger generations, Kia LaBeija, born in 1990, created the photo series 24, which is about her experience of growing up in New York as a racialized and HIV-positive woman. LaBeija contracted the virus through perinatal (mother-to-child) transmission. Like them, photographers Sunil Gupta and Rotimi Fani-Kayode (the latter of whom died in 1989) have also reflected their personal experiences with the disease in their work.

Carlos Motta, born in 1978, is a Colombian artist based in New York City. He has dealt with the HIV/AIDS issue with particular emotional and political resonance. This was seen in his solo 2023 exhibition Stigmata, at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO). This included, among many other pieces, the video Hilos de sangre (“Threads of Blood”), filmed in collaboration with the historian Pablo Bedoya. It’s an archive of documents and personal experiences related to the virus.

On February 21, Motta will open Plegarias de resistencia (“Prayers of Resistance”), another exhibition at the MACBA in Barcelona curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio and María Berrío. There, the HIV/AIDS crisis will once again be on the table. And, on February 27, at the Mayoral Gallery — also in Barcelona and with the same curator — an exhibition by the Peruvian non-binary artist Wynnie Mynerva will open: El Dulce Néctar de tu Sangre (“The sweet nectar of your blood”). This exposes her own experience with the infection, but also pays tribute to the legacy of other preceding artists.

The case of Pepe Espaliú, from Córdoba, Spain also stands out. He settled in New York in the early-1990s. His work — conceptual, but with a refined, formal dimension — offered autobiographical and identity-based content. In 1990, he was diagnosed with HIV and his work immediately incorporated this reality. His sculptures of cages and crutches, as well as his anguished performances, spoke of the experience of an artist who was doubly stigmatized by his condition as a gay man and as an HIV patient.

In 1992, in his best-known piece of performance art, Carrying, he was carried by a human chain of volunteers (among them, the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and the actress Marisa Paredes) in San Sebastián and Madrid. Accompanying this work of visibility, he also published a stark column in EL PAÍS, under the title Portrait of the Evicted Artist. In the op-ed, he wrote: “AIDS is the well that today I climb, brick by brick, blackening my body when touching its black walls, drowning in its dense and humid air.” He died 11 months later.

The curator and researcher Jesús Alcaide collected Espaliú’s texts in the excellent critical edition Pepe Espaliú: The Impossible Truth, Texts from 1987-1993 (2018). He has also participated in monographs on the artist. In a similar work, art historian Andrea Galaxina collected a series of works impacted by the crisis in her book Nobody Looked Over Here: An Essay on Art and HIV/AIDS (2022). And, a little over a year ago, the exhibition titled Memories of HIV/Aids in Latin America, 1978-2019 — organized by the Madrid-based Arkhé Archive, offered an extensive and necessary overview of how the crisis has been experienced in Spain, Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela.

On the other hand, amidst the dominance of social media, the scarcity of art projects specifically dedicated to the subject beyond the aforementioned ones — is striking. In this context, however, we can mention the extraordinary work carried out by The AIDS Memorial: an Instagram page dedicated to remembering the victims of the disease, through personal testimonies from their loved ones. Once again, images and texts function together, as a vehicle for the transmission of memory. In fact, they often create the memory itself.

But of all the works on HIV/AIDS imagined by artists, perhaps the one that most aptly reflects the current context is a photo taken by David Wojnarowicz for the poster of the documentary Silence = Death (1990), by the filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim. It’s a close-up self-portrait, in which the artist’s mouth appears sewn with thick thread. Seen through today’s eyes, this snapshot reminds us that there are always interests that will want to silence uncomfortable messages. One of the functions of art is, precisely, to rise above said interests, in order to express what is important and what is urgent.

According to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, nearly 40 million people are currently living with HIV, while about the same number have died of the disease since the virus was discovered. Fortunately, thanks to the availability of more effective drugs, the situation isn’t as dire as it was at the beginning of the pandemic, but the crisis cannot be considered resolved. It’s estimated that more than 600,000 people still die from the virus each year. This is what is important and what is urgent.

Translated by Avik Jain Chatlani.

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