How to Have Art (Events) in an Epidemic

Co-Founder of Visual AIDS, Robert Atkins delivers a talk How to Have Art (Events) in an Epidemic: A History of Visual AIDS from Day Without Art to the Red Ribbon on Day Without Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on December 1, 1992.

The text (below) is later adapted for the book Disrupted Borders, edited by Sunil Gupta, River Orams Press, London, 1993

When you reach the answering machine at Visual AIDS's tiny New York office the current message solemnly intones: "This is Visual AIDS -- the creators of Day Without Art, Night Without Art, and the Ribbon Project." During the month preceding Day Without Art, this self-promoting little spiel is partly intended to inform journalists of a few simple -- and apparently easy-confused -- facts: that Visual AIDS is an organization, that Day Without Art is an event, that International AIDS Awareness Day is the World Health Organization's baby, etc.

Visual AIDS formally appeared in the fall of 1988. It was preceded by perhaps six month of informal and sporadic discussions among four gay, white men: myself [Robert Atkins], William Olander (the now deceased, New Museum of Contemporary Art curator), Thomas Sokolowski (the director of New York University's Grey Art Gallery) and Garry Garrels (formerly of the DIA Foundation, and now the Walker Art Center). Between us we'd volunteered and buddied at the Gay Men's Health Crisis, ACTed UP, raised funds for Art Against AIDS, and would continue to do these things after the emergence of Visual AIDS. In our roles as curators and critics, we were also tracking a growing body of artwork about AIDS and trying to give it visibility.

On 1 March 1989, Visual AIDS issued its first release, signed by 35 multi-cultural representatives of New York artist organizations, museums, and AIDS-service organizations. Entitled Visual AIDS: The Art World Organises, the initial, stated goals were modest, but they did lay the foundations for the future. "Our purpose," we wrote, "is to support an ongoing effort ... to encourage, facilitate, and highlight AIDS-related exhibitions and programmes in the non-commercial art world ... We hope to increase awareness and encourage discussion of these programmes and the pressing social issues that AIDS raises within American society." As good art workers we created a slide archive and began to network. That press release ends by noting that: "an idea involving a moratorium has been proposed to about thirty organizations. [It is] tentatively called A Day Without Art."

Our fledgling organization was quickly overwhelmed by Day Without Art. The event revealed the flimsy, ad hoc nature of our enterprise. We chose not to fund-raise for ourselves in the face of the dire shortage of money for People With AIDS, so at first we operated from our homes and workplaces. Then, in fall 1989, from office space in the Clocktower, which was generously provided by PS1, and later in space provided by the Art Matters Foundation. Planning for the first Day Without Art proceeded in the most decentralised fashion. We subtitled Day Without Art "a national day of mourning and action in response to the AIDS crisis." We wanted to encourage -- and link -- both responses but hoped that the less threatening "mourning" might allow for the sometimes more controversial "action." Our inability to co-ordinate a widely-dispersed national effort initially seemed a weakness, but proved to be an advantage. Local responses became the heart of a so-called national event.

The decision of whether or not to participate in Day Without Art catalyzed dozens of alternately inspirational, acrimonious, and invariably educational discussions among trustees of universities and museums about the roles their institutions might play in battling the AIDS crisis. An astonishing number of generally conservative institutions did decide to participate, many due to pressure from staff members.

More than 800 US art and AIDS groups participated in the first Day Without Art. Some spaces closed for the day, while at others staffers volunteered at AIDS-service organizations. Other organizations and galleries dimmed lights, shrouded -- or removed -- artwork and replaced it with AIDS-prevention information. Universities and art schools made brilliant use of the day to educate students about AIDS, racism, and homophobia. Children's museums in Boston, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Pittsburgh provided AIDS programming for kids in the form of plays, videos, poster-making, and discussions. The Iowa Art Council sponsored an AIDS-awareness poster competition for secondary-school students and exhibited the winners in the state Capitol.

With less than six-months' notice, at least 45 spaces mounted exhibitions devoted exclusively to art about AIDS. Video Data Bank's excellent six-hour programme, Video Against AIDS, and panels from The NAMES Project Quilt were widely exhibited. Until 1989, the Quilt had never been shown in a museum.

For that first Day Without Art, solo shows were devoted to AIDS works by Luis Cruz Azaceta, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Louise Lawler, Hillary Leone and Jennifer MacDonald, Ann Meredith, Brian Weil, Krysztof Wodiczko, performer Tim Miller, and film-maker Rosa Van Praunheim, to name just a few whose work might be familiar. Keith Haring painted a 24-foot x 10-foot mural depicting "Viral Images" at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena during the course of the day. (Keith asked that his mural hang in its present location until a cure is found.) Memorial exhibitions commemorated the artists Philip Dimitri Galas, Richard Irwin, Peter Hujar, Cookie Mueller, Rod Rhodes, Andreas Senser, and Paul Thek. The curators and administrators Nathan Kolodner, John McCarron, Bill Olander, the collector Sam Wagstaff, and the dealer-painter Nicholas Wilder were also celebrated and mourned via exhibition.

It is difficult to summarize hundreds of often inventive observations of the day. At one end of the spectrum were artist organizations that (anonymously) donated both people power and expertise in areas like graphics to AIDS service organizations. At its other end were glitzy observations like the Museum of Modern Art's; MoMA screened Common Threads -- the HBO-produced film about the NAMES Project Quilt -- and Elizabeth Taylor introduced it. The previous night MoMA had staged a vigil and programme highlighted by the premiere of an original composition composed and performed by Leonard Bernstein.

At Visual AIDS, we had only the vaguest sense of what would transpire on 1 December and how it would be received. Perhaps what was surprising was that the element of spectacle was largely absent from the individual observations. Nor did AIDS-as-spectacle dominate the copious and supportive press coverage of the day at a time when AIDS seemed to be slipping, once again, from the media front burner. Interestingly, we found that cultural reporters were much better targets for the AIDS information and rationales for the day than their science- and news-reporter counterparts. Even more interesting, journalists at the major daily papers in Sarasota and Los Angeles wondered why more local organizations were not participating in Day Without Art, provoking heated local debate. It's difficult to imagine another situation in which middle-class arts professionals might be forced to defend their decision to remain uninvolved in AIDS struggles.

Visual AIDS's propensity to stimulate debate was first clear a month before A Day Without Art. On 8 November 1989, the then-new National Endowment for the Arts Chairman John Frohnmayer inadvertently kicked off Day Without Art when he announced that he was rescinding a grant to Artists Space for Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, the AIDS exhibition organized by photographer Nan Goldin for Day Without Art. Both censorship and AIDS awareness became issues in this tense stand-off between progressive elements of the art communities and Frohnmayer, who was then busily cosying up to reactionary Senator Jesse Helms.

Because the show was conceived for Day Without Art, Visual AIDS found itself well-sited to intervene. After a concerted lobbying effort, Frohnmayer agreed to hold a 1 December meeting organized by Visual AIDS, that would include HIV positive artists. The meeting resulted in the revitalisation of the AIDS Working Group within the federal agency and NEA directives to its organisational mailing lists about compliance with the Disabilities Act and treatment of HIV-positive staff. It also spurred some ultimately fruitless work by the NEA regarding health insurance reform.

Because Visual AIDS straddled both the AIDS and art worlds, we began to function as a forum, a meeting place for emerging art-AIDS coalitions. We participated in the NEA's 1991 forum on AIDS and insisted that artists with AIDS be included in the meeting. We hosted the NEA's 1992 meeting of funders and art professionals that led to the recommendation to implement the second phase of the Estate Project designed to assist artists with AIDS. In 1991, we organized the World AIDS Day Coalition for the World Health Organization and a spectrum of AIDS organizations, although we ultimately felt that the participants saw us only as a vehicle for enhanced media attention. And of course we worked with the Coalition United for AIDS Action, which organized the AIDS demonstration and rally during the 1992 Democratic National Convention in New York.

Visual AIDS received the New York Governor's Art Award for the first Day Without Art. At the black-tie award ceremony at the Metropolitan Museum in June 1990, our acceptor, Philip Yenawine, took the opportunity to chide Governor Cuomo for his lackadaisical approach to the AIDS crisis. At that time, we were also feeling organisational growing pains. Our structure had been democratic-anarchic: we had a steering committee and a meeting chairperson but no officers. Nor were we being offered foundation money. The second Day Without Art approached and overwhelmed us as thoroughly as the first had. Our organisational circle had grown so large that producing more than a couple of mailings each year had become prohibitively costly. In 1990, we urged participating organizations to get beyond the "art ghettos" and out into community -- that is, communities. Urging was all we've ever been able to do and it's hard to know what effect that urging had.

Day Without Art 1990 signified a radical shift within the group. Our artist population increased substantially. This made us a livelier, more spirited bunch, but it sometimes gave us less access to useful contacts and our organisation constituents. Ideas remained our currency and in 1990 we began producing them at a rapid clip. The boundaries between programmes and programmatic artwork began to blur. We operated like an art collective, which I found extremely satisfying. A half-dozen new projects sprang up like mushrooms: Positive Actions: the Visual AIDS Competition was a competition for a temporary public artwork about AIDS to be funded by the Public Art Fund. Entrants were asked to consider these questions: Can art and design make a difference as friends and colleagues confront HIV infection? What can we do as artists and citizens in the public arena to inform, move, inspire, and/or provoke audiences? What sort of physical, social, or political sites would be appropriate for a work about AIDS?

The "Editors' Project" was a way of coercing the normally not very receptive art magazines to do more about AIDS. Ranging from After Image to Artforum, and from Contemporanea to Shift, eleven of them published different fragments of Group Material's AIDS Timeline in their December issues. "Night Without Light" saw the skylines of New York and San Francisco darkened for fifteen minutes and this symbolic observance was repeated throughout the US in 1991 and 1992.

Another project that debuted on 1 December 1990, was the Electric Blanket, an outdoor slide-projection event. Information and statistics about AIDS and photo-images of PWAs were projected onto the side of the Cooper Union in the East Village while bands played. Most of the pictures had been gathered in the neighborhood, making this a very local tribute. The Electric Blanket has been exhibited inside or outside art spaces from Seattle to Hamburg. It continues to travel and is augmented as often as possible with local images. Perhaps the 1990 project with the most audience-potential was Bravo cable network's Moment Without Television, followed by 48-hours of continuous AIDS programming. Bravo's groundbreaking work continues for its third year and has apparently inspired PBS and MTV to wake up and follow suit. Visual AIDS has initiated other artists' programmes, but I know you get the idea. I want to turn to just one other Visual AIDS-instigated project that's not specifically connected with Day Without Art. I want to discuss it because it's quite misunderstood and it's underestimated. Its slyly subversive character is also emblematic of the way Visual AIDS has operated. That project is The Ribbon Project -- which is the way our trademark reads -- but you know it as The Red Ribbon.

The red ribbon debuted on the televised Tony Award Ceremonies in late Spring 1991, and now you can't turn on the television without seeing them. We knew how subversive the ribbon was, when -- a full fifteen months after its creation -- Republican handlers ripped it off Barbara Bush's chest at the 1992 Republican convention in Houston. The ribbon has enabled writers who do think and talk about AIDS to write about it. New York Newsday ran an article titled "Red Ribbon to AIDS Kindness" on 6 October 1992, about the apparently red ribbon-strewn Miss America pageant. Bear in mind that the ribbon is hardly news any more. In fact, one might assume that the ribbon is simply mandatory accessorising at any television event or one might alternately assume that it continues to symbolize AIDS-concern, or both. Certainly people wear ribbons for the "wrong" reasons, just as some people wore Silence=Death buttons for a variety of reasons (occasionally in order to get laid). All the same, I am absolutely convinced that the red ribbon never deterred anybody from doing something more meaningful to end the AIDS crisis.

In any case, I did learn from "The Red Ribbon to AIDS Kindness" article that the new Miss America volunteers in an AIDS hospice, doesn't believe that the Bush-Quayles have done enough to combat the epidemic, and plans to continue to talk publicly about AIDS during her reign. The author ended his column with a stirring denunciation of AIDS-phobia and homophobia. It's unclear to me whether Miss America's or the writer's comments would have appeared before the advent -- or should I say onslaught? -- of the ribbon.

If I've given you the impression that Visual AIDS is largely a sum of its project parts, that's probably not inaccurate. This organisational umbrella-of-a-structure has made it easier to respond to quickly changing AIDS- and media realities. Certainly the one thing we have learned from AIDS-work is that AIDS crises are dynamic. What was needed or useful yesterday is irrelevant or passe today. The ad hoc nature of the group has also allowed for a membership where satisfaction derives from working on a project, rather than simply belonging to an organisation in which 'membership' is, frankly, a bit of non sequitur. Visual AIDS faces what every AIDS organisation faces: Burn-out and the illness of many of our most active members. We also face changes in the art world -- some of them positive. Over the past few years there's been an attitudinal sea-change in the acceptance of tough, AIDS-related content in exhibited artwork. Such works remind us that art's traditional purpose is to teach. And that the anti-didacticism of so much late modernist art is really an anomaly, an exception in Western art's several thousand-years'-long history. Effective, socially-engaged art practices can help save lives. But only if large and vocal elements within the arts communities help ensure their broadest possible reach.

Text courtesy of Robert Atkins