The Ross Laycock Initiative for the Exploration of Science, Art, AIDS

A special web gallery in honor of Ross Laycock (1959–1991), biochemist, poet, activist, and partner of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Please consider making a gift in honor of Ross to help us raise $75,000 by World AIDS Day.

Since 2016, Visual AIDS has worked with Artist Member Carl George to uplift the legacy of Ross Laycock and cultivate new scholarship on his role in the oeuvre of Felix Gonzalez Torres through the Carl George / Felix Gonzalez Torres / Ross Laycock Archive. On long term loan to Visual AIDS for nearly a decade, the collection has inspired numerous artistic and academic projects and been featured in exhibitions at the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery and the University of Southern California. 

We are proud to share that the Getty Research Institute has recently acquired the collection from Carl, and has recently listed it on their catalog here.

My hope is that this project will encourage artists to explore the intersections between art, science, and AIDS, and will highlight the work of artists in the Visual AIDS artist registry who have used the science of HIV to inform their artistic practice. Artists like Valerie Caris Blitz who sewed her printed blood work results into a hospital gown with a scarlet red lining. Or Anthony Viti, who creates stunning abstract paintings using his own bodily fluids, along with traditional art materials. Or Ben Cuevas who knits cushions in the shape of HIV meds. 

Ross would have loved this.

Over the coming months, we will invite activists, scientists, doctors, and others in the Visual AIDS community to add their reflections and responses to work from the Visual AIDS archive that engage with medicine. 

With two museum exhibitions and five new archival collections, this has been a year of momentous growth for Visual AIDS. Yet we have also seen devastating funding cuts across the board — HIV research, treatment, services, as well as for the arts, archives, and museums — and an alarming uptick in AIDS denialism. This fall we are raising $75,000 to sustain the work of Visual AIDS in this urgent moment. Please join us by donating to support our work to repair gaps in the cultural record and highlight the insights and contributions of artists living with HIV.

Cockroaches 

A few years ago, I was completely blown away by an exhibition of General Idea’s works on paper at the Drawing Center in New York. Seeing the “dolphin blow job drawings” and the “cockroach drawings” side by side — and how they became one and the same— made me laugh and cry at the same time. I love when art gives you permission to feel — to get emotional, to get turned on, to be carried away. I love exhibitions that feel like going to church, or losing yourself on a sweaty dance floor, or at a sex party — that kind of surrender.

Jorge Zontal is one of those masters my generation was never taught about. No one mentioned him in art school. We had to stumble upon him by chance, years later, and wonder how different our way of seeing might have been if we’d met him earlier — if he had been part of the story we were given when we first fell in love with art.

“During Zontal’s last months and as he was going blind, he represented the black floaters in his eyes as cockroaches,” the label said. I’ve been reading about art for more than twenty years — so how is it that I’m only discovering the cockroach drawings now, I thought? A body of work that so hauntingly and beautifully ties together the act of seeing with the act of creating, the way life and art overlap and bleed into each other — the very thing everyone’s been talking about for a century?!

And even beyond that — beyond HIV/AIDS — why have so few people paid attention to Edvard Munch’s late works? The ones he made when he was losing his sight, painting what he was literally seeing: wild, colorful hallucinations caused by an intraocular hemorrhage, and that huge black hole devouring part of the canvas, echoing the blind spot that had opened in his own vision.

Annie Sprinkle is, once again, bravely facing breast cancer — and at the same time creating some of the fiercest, most alive work she’s ever made. Why don’t we pay attention? Why do we keep pretending the cockroaches aren’t running everywhere?

Pietro Rigolo
Chief Curator and Head of Collection
Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, Italy

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s (Untitled) Portrait of Ross in LA is the installation which made me experience the transformative power of art for the very first time.

Felix created coded art with emotional metaphors, inviting viewers to participate, calling attention to the spiritual impact of AIDS. A really moving example is (Untitled)  Portrait of Ross in LA, an installation he created the year his partner Ross Laycock died of AIDS (1991).

It features a pile of colorful candy in Ross’s exact weight before he got sick, 175 pounds. The viewer is encouraged to eat the candies, echoing the experience of Catholic communion (Felix was born in Cuba, a very religious country). The installation disappears slowly, just like Ross did, alluding to society’s silent participation in the devastation of the gay community during the AIDS crisis. But, as the installation gets continuously replenished by the museums, Felix has managed to give his beloved Ross eternal life.

When I read the explanation about this piece, I had to sit down because I burst in tears uncontrollably.  Art has that power. At least Felix’s art does. That’s why he became one of the most influential artists of the 90’s. His work resonates as vibrantly today as it did then and its social and political message is as relevant as ever.

Thank you, Felix for making us cry and, in doing so, fully understand the catastrophic impact of AIDS, something that religion, scientists and politicians won’t ever be able to do.

A Regular Day
On Carl George’s DHPG Mon Amour

I hope you won’t mind that I’ve brought Susan Sontag along again, but here she is, writing in AIDS and Its Metaphors: ‘Indeed, to get AIDS is precisely to be revealed, in the majority of cases so far, as a member of a certain “risk group,” a community of pariahs.’ Sontag writes of how the illness ‘flushes out an identity’ and ‘has been a creator of community as well as an experience that isolates the ill and exposes them to harassment and persecution.’

Probably my first image of the community is out on the streets: scaling walls, lying supine as human obstacles, chanting with fists in the air. I’m forever grateful to these activists for their public interventions. Meanwhile — not at all separate, but interlinked — works of art like DHPG Mon Amour bear witness in ways that bring the crisis home. As with Sontag’s text, Carl George’s short film was produced in 1989. At the time, some American states still outlawed sodomy within the privacy of one’s own home. In Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), the Supreme Court decided against striking down those bans. Justice Lewis Powell, who’d wobbled then ultimately cast the deciding vote against sexual freedom, took umbrage that lawyer Laurence Tribe’s argument described sodomy within ‘the sanctity of the home.’ Powell harumphed into his notebook: ‘Home is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. It usually connotes family, husband and wife, and children.’

In DHPG Mon Amour, through the quiet wildness of Super-8 film, the viewer spends time at home with David and Joe. First, Joe fetches provisions after work. Back at their apartment, he greets David, skimpy on the couch, with a kiss and a belly rub. The dog gets a belly rub, too, then gives David a lick. Food is prepared in the kitchen to be barbecued on the rooftop among potted plants. We see David preparing his dose of DHPG, the antiviral medication to treat CMV retinitis, an ocular opportunistic infection that was common among people with AIDS. With the elegance of a craftsman, David dilutes the contents of a vial, mixing it with a bag of sugar water. And it involves a lot of needles and being very careful and being sterile about everything…, says David in the voiceover commentary. But it’s not that bad. You get used to it very quickly.

In the few months between filming and recording this audio track, David lost most of his sight. Joe took on the responsibility of infusing David at eight in the morning, four in the afternoon, and midnight. In the voiceover, Joe can be heard guiding David through the footage as it plays, noting his drug preparation matter-of-factly. When I watch and rewatch the film, I must accept the deterioration that occurred so quickly, accept the power of disease, accept the brutality of time. Through it all, David and Joe demonstrate care upon care upon care.

Their motivation for participating in the film was to wake people up. The two had taken as much control over managing their health care as possible. Resisting the consensus around AZT. Dosing David with DHPG before it was approved. As Joe says, just fucking do something about it. He describes the precision with which they prepare and administer David’s dose. You become total virgos, which is what I am, so you just become these anal fucking compulsive people, and everything is laid out… He adds, somehow sweetly, with a lightness that is ironic but also true, And this is just us at home. This is a regular day.

Carl George makes art in a range of mediums and lexicons, and to me his oeuvre is united in its variance. When I first looked at his untitled paintings, the radical abstraction of Kazimir Malevich came to mind. In 1915, Malevich wrote: ‘But a blissful sense of liberating nonobjectivity drew me forth into the “desert,” where nothing is real except feeling… and so feeling became the substance of my life.’ I then think about the New Narrative literary movement in the eighties, wherein queer writers were partially drawn to something like this “desert.” One of the movement’s founders, Robert Glück, later described ‘a luxurious idealism in which the speaking subject ‘rejects the confines of representation and disappears into the largest freedom, that of language itself.’ But he and his cohorts would not submit to faith in some total escape from social realities. Glück has stated, ‘Whole areas of my experience, my gay experience, were not admitted to this utopia. The mainstream reflected a resoundingly coherent image of myself back to me — an image so unjust that it amounted to a tyranny that I could not turn my back on. We had been disastrously described by the mainstream — a naming whose most extreme (though, not uncommon) expression was physical violence. Combatting this injustice required at least a provisionally stable identity.’

We don’t just self-identify, we are identified by others. We can and should resist attaching ourselves to either form of identification; but the way I see it, there may also be a nobility in holding these identities, provisionally but also protectively, with disjuncture but also respect. This act of holding may be a bridge — in the immediate or across time — to others who have been ‘disastrously described’ in similar ways. We can become siblings through the experience of being shunted and shunned, and through finding other paths, other homes. In the murk of how we’ve been identified and disregarded, we may take some pleasure, even discover some pride, even as we ultimately aspire to the transcendence of other people’s descriptions.

Which is all to say that it seems to me an artist can simultaneously pursue the sublime and the plainspoken.

At the end of DHPG Mon Amour, David and Joe are side by side on the couch. They’re in nothing but shorts, besides David’s glasses and the two patches where needles enter his smooth chest. Spontaneously the two beam broadly at each other — amused, it can be inferred, by something on the tv. When the time came to record the voiceover, David’s blindness was so close to complete that he could no longer discern a television picture. As they spoke their commentary, the song “Blue Mood” by Randy Crawford played. It is precisely when she belts out the line ‘but I guess I gotta keep on smiling’ that the film shows the two men breaking into grins. On the audio track, Joe expresses utter delight, then explains the synchronicity to Joe, who laughs, becoming a part of the marvel he cannot quite see. They’re happy all over again; but this time, Joe aids in David’s perception. Their mutuality has changed shape, as mutualities do. But still they arrive at the wonderful knowledge that the happy moment will continue to reverberate through the film. Of course, this happiness will change shape too, depending on who is viewing and wherever it is they’re currently at.

Now I’m thinking of something an artist once told me about Prospect Cottage, the Victorian fisherman’s hut on a shingle beach in the south east of England. After Saint Derek Jarman bought it in 1987 — tending to a ruggedly mystical garden, making art, taking medication, synthesizing these daily activities — it transformed into a holy place. The pitch-black shack with yellow window frames, loomed over by a pair of nuclear power stations, is now a destination for followers of Jarman’s legacy as well as tourists with a vague notion that someone important was once in residence. Anyway, this artist, who’d been close to him, described Derek’s final period in Prospect Cottage as sexless but intimate. Derek and friends would squeeze onto the sofa to watch Blind Date, the dating game show. I picture a restless sleepover of caustic and frustrated lost boys.

In 1992, Derek Jarman produced a series of intense paintings in which multivalent phrases like ‘sex horror’ are scraped by finger into impasto paint over photocopies of tabloid newspapers with homophobic headlines. The title of the series — ‘Blind Date’ — is gallows humor; the artist, losing his sight, needed help to get the paintings done. I’d perceived these late works as hellish, furious, feverish, in part propelled by misguided prescriptions. Indeed, they may be all these things. But how compelling to hear that the boys in the cottage actually did watch the campy tv show Blind Date. I’m reminded that to be serious isn’t the same as being pious. We can have one foot in the “desert” and still tune into the broadcast of a regular day. Sontag, once more: ‘Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character.” Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “a camp,” they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.’

I am thankful to David and Joe for opening their home to Carl’s camera. Carl documents intravenous injection unflinchingly, while maybe none of them expected how their attention would roam to the watering of rooftop plants, the dog, the heat, a magazine, bare feet. I am not only shown the darkness falling before David’s eyes, but the way he and Joe filled one another with light. I am inside a place where it is acceptable to accept anger, just laughter is permitted and music is heard. I am witness to the expansive possibilities of commitment. I’m invited into a moment when two lovers smile, surrendering to relief. I’m tasked to consider home as not only a place to retreat into sameness, but a site from which to foster tomorrow’s difference.