Don’t Mourn Consecrate: Talking about Juan González’s historic public art

This post is part of “Community Knowledge Practices,” a guest-edited portfolio by Theodore Kerr that documents conversations that reshape historical narratives by leveling the playing field between scholars, community members, and knowledge bearers. Read more about the portfolio here.

Introduction

Not much is known about Don’t Mourn Consecrate, an AIDS-related installation work by artist Juan González (b. 1942, Cuba; d. 1993, New York City). One of the first public artworks to engage with the AIDS crisis in the US, the work debuted in the streetfront windows of New York University's Grey Art Gallery September 1987, predating Let The Record Show, the landmark ACT UP installation in the New Museum windows, by two months.

And yet, Don’t Mourn has been treated as a minor piece within González's larger body of work, not even included in his catalogue raisonné. On October 19, 2023, I organized a public event with Leah Sweet from NYU’s Grey Art Gallery (now Grey Art Museum) and Nicholas Martin from NYU Special Collections to increase awareness of Don’t Mourn, with the hope of also generating new information about it. The event was organized as a Long Table, a feminist format that begins with a table populated by invited speakers and empty chairs. After the invited speakers present, the audience, created in a circle around the table, are invited to step up, sit in an empty chair and engage in dialogue, either asking a question based on what was said, or adding to the conversation through their own thoughts. The long table format facilitates community knowledge practice as it literally makes room at the “table” for a diversity of perspectives, while also holding space for expertise as a form of “table-setting”.

Below is an edited transcript of that event that begins with three presentations on the history and context of González's work, followed by three responses providing contemporary entry points to consider the work. The event ends with a collection of audience comments.

Contents

Part 1: Presentations

• David Brinker
• Leah Sweet
• Theodore Kerr
• Samuel Ernest
• Carlos Motta
• Melanie Kress

Part 2: Audience Remarks

• Eric Rhein
• Teriananda
• Jess Camacho
• Fernando Mariscal
• Pato Hebert
• Kyle Croft

Postscript

• Max Freeman

Part 1: Presentations

David Brinker

Hi, my name is David Brinker and I’m director of the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. I want to thank the organizers of this evening’s event for the invitation to share with you part of the history of Don’t Mourn, Consecrate, particularly how the work came to reside at MOCRA.

MOCRA is the first museum to focus on the spiritual and religious dimensions in contemporary art. Through exhibitions, collections and programs, MOCRA highlights and explores the ways contemporary visual artists engage the religious and spiritual dimensions, understood expansively and inclusively.

MOCRA opened in 1993, emerging from the doctoral studies of our founding Director, Catholic Jesuit priest Terrence Dempsey. Father Dempsey’s dissertation examined a significant, if under-recognized, current in American art in the 1980s: artists who were engaging with the religious and spiritual dimensions in their work. Not, as might be expected, as ironic commentary or superficial critique. Rather, this was sustained engagement, perhaps critical or doubtful or generally non-institutional, but sustained nonetheless.

I’ll pause here to say that if you find yourself intrigued about what MOCRA has been up to the past 30 years, please visit our website or follow us on social media. Or, if you find yourself in St. Louis, please stop in and say hello.

Among those who assisted Father Dempsey along the way was Tom Sokolowski, who at the time was the Director of the Grey Art Gallery. Sokolowksi remained a friend and supporter of Dempsey’s work, speaking at MOCRA twice and facilitating MOCRA’s presentations of Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds during his tenure as director of the Andy Warhol Museum. I have pieced together what follows from materials in our files at MOCRA, as well as conversations with Father Dempsey and a 2011 interview with Sokolowski on the MOCRA Voices podcast.

It seems likely that Dempsey and Juan González met through Sokolowski. The two were corresponding as early as February 1987, and their letters suggest that they connected not only over González’s art, but on a personal and spiritual level as well. I haven’t been able to ascertain when they first met in person, but it may have been whileDon’t Mourn, Consecrate was on display at the Grey between September and October of 1987.

Father Dempsey took a number of photographs of the work. Unfortunately, they don’t provide a wider context of the display in relationship to nearby Washington Square Park, as this placement was essential to the conception and impact of the work. In his MOCRA Voices interview, Sokolowski spoke of realizing that the windows of the Grey could catch a lot of eyes in the same way that department store display windows grab people’s attention as they hurry along.

Don’t Mourn, Consecrate consists of several elements. Two long sheets of paper, each about 10 feet high and 4 feet wide, hang side by side. It’s possible that the image they bear is a photo enlargement from a maquette which is also in the MOCRA collection, but I don’t have insight into the exact mechanics. (I’ll say more about the maquette presently.) Prominent in the image is a direct visual quote from Hans Holbein's 16th-century Dead Christ in the Tomb, which features a life-size, startlingly naturalistic depiction of a corpse. Here the figure of Christ is recontextualized to identify with the gaunt, emaciated bodies associated with late-stage AIDS all too familiar at that time.

So, how did the work come to be at MOCRA? Following the presentation at the Grey, it seems that Father Dempsey and González discussed the possibility of displaying the work at the Newman Center in Berkeley, California. However, in a letter from July 1989, Father Dempsey describes financial hurdles, and this plan did not come to fruition.

That same letter confirms that González had given the maquette for the work to Father Dempsey in November 1988. At some point before the end of González’s life on Christmas Eve in 1993, he also gave the full-scale work to Father Dempsey, apparently with the intent it would become part of the collection at the soon-to-open MOCRA.

A tribute exhibition titled, A Bouquet for Juan was held at Nancy Hoffman Gallery throughout June 1994. Portions of that exhibition were reconstituted as the core of an exhibition that opened in October 1994 at MOCRA titled, Consecrations: The Spiritual in Art in the Time of AIDS. Not only did González’s work inspire the title of the exhibition, but the piece itself was re-imagined for installation at MOCRA. Plexiglass panels helped to simulate the storefront windows, and we made a new scroll listing annual deaths from AIDS.

Consecrations was a pivotal exhibition that brought MOCRA widespread critical attention and established MOCRA’s approach to contemporary art as not only viable, but vital.

Since Consecrations, the work was displayed in 2009 and 2010 in the exhibition Good Friday: The Suffering Christ in Contemporary Art, and more recently in the 2019 exhibition Gratitude.

Our presentation of the piece has evolved slightly over time. For Consecrations and Good Friday, we used pre-cut red vinyl lettering. For Gratitude, however, we used custom vinyl lettering that more closely replicates the positioning and typeface used in the maquette. In our Good Friday presentation, the updated number scroll reflected cumulative annual deaths from AIDS worldwide. For the most recent showing, however, we omitted an accompanying scroll.

So, that is the story, as best I know it, of how Don’t Mourn, Consecrate, made its way from Greenwich Village to Midtown St. Louis, the result of the deep friendship between an artist and a museum director. It’s a work that continues to resonate and has profoundly shaped the development of MOCRA.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Leah Sweet

Hello, everyone, and thanks to all of you for being here this evening. My name is Leah Sweet, and I’m the Head of Education and Programs at the Grey Art Museum, NYU’s fine arts museum, and we’re joined by the Grey’s director, Lynn Gumpert, as well. I first encountered Juan González’s Don’t Mourn, Consecrate when Ted brought it to my attention shortly after I joined the Grey’s staff about a year and a half ago, and I was immediately intrigued. Of course, I’m keen to understand the Grey’s institutional history and share that with our audiences, and Don’t Mourn, Consecrate also spoke to me as an art historian who works on Joseph Beuys, a postwar German artist who heavily engaged religious and spiritual modes shaping experience and meaning in his art.

It’s interesting to revisit this important installation as the Grey moves from Washington Square Park, the museum’s home since 1975, to its new location at 18 Cooper Square. We hope you’ll come by to see our new space in March 2024 when we reopen as the Grey Art Museum.

Following on David’s introduction to the work, what I hope to contribute is a bit of context for Don’t Mourn Consecrate as a work of public art that was on display at the Grey Art Gallery for seven weeks, from September 14 to October 25, 1987. Who helped shape this installation, what objectives were assigned to it, and who were the publics that encountered it in the fall of 1987? As I’ve started to work on these questions, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Special Collections to access to the Grey’s archive, which is housed here, as well as to back issues of the Washington Square News, NYU’s independent student newspaper, to better understand what public conversations about AIDS was happening on campus. Hopefully the following will provide stimulus for the conversation to come, and we can revisit any photos later if desired.

How did this installation come into being, or, how is it the result of thoughts, desires, and institutions specific to the fall of 1987? As David mentioned, Tom Sokolowski, the Grey’s former director, was essential to its instantiation. Sokolowski was a founding member of Visual AIDS, and played a crucial role in establishing Day With(out) Art in 1989 and the red ribbon project in 1991. At the Grey, Sokolowski mounted some of the first AIDS-related art exhibitions in the US, including Juan González’s Don’t Mourn, Consecrate (1987), Rosalind Solomon: Portraits in the Time of AIDS (1988), Ken Chu’s AIDS Series (1990), The AIDS Bottle Project (1991), and Australian AIDS Posters (1992).

Sokolowski introduced installations by contemporary artists to the Grey’s windows in 1986 in line with his conviction that art incites action, empathy, and or even just interaction with pressing social issues. In a memorandum to NYU’s Vice President of External Affairs dated Oct. 22, 1987, Sokolowski explains that each installation connects with the theme of the Grey’s current exhibition inside the gallery, as well as his hope that these window installations will “challenge both the NYU community and the larger Greenwich Village community to consider those issues which are engaging the world of visual arts, a world which is increasingly taking a greater interest in social issues.” In 1987, these issues included “urban blight, the social responsibility for the homeless, urban crime, and the “relentless mortality rate due to the AIDS virus.” Sokolowski envisioned the Grey’s windows and its exhibitions as a means to take leadership role in the community, NYU and Greenwich Village, through art.

Don’t Mourn Consecrate paired with an exhibition called Morality Tales: History Painting in the 1980s—curated by Tom Sokolowski, and which opened and closed on the same dates as the window installation. Featuring thirteen artists including Leon Golub and Sue Coe, the exhibition explored what Sokolowski identified as a underrecognized return to history painting by contemporary artists, i.e. large-format, didactic, inclined to subject matter that serves as a vehicles for moral commentary that started in Europe in the 17th century. Sokolowski classified the works in the exhibition, which focused on topics such as South Africa, child prostitution, and others, as “emotionally accessible and responsible art,” and importantly, against dispassion and irony, calling out in the exhibition’s catalog an insufficient effort to deal with the AIDS crisis in art.

Thus, Juan González—who worked in hyperrealism and magic realism, and whose art historical references convey the artist’s deep knowledge of European painting— was selected to pair with Morality Tales, though it’s not clear from the records whether Sokolowski chose González to do this project, or whether González was suggested to him by others working on the project. And indeed, selected not just for the window installation’s content, which as David mentioned, related to works that González executed in 1986, but also with an understanding of how art in particular communicates moral, religious, and other commentary with the viewer.

For example, as David mentioned, there are two windows, one conveying the urgency of the AIDS crisis with statistics from the CDC, and the other with Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, whose vividly-rendered putrefaction is installed in the Kunstmuseum Basel at a height where the viewer can confront it with maximum intimacy, just as in the Grey’s installation, at a height where the passer-by’s head occupies the same level as Christ’s body, recalling the devotional relationship of Christian worshiper and altarpiece. The Grey’s press release for the installation states: “Mr. González’s artwork deals with the AIDS crisis and its implications for humanity. The title clearly defines the artist’s intention for the viewer, that is, an active response to the danger posed by a passive acceptance of the virus.”

The Grey’s press release also gives additional insight into the growing list of AIDS-related fatalities per week, recalling a similar ritual on Washington Square during the Vietnam War, when the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South kept count of the war dead on a public plaque displayed on the church’s façade. Correspondence from Sokolowski indicates that he wanted to make the addition of the new numbers each week into a ceremony conducted by celebrity volunteers, but this was not realized.

And pushing out a bit, keeping with the theme of specificity to the 1987 installation, González’s work was also the result of an inter-institutional team, who framed it in response to the overwhelming loss of life due to the AIDS pandemic in general, but also very decidedly within the artistic community specifically. This group of institutions included the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, who represented González, but also two freshly-minted organizations in the fall of 1987, Northern Lights Alternative, an AIDS service agency providing counseling and education, and its related enterprise with Bree Scott-Hartland, the Artists with AIDS League Project, known as AWAL, which was founded to support artists with AIDS, specifically to help them continue to mount exhibitions and have other opportunities for realizing work. The Grey’s press and AWAL press release for González’s installation indicate that Don’t Mourn was in fact an inaugural if not the inaugural exhibition for AWAL, and thus it’s interesting to consider the impact of this on the presentation and reception of this work.

For example, a project proposal to launch AWAL from 1987 in the Grey’s files stresses the need to “protect our cultural heritage as it is threatened by the AIDS epidemic,” citing recent press in The New York Times and Vanity Fair containing statistics about loss of life in the art world. Similarly, an undated press release from NLA and AWAL announcing González’s installation states:

This is a unique time not known since the Middle Ages. The threat of the loss of artists, their legacy, and the record of this crisis is frighteningly real. The deaths of artists makes this epidemic more visible, and more traumatic to our civilization.

JUAN GONZALEZ joins with AWAL as a supporter of this project with his installation piece in the windows of the Grey Art Gallery and Study Center Don’t Mourn, Consecrate, the sincerest form of commitment to his community. He feels the threat of the AIDS crisis. Many artists feel affected by this crisis and their dedication has found expression in their work which is now being developed into a larger context by the Artists with AIDS League Project.

Given the abundance of information on AIDS-related education at NYU that I found in relation to the Grey’s files on Don’t Mourn, Consecrate, I also investigated the context of NYU, researching how AIDS was discussed in the Washington Square News between 1982-1988. And it’s a remarkable fact that the topic of AIDS first appears in a variety of student newspapers in 1983 and then disappears completely for a couple of years, reappearing infrequently in 1985 and then becoming a sustained topic of frequent, prolonged discussion by the fall of 1987.

Sokolowski was a member of NYU’s AIDS Education Committee, which included many high-level administrators and NYU’s chaplain, Father Ray Rafferty. Meeting notes from August 1987 reflect the University preparing to welcome students back to campus, and the AIDS-related initiatives that NYU had generated for them, including:

• A brand new AIDS Education Center at NYU
• AIDS pamphlets handed out at registration, in all orientation packets for new students
• Educational posters, and an NYU AIDS Hotline
• Health Week to include a major presentation on AIDS with a presentation by C. Everett Koop
• Safer Sex workshops with roleplaying
• AIDS videos “Sex, Drugs, and AIDS” “Beyond Fear” and “People Like Us” and AIDS film produced by Ronald Reagan, Jr.
• RA’s gone through training in conjunction with American College Health Association and the GMHC; condoms in all dorms, student center, bookstore; window display on AIDS in the bookstore
• Task force of colleges in the city; students want to develop own task force on AIDS
• AIDS benefit exhibitions and concerts on campus

All of which were reported on at length and repeatedly within the Washington Square News.

I’ll end with this clipping from The Philadelphia Inquirer writing about Don’t Mourn in an article as part of a series “AIDS: A Day with A Global Killer” from October 22, 1987, that proclaims “In the art world, thinning ranks” and only shows the right side of the installation with the CDC’s statistics. I show it because I’m always fascinated by the afterlife of ephemeral performances and installations, both through images like these which now have the power of documents to shape how we understand these works, and in their subsequent restagings and reinstallations as well, which reinforce the work’s ongoing relevance. What changes, what is lost, what is gained in their repetition? Other questions I’m pondering which might be fodder for discussion are how the religious nature of, and almost devotional engagement with, Don’t Mourn, Consecrate affects its reception within art history and other fields as well. And perhaps I’m too literal here, but I find this photo so intriguing given the threat that I mentioned of AIDS to the art world, but as well to the pervasive lack of discussion of the word “consecrate” in any of the installation’s press or reviews. Thus, I have questions about the depiction of Christ’s body in juxtaposition with bodies associated with late-stage AIDS as David mentioned, especially with the idea of something becoming sacred, with the idea of transubstantiation, which itself suggests something experiencing a categorical shift from one thing to another, rooted or at least linked to belief from a public in that change. And it seems to me that there’s so much more in this constellation of images and words that can be teased out and expanded upon, and I’m hopeful that will happen here tonight. Thank you.

Theodore Kerr

Every year since 2015 I have visited St. Louis to research the life and death of Robert Rayford, a 16-year-old teenager who died with HIV in 1969, a fact the medical team that tended to him at the time were able to confirm in the mid 1980s as HIV testing became available.

I arrived thinking that Rayford’s story would be part of local knowledge. But it wasn’t. This echoed the larger HIV response where people also did not know or speak of Rayford. Was this because he was Black? Because he was young? Because his story doesn’t fit the so-called narrative?

Sadly, as is often the case when people die young, there is not a lot known about Rayford, and after that first summer in St. Louis, I realized that while I would still conduct research in archives and such, that to best and truly honor Rayford’s story I needed to remember what folks like José Muñoz, Toni Morrisson, Pierre Nora, Matita Sturken, and Sadiya Hartman teach us: memory is many things and can be contained in the ephemera, culture, stories, and imagination of the communities were our dead once lived. The past is not only what we left behind, but what does and does not get dragged forward.

To do this research I engage in what I call community knowledge practice, a means to both share what I am learning as I learn it, while facilitating knowledge sharing from within the community. In these situations, I share what I have gathered about Rayford and local AIDS history, while also listening and learning.

By working to understand AIDS better through the story of Rayford and St. Louis I have found myself, a long time AIDS organizer and writer, in places I never thought I would be: including the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at St. Louis University. For years, friends suggested I go. I finally did, starting with their online offerings. It was on the MOCRA website that I found that AIDS was a big influence on the founding of the museum. The inaugural exhibition by the founding director, Father Terrence Dempsey, included many artworks by artists living with HIV, and the third exhibition at the museum was all about HIV, Consecrations: The Spiritual in Art in the Time of AIDS. Its name, as you can tell, was inspired by the artwork we are here to talk about today.

The legacy of curating with HIV in mind remains, and can be seen most keenly in current Executive Director David Brinker’s online engagement. A spring 2020 post entitled “More than just numbers” finds Brinker wrestling with the fact that at the time, the US had just officially marked 100,000 deaths from COVID-19. Brinker wrote:

We at MOCRA don’t pretend to have any great insights, but we do believe in the capacity for art to carry us past the limitations of speech in articulating our grief, fear, confusion, and anger, to remind us of the power of empathy, compassion, and solidarity. This can be especially true of art that emerges from an engagement with the spiritual and religious dimensions: art rooted in the fertile soil of wisdom found in the world’s faith traditions, or shaped by the discipline of ritual, spiritual, or artistic practices; art that taps into a treasury of images and themes that speak across time, geography, and culture.

Brinker then wrote about Don’t Mourn Consecrate as an example of an artwork that works with and beyond numbers, noting that the original art installation, and subsequent exhibitions, includes a tally of AIDS related deaths in the US. Included in that tally is González’s own life and death. He died with HIV in 1993.

But also, I am excited to focus on Don’t Mourn, the impetus of tonight’s gathering. I am captivated by what we don’t know. Don’t Mourn is not treated as a major work. And, as Leah has so worked hard to find, there is not a lot written about the work at the time of its 1987 installation.

So, as I have learned in St. Louis, through Robert Rayford, not knowing something is a kind of information. We can ask why there is not more information available? Or who has the information? And sometimes even, is this information I need or want to know?

Not knowing is also a great reason to bring people together, like we are tonight.

After me, we will hear from Carlos, Samuel, and Melanie. The three of them will be providing us their thoughts about the work, not as experts on it, but as brilliant people with experiences they can bring. After they speak, we will open up the discussion.

To facilitate that happening, we are using the long table format. At the table now are the folks who have been invited to talk first, with some empty chairs. Around us is a circle of listening. After the invited folks have spoken, they can stay where they are, or sit in the circle of listening. When there is an empty chair at this table, anyone is invited to occupy it with the goal of sharing.

Lastly, speaking personally I just want to name an awareness I have that we are taking about death as it is happening in many ways: specifically im thinking about the genocide of Palestinian people happening as we speak, and as COVID and HIV remain health crises even as responses are threatened or removed all together.

A roundtable is rooted in a faith around conversation, connection and community. What we may not know or be able to handle may be offered at the table. What we have in terms of knowledge or research or resources can be offered at the table.

Samuel Ernest

Thank you to Ted, Leah, and Nicholas for inviting me and for your work organizing this event.

I am a doctoral candidate in theology at Yale, writing on gay theological responses to the AIDS crisis. The dissertation is moving me toward an image that emerged in the late 1980s, the image of the “Body of Christ with AIDS.” The Body of Christ with AIDS is the church with AIDS. It is a symbol of eschatological unity imbued with the human tendency to fall apart. In his book, Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde, Robb Hernández says, “AIDS breaks down all that it touches—bodies, social ties, material culture, archival bonds, record wholes.” Add the church to that list. The Son of God, too.

I look at Don’t Mourn Consecrate and am confronted with a dead body. I confess my attention privileges the panel on the left. The numbers, rising while they descend, are abstract, but on the body, there are dark spots on the hands and feet and a wound in the side. I read this as the body of Jesus in the tomb—both a dead God and a dead, beloved human. A dead Palestinian Jew. His body rests at the hard bottom edge of an ambiguous space. A landscape with thick fog, maybe—it teeters between serene and turbulent. A wreath of white roses hangs in the air, already breaking the injunction below that we are not to mourn. Mourners lay a wreath at the site of their beloved’s body, so the mourning has already begun. The wreath hangs in the air like a portal. To where? To when? It is at once a sign of finality and an opening up into something else.

As much as I draw my attention to the wreath, my eyes always fall back down. I want to draw closer to this body. To see his head, his hands, his feet. Touch him. Touch the image—kiss him. He doesn’t look comfortable. Don’t you want to scoop him up and place him somewhere more final?

To see the man as Jesus is to see the body as temporarily dead, suspended between his death and his resurrection, and then ascension. But this is a painting. The body doesn’t rise. The death count does. I can read this work as an image of the Body of Christ with AIDS. The body of Christ here is not primarily collective—we see Jesus, not a church. Nonetheless, a collective is suggested by the growing number of the AIDS dead. What is their relationship to this dead man? What is the relationship between these panels?

Don’t Mourn Consecrate quotes Holbein’s Dead Christ in the Tomb, but its title quotes another disfigured martyr, a laborer.

Joe Hill was born in 1879 to Lutherans in Sweden. He played piano and at nine years old began working in a rope factory. The biography of him on the AFL-CIO website (which I take his entire story from) tells us he moved to Stockholm in 1900, “stricken with skin and joint tuberculosis.” He received “radiation treatment and endur[ed] a series of disfiguring operations on his face and neck.” In 1902, Joe moved to the US. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and served as the secretary of their chapter in San Pedro, California. He became a prominent labor organizer and revolutionary. Hill is best known for the songs he wrote, which were distributed throughout the IWW. In 1914, he was dubiously charged with murder in Salt Lake City. In 1915, he was executed by firing squad, after a failed campaign to save him undertaken by labor activists and even President Woodrow Wilson. He sent a letter to a prominent organizer in Chicago the day before his execution:

Goodbye, Bill: I die like a true rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning—organize! It is a hundred miles from here to Wyoming. Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in Utah. – Joe Hill

He also left behind a will in the form of a four-stanza poem. It begins, “My will is easy to decide / for there is nothing to divide.” He requests that his ashes be scattered, and so they were, portions of them sent to labor activists in every state except Utah, and throughout the world.

Joe contrasts mourning and organizing. Mourning looks backward, to the one body, Joe’s; organizing looks forward, to the collective body, the workers. Mourning orients one toward death; organizing orients one toward life. Mourning wastes time, it distracts; organizing builds within it, it focuses.

Organizing and consecrating are not the same thing, but they are similar. They’re from different contexts—labor and ritual—but they do overlap. Both encourage the multiplicity of bodies, bodies working together, many bodies becoming and working as one body.

Consecration is marking something for holy purposes, holy work—a building, a life, bread and wine. In the mass, bread and wine are consecrated and distributed, becoming the body and blood of Jesus. Like Joe Hill, Jesus left only his body to divide, and a command to divide it, distribute it amongst those who love him. In the eucharist, these things happen at once: consecration divides the body—portions it out—and mystically unite those who receive it into one. There is a dead body, but in consecrating it, a remainder of life is found.

The piece demands: DON’T MOURN. The work of mourning has already begun: look at the body, placed here by someone, look at the wreath, placed here by someone. CONSECRATE: There are other relations to the dead besides mourning. Take up the dead body, live with it. Draw it into your life. Be drawn into its life.

A question: what kind of action is the ongoing tallying, mourning or consecration?

Do not be afraid.

Carlos Motta

Thank you Sam for those wonderful words. And thank you for the invitation to be here tonight. I didn't know anything about this work before your invitation to think about it, Ted. And it was a real pleasure to discover it and research it even though there isn't much information on it out there. Today, however, I'm at a loss for words and not because the work doesn't elicit many thoughts, but because it creates a line of thinking around public art and art and AIDS, and today I am in the process of mourning the situation we have been living today. So instead of speaking for the five minutes I was invited to talk, I want to provide some framing and then invite you to sit in silence for the rest of the time that was allocated to me.

I'm thinking about what it means to witness mass loss of life, what it means to witness mass loss of life with the support of governments, like ours, which of course echoes the AIDS crisis in ways that are more profound than just one. I am thinking about what it means to cope with mass death and be completely unable to do anything about it, which is perhaps one of the things that our peers who survive the ongoing AIDS crisis, but especially at the beginning of it, have to do.

So I want to invite you to sit with silence for a second, not because silence is necessarily productive, but I do think that before we could get to organizing, we need silence. So let’s be together, don't use your phones, and if you don't want to be a part of this invitation, please come back in four minutes. Feel free to go to the bathroom or go check out a book.

I want to think about silence as a way to honor Juan González and the victims of the AIDS crisis or the countless Palestinians who are being slaughtered every day along with the Israelis who died in the original attack by Hamas. I want you to think about silence as a way to mourn, perhaps also as a way to confront your own thoughts and ideas around the present. I also want to think about silence as a way to resist, as a way to think that's a way to organize and potentially as a way to act. So we have about three minutes and 50 seconds with this. You get to stay where you are. You can move around as you wish.

[silence]

Thank you.

Melanie Kress

It's really hard to speak after all of these brilliant people and to pick one place to start. So I'm just going to go with my gut.

So my context for coming to this—and I have to remember that there's a microphone in front of me because all I want to do is turn around (and stop being heard) and look at everyone in the room—I've worked in public art for 10 years now, and a lot of what I have organized has ended up being time-based work and performance and film and screenings and public programs—and also sculptures. And one thing that I think that I've learned is that those sculptures are always also performances. And a number of artists have worked with the structure of the Speaker's Corner and different kinds of projects, like this, that come up, which are essentially just putting out a soapbox into the public space and inviting people to come and speak. And so thinking about silence has been thinking about speaking also, and I think that they flip flop in terms of what they can affect or lose in different contexts.

The soapbox that comes to mind that we had discussed before the talk—and I promise this is connected—is in fall 2016, one of the first big projects I organized on The High Line was the presentation of Zoe Leonard's text, I Want a President, which starts, “I want to dyke for president, I want a person who AIDS for vice president…" and then goes on listening essentially every person who in 1992 and in 2023 would not be able to imagine being president. One thing that Zoe said about putting on this work was that we had to keep it alive. She said, I don't want this to be an artifact. I don't want it to be a document. I don't want it to be a piece of history. I want it to be in this moment. So every Thursday we brought out a soapbox and a mic, and invited people to speak, with some folks who were invited. It was not dissimilar to this talk structure actually. Some folks were invited and then anyone could also stand up on the box. There was also an event that was organized—and because it's New York City, it was a fake political rally because legally we could not support any one candidate in particular, although many artists did a good job of breaking that rule. These things were all organized performances, but the moment the work went up—and for context, it was right under the Standard Hotel, on the big leg of the wall there. We needed a big kind of crane to put it up, and as it was being wheatpasted, the second that the first panel went up, dozens of people stopped, and then more people stopped and then people started having a conversation about it.

I feel like a similar conversation comes up around monuments—these conversations and protests for taking monuments down, and the second the object has been removed, no one cares anymore. Not because they don't care, but because it's not actually the object itself—it's the position of the object that the object is performing that matters to people, its power and that articulation of history every day that someone walks by it that they are attached to.

So the connection that I see—and it's really interesting because you talk so wonderfully about the left side of the work and I think so much about the right side. I'm so glad you shared about the bell and there's this performance and ritual of adding the numbers every day and also the accumulation of the numbers physically that also reminds me of the Vietnam Memorial and the fact that you have to walk under the names and that the gash and the landscape is because the number of people who were dying each year got longer and longer every year. And so there's this accumulation that's happening, but the fact that the work is live and is never static and continues to change and that in public space it will always be live no matter what's happening, are my initial thoughts.

And there was one other thing that I wanted to share. This connection of public health and public art and who is the public: It's anyone who's there at that moment. And one thing that I think that I've come to understand about public art is that it's not art—but I say that only because for those people who are encountering the thing that is the artwork, and don't know that it's an artwork, it has to function on the terms of whatever else it is that you were expecting to see there. So—like you were talking about—there was a nice quote about the windows being the shop windows. And there is an expectation of an encounter, and I think about this in terms of Félix González-Torres’s billboards from the same time, Gran Fury and the buses at the same time, the billboards occupying these spaces of advertising in order to raise awareness and have this conversation and to resist through the functionality of that vehicle. And so of course it’s an artwork and it's doing something beyond what that advertising space can do, but it's using all of those rules and playing with all of those rules in a way that's taking the expectations that are already built into the urban environment and changing them into something else.

Part 2: Audience Remarks

Eric Rhein

Yeah, so obviously I didn't prepare any kind of written material, but I'm Eric Rhein. I'm really happy to be here. I appreciate everyone’s comments very much, particularly Carlos' recognition and how much one who has lived through the AIDS crisis contains within their being. So when I look at the artwork, it's a visceral experience of having tested positive in 1987 and experiencing my friends' illnesses before that. And also I'm going to bring Visual AIDS into this conversation because the individual artist is a walking activist and the individual artist, like myself, who would have walked by this window and now experience it historically, creates from a space of their own public health crisis. And whether-or-not they're celebrated now or into the future, we are here and we're creating, wanting to put our work out into the world, even unknowingly sometimes, as some way of harnessing trauma and wanting to share it, wanting it to be validated as expressing something that is of importance that we've lived through. For me, having achieved a certain amount of attention, I know the importance of the Visual AIDS archive, which at this point has hundreds of members. Some of these artists are working even in near isolation and others are no longer alive, and others like myself are still trying to make sense of it all. So, that is my experience.

Teriananda

I am going to share now, against my better judgment. I was just going to wait, but I have all kinds of ideas swinging around in my head. First of all, I'm going to tell a story which is sad and humorous all at the same time. I live right near here and I never saw those windows. I did however, see almost every show that David Wojnarowicz did for years on end, and read his book Close to the Knives. I just have to call his name for starters because he influenced so much intersection of AIDS and activism. I was in ACT UP from 1991 through to 1996.

The story I'm going to tell is just synchronistic to this image. And I just have to tell it. My best friend in high school turned out to be gay and he came out to me in Sheep Meadow. He'd taken acid and he was on the phone crying. He told me to meet him and Sheep Meadow almost at midnight. So we're sitting out there and he ‘confessed’ to me that we're never going to get married because he was attracted to men. He was from a well-off family who lived on E. 62nd street. We used to wander the Upper East Side when I was going to Hunter College High School getting high and planning what townhouse we were going to buy. He was the first person I knew who got sick with AIDS in the Fall of 1986. The way I found out was that his mother, who was just a demon, called me and told me that he'd been in a coma in his apartment for a week when he was found. He was six feet tall but only 67 pounds. He never regained consciousness. I went to see him at Mt. Sinai Hospital every week all Fall. He was Jewish and was born on Christmas. He and his family were not religious. He would joke about how with his very long hair he looked like many images of Christ. Having been born on Christmas, when he got sick I just knew that he was going to pass away on Christmas day, and he did. I don't know how he willed that to happen, but it seemed to be his sense of irony or whatever. So this image of AIDS… that was used of Christ as an image of somebody sick with HIV, it just blew me away.

But the other thing I wanted to say is when I was thinking about the front-page headlines that we've had the last week or more, there are so many statistics that are given on almost a daily basis, certainly a weekly basis of, 2000 people that were washed away and killed in Bangladesh in a flood, or that died in a civil war in a part of Africa… even those who pay a lot of attention to news, don't really understand. We see the headlines about this particular crisis right now, but there are large numbers of people that are dying as a result of the climate crisis, as a result of absurd violence that is beyond anybody's comprehension. And when we see these things in the headline, I just would ask that we always remember the nameless faceless people that die whose lives had just as much value and we'll never know who they were. So it is wonderful to commemorate the people that we know personally that live inside us. I lost most of my friends. I'm 76 and I have almost no friends because they're all ghosts walking around the neighborhood. But anyway, it's been a long strange trip. That's all I can say.

Jess Camacho

Hi, my name is Jess. My observation relates to the last two people who shared, and goes back to Ted's prompt about what stands out for me: it starts with what you, Samuel, spoke to in terms of the relationship between the abstract quality of the numbers and the singularity of the dead body. But it's not just any body, it's Christ. It's the only son of God, which feels like a kind of fuck you. There's something very aggressive about that, or very, very potentially antagonistic, or confrontational about positing the idea that Jesus has AIDS.

For me it gets to a really emotional space really quickly, but before I go there, I want to observe that Christ is a singular figure in the ethos of the religion, but there are so many duplications of the figure of Christ, and even in the video earlier it was discussed that the artwork is potentially a large photocopy of the maquette, if I remember correctly, so the work itself is a duplication of a painting of an idea.

But really for me it's the singularity of, I mean... just to really think about my own emotional experience as I confront this: I'm a new father, and I've never had the kind of attachment to anyone that I have to my son. And so for those that are religious and more conservative, to be very general, they’re going to be less sympathetic to the plight of people living with AIDS, and it just struck me as very bold and sensible to propose that every one of those numbers is as important as the son of God.

Samuel Ernest

He did in fact make some iconographic art. In the book, you can find it.

And, I wanted to respond to Jess's comment about the body of Jesus with AIDS, as a kind of fuck you, I think. Yes. And it reminded me just that the question of who gets to claim Christ's body, and this was a question that became kind of pivotal. A lot of liberation theologians struggle with church hierarchy. Liberationist theologians would emphasize the poorness of Christ in poor communities. James Cone, a foundational Black theologian, talked about the Black Christ, and Marcella Altus Reed talks about a queer God. And I think this could represent a similar kind of logic that maybe there is actually something freeing, liberating, happening in the image of the identification of Jesus with the people who are like us, our community. And as soon as I say that, I think more about these dichotomies and the fact that this is behind glass. And so I imagine wanting to touch Jesus and not being able to. Yeah.

Eric Rhein

With Ray Navarro, there's a beautiful clip from either How To Survive a Plague or United in Anger where Ray is in the hospital, his mother's by his side and he is blinking, and he talks about how the light is coming through the window and how beautiful it is. So that's an example of how one can transform their experience into something that is beautiful.

Kyle Croft

I’m very excited about this conversation, as someone who's also researched the history of Visual AIDS and Tom Sokolowksi. I wanted to share my thought process hearing all of this, as an art historian who's not really interested in anything before 1950, an atheist who doesn't really know anything about how to read religious images… I think there is a canon—or a way that people have talked about art about AIDS, about activist art—that is being created right at this moment. There's one lineage that has been very established by critics like Douglas Crimp, which is based on postmodernism, advertising, image cultures and appropriation, Gran Fury, artists who were creating these very sexy, slick images that communicate a message very clearly.

The way that I was taught to look at AIDS activist artwork was through a question Crimp posed—what can art do in response to AIDS? He provides a very neat answer, which is that art can communicate information, be the media, say what nobody else is saying. But I think Don’t Mourn gets into this other kind of thing, which I think Tom Sokolowski was really interested in as a curator working at the Grey, which is an encyclopedic institution. He was interested in looking across history, and I see in Tom’s writing he’s often making these grand universalizing connections. And Bill Olander, who did the window at the New Museum, also does this, comparing the Silence = Death poster to The Death of Marat by David, which was made during the French Revolution and paraded through the streets as a sort of public art of the 18th century. How can art about AIDS be incorporated or seen as part of a longer art history, staking out its value in relation to religious art, art that we have been taught to value in a certain way?

I feel excited about this conversation as a way of finding a new genealogy to put this type of work into, that’s less about what other artists were doing in the late eighties and more about this much longer history of how artists have thought about death and communicated with the public—and even what public art is, how religious art has always been about being public or being visible in churches and public space.

Melanie Kress

I think it's really nice that you bring up that comparison to artists who are working in these kinds of advertising languages. And I was really curious when you first invited me to talk about this work because this is a strange piece of public art because it is public art and it isn't. It is in the private university gallery, and it’s inside. But most of the challenges I'm thinking about around public art work comes from the fact that it's outside.

So, I'm going to say a lot of things that are really obvious: it's a window. So it's inside and it's outside at the same time. But it has all of these contradictions that we've been walking through, of the individual and the universal, a huge amount of symbolism that's quite obvious to a lot of people, but wouldn't be to others in terms of recognition of the body of Christ or the rosette of flowers. And then you have this bright red or orange, very bold text in the language of advertising. And if you don't know what those numbers are, you have no context for what this work is talking about. So it occupies a strange space. And in public art, you often have to speak very loudly—and there are a lot of really interesting artists that work with, who think on a small scale or how to make public art that whispers—but you have a lot of competition in public space. So when you're working on a much smaller scale or on a non-advertising scale, it's really easy to get drowned out. Which is just to call that back in of this being a public artwork and not a public artwork at the same time and what it's able to do because of that, to sit in this weird space also like that dioramic space of this shallow depth to be sculpture and performance and language all at the same time.

Theodore Kerr

I want to jump in. That was so helpful. I think what's so powerful about what you said is that it mirrors the AIDS crisis and that it mirrors the individual experience of living with HIV, right? Especially during the time we are talking about: HIV would be both public and private depending on your experience of it. And after 1996 when there's life saving medication, we struggle with this very thing that the epidemic becomes a less public thing. And so I love that you brought into this public and private, and I think you said the word intimate.

Melanie Kress

Well, the space of it also, it's not entirely dissimilar from religious relics and the way that you would go look at them, often Mary is in this kind of niche, niche (for the art historians, I am conscious of my pronunciation) this shallow space of viewing and this incredible intimacy and preciousness of whatever the object or representation of a religious figure is, but the availability for viewing on mass at the same time for many people…

Pato Hebert

I love that point. In Panama the Virgin Mary has a… it's not even a halo… it's an arc . So there's something about what we're calling the advertising that actually within a kind of Latin American context feels quite consistent to me. Like the concrete shrine that is the most sacred space.

Theodore Kerr

Did you know that it's 8:30? Out of respect for the amazing people that work here we do have to wrap it up. It is such an honor to do this. I really want to thank Juan González’s family for being here. It means a lot. Also, thank you to the invited speakers, everyone who shared, and everyone who came!

Leah Sweet

Thank you so much for this wonderful and lively conversation. There's so much more we could say. I was so struck with how many people have related both historical to present day pandemics, crises and so much more. It's interesting to go forth and think about how we actually give presence and how we consecrate in the present tense right now. Thank you.

Postscript

After the event, a friend who did not get a chance to speak shared this text with me.

Max Freeman

My main thought was that the utterance contained in the piece, "don't mourn consecrate", didn't receive enough interpretation. To mourn, in the Freudian sense, is (to my mind) preferable to consecration: it is individual and conscious. In mourning, a person deals with the grief of losing a specific love object, and this process takes place in the conscious mind. Mourning isn't purely-backward looking, as some of the speakers suggested; one comes to terms with one’s grief in a conscious, healthy manner, and so is enabled to move forward without a neurotic relation to the grief. To consecrate seems to me the opposite: it's to assume a dishonest or mythical relation to one's loss, and it erases the person consecrated because it erases their individuality, turns that person into something unreal, sacred, imaginary, set apart. Marx would say that consecration is - intentionally, strategically - opposed to organization; religious myths are constructed to offer a false consolation to oppressed people and purge them of the anger and energy they ought to devote to organization and revolution.

We can't assume that Juan Gonzalez "believes" or "means" the utterance “don’t mourn consecrate”, in a straightforward way. The utterance is complicated by its juxtaposition with the image of Christ (the most consecrated and most pictorially memorialized person in Western history) and also with the tally of AIDS dead. Christ is the prime example of how "consecration" erases the human person and indulges in denial, repressing the fact of death & loss while creating a false, consoling belief in their continuing survival (He's not dead; He is risen). The tension between the most memorialized individual in Western history with the nameless, faceless, impersonal, statistical memorial provokes questions rather than telling us what to do. To whom is the utterance directed? What is the object of the utterance (who or what would we mourn or consecrate: a lost loved one, or all the unknown dead?)? Is the utterance undercut by the surrounding work, or is it ironic, or is it or is an overstatement, or is it bad advice?

Theodore (ted) Kerr is an educator, writer, and organizer. He is the co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2022, with Alexandra Juhasz). He curated the 2021 exhibition AIDS, Posters and Stories of Public Health: A People's Pandemic for the National Libraries of Medicine. He was one of 4 oral historians who worked on Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project for the Smithsonian, Archives for American Art in 2017 / 2018. In 2019, he edited "What You Don’t Know about AIDS Could Fill A Museum," an issue of the On Curating journal, and in 2014, he edited "Time Is Not A Line," a journal issue for Carlos Motta's project, We Who Feel Differently. Kerr is a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do?