“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you,” warns Audre Lorde in her paper The Transformation of Silence Into Language And Action. In this essay, Lorde argues for speaking–the voice–as an essential, if not the most essential, activist tool. She concludes, “The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break the silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken” (44). Continue reading
Tag Archives: Gran Fury
Dead Tired Of Being So Bloody Positive: PosterVirus Reflects AIDS Activism Now
In her essay “Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism” in the collection Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Ann Cvetkovich reflects, “The AIDS crisis, like any other traumatic encounters with death, has challenged our strategies for remembering the dead, forcing the invention of new forms of mourning and commemoration. The same is true, I would argue, … Continue reading
Potentials of Queer Abstraction: “Read My Lips” at Knockdown Center
“In putting together a show about complicating visibility, it is necessary to acknowledge that there have been times when queer visibility was life or death. It also must be acknowledged that without violence against queer people — whether physical or the violence of mandating identity — it wouldn’t be necessary to have a conversation around … Continue reading
I Got Holes In Different Area Codes: Donald Moffett’s ‘Any Fallow Field’
“Too often, the study of sexuality in art is dismissed if it departs from the iconographic depiction of sexual acts or bodies that are deemed to be erotically appealing. It’s one of the ways that those suspicious of or uncomfortable with queer theory, for instance, attempt to domesticate its critique–by claiming that anything other than … Continue reading
Art Is Not Enough: Questions For Andrea Bowers’ ‘Whose Feminism Is It Anyway?’
“Art is not enough,” decries HIV/AIDS activist art collective Gran Fury’s startling graphic, concluding, “seize power through direct action.” Published in the Village Voice, Gran Fury’s statement on the political effectiveness of art joined the rest of their ubiquitous and by design, inescapable output linking direct action and art in order to confront issues surrounding … Continue reading
Mourning, Militancy and Art In ‘Let The Record Show’
Devastating, enraging, moving, motivating and yes, militant, Let The Record Show succeeds in powerfully and captivatingly revealing the innumerable and almost incomprehensible losses to the arts community, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as that community’s strong and outspoken response to the crisis. Continue reading
More Demonstrations and Less Memorials In ‘Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism’
Scrawled in black pen in one of his many journals in the New York Public Library’s exhibition Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism, artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz wrote, “If I die of AIDS, don’t give me a memorial, give me a demonstration.” Continue reading