Aids and Artistic Polities

Abstract

The author treats the topic of AIDS as a focal point for artistic politics in the United States and, eventually, in a larger international context as well. He considers a range of representations of AIDS in contemporary art since the 1980s and considers how AIDS became a pivotal point around which thinking about artists' activism and art as social intervention turned. He discusses AIDS as a paradigmatic case for a new global, biopolitical, and mediatized cultural phenomenon that bore with it a new ensemble of political, moral, and economic effects, in turn profoundly affecting conceptions of aesthetics and activist art. In the latter part of the essay, he develops a typology of strategies utilized by artists in addressing the problem of AIDS: 1) transcoding strategies; 2) media critiques and/or critiques of culture industry representations of AIDS; 3) alternative publicity; 4) AIDS exemplars; and 5) strategies of mourning and memoralization.