Re-Act

“SILENCE = DEATH” is the proclamation glowing on the lobby walls of the Carpenter Center these days. That slogan, writ under a pink triangle, was the icon that fueled a revolution in AIDS activism in New York 20 years ago. Now this historically significant image has resurfaced for “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987-1993,” encouraging Harvard to speak up about AIDS and explore its relevance to the community. The exhibition marks the 20th anniversary of the formation of ACT UP New York as well as the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project, a collection of interviews with artists who were involved in the movement.

The preparation for “ACT UP New York” at Harvard—open from October 15 to December 23—has been fueled by the conviction that some things should be remembered and talked about, that some things shouldn’t remain silenced—the same conviction that began the ACT UP movement. By bringing an important and still pertinent historical moment into focus, “ACT UP” hopes to create a forum on campus wherein a greater dialogue about AIDS can take place.

STARTING UP

In the late 1980s, AIDS related death rates skyrocketed, causing a genuine crisis in American health care. Responding to the growing fear among citizens and the rising cases of illness, ACT UP sought to foster open public discussion.

“ACT UP was formed in 1987, and was probably the definitive social movement of my life, and also of my generation,” says Helen Molesworth, a co-curator of the exhibition and the Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museum. “It was a really important moment of social protest in our lifetime.”

During its first years, ACT UP became a widespread movement largely because its symbols were widely recognizable and eventually iconic. Deeply saturated with artists and the art, it functioned as a sort of visual, social initiative.

“The coalition of ACT UP was populated by artists and that was the case for a variety of things, including the simple fact of New York life in the 1980s,” says Claire Grace, co-curator and PhD student at Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture.

“The art world is filled with gay people,” Molesworth adds. “And gay men were really the first group of people who were hit by the disease.”

Realizing that they had a role to play, artists became more actively engaged in raising awareness about the crisis. “Those people brought all of their creative energy and their intellect to bear on this massive health crisis. They understood that in addition to acts of civil disobedience, they were also going to have to operate on another public sphere, and that was the sphere of images,” Molesworth says. “So they made t-shirts and stickers and posters that got pasted all over New York, and billboards, and bus advertisements and subway ads. There was a moment in New York when you just couldn’t be outside and not be experiencing some of the visual material coming out of ACT UP.”

Yet, even though the movement was so pervasive in its time, its history seems to have fallen out of the public eye. “I found that a lot of younger people did not know what ACT UP was,” says Molesworth, citing one of the reasons why she decided to put on the exhibition. “And I thought it was really curious that the history was so fragile that could be lost in perhaps a 20 year period.”

Despite its present invisibility, ACT UP, or AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, continues its work and remains relevant. The right to health care is one of its legacies, and a project that still resonates strongly today. And more locally, infection rates among men aged 18-35 are on a rise in Boston.

“Many of these images—their vitality and their message are really powerful and relevant to the current AIDS crisis that we face,” Grace says. “But their currency is dialed into a historical moment. You don’t see them on the streets anymore and that might be partly because our culture has changed a lot and it’s no longer as possible to be heard or to have your visual object resonate in this culture that we exist in.”

But “ACT Up New York,” will struggle valiantly against these conditions to create what they hope will be an active discussion on campus.

TEAM EFFORT

At Harvard, hardly anyone talks about AIDS. And what’s more, as of the first of August, the university ceased to provide anonymous HIV testing to students.

“People always assume that on campus we’re immune from HIV, we’re immune from sexually transmitted infections.” says Jia Hui Lee ’12, political chair of the Harvard College Queer Students and Allies. “The reality is that we can’t assume that it doesn’t happen. These support systems are very, very important.”

In disseminating information about AIDS on campus, “ACT UP” seeks to reverse the policy, and the mentality that underlies it. “I think anonymous testing is something that needs to be available to students and to everyone,” Grace says. “I think it’s an important thing for the university to consider. Among other things that’s one of the shifts that I’m hoping to see happen.”

But in order for “ACT UP” to be more than just another exhibition and to actually affect such change, it needs to have a reach beyond the activist and artist community. “One of the most wonderful things about this exhibition, and about visual arts in general, is that it can provide us with an opportunity to really strike at a topic from many different disciplinary perspectives. Because this is such an essential historical material and one that has really been lacking in popular consciousness now—or at least on campus—Helen saw really intently a need to have as broad a reach as possible,” Grace says.

As a result, the exhibition—a collaborative effort across the university—is supplanted by a variety of events, meant to appeal to audiences with a variety of interests, including symposiums hosted by Harvard University Center for AIDS Research, and one by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

“We looked across the college and the university to see people who were working on AIDS/HIV,” says Molesworth. “And there are tons of people working on AIDS/HIV. So we thought the thing to do is to try to make this thing as interdisciplinary as possible. Because the movement was interdisciplinary.”

Just as the ACT UP movement naturally attracted a diverse group of people, so did this event. “We were approached by the Harvard Art Museum and specifically Claire, and met with them about the idea of collaboration,” says Stella Gukasayan, Program Coordinator at Harvard University Center for AIDS Research who is organizing one of the events. “Before they approached us to discuss that, Laura Bogart, a faculty who is part of the Harvard University Center for AIDS research, and I were working together to plan this HIV Denialism, Mistrust, and Stigma symposium. It just happened to be such a natural, organic mesh. It fit perfectly.”

The variety of subject is not the only way that the organizers made sure to appeal to a wide audience on campus. “ACT UP New York” involves students directly as well. “I got excited about the idea of students engaging in something as hard core and high profile as the Harvard Art Museum symposium,” says Trevor J. Martin ’10, who is putting on a performance art piece in conjunction with “ACT UP New York.” “It’s pretty much unprecedented for students to get really involved and really engage content-wise through the practice of art in symposiums.”

Students will also have the opportunity to work with members Fierce Pussy, an artist collective who were heavily involved in the movement and whose work will be featured in the exhibition, sponsored by the Women’s Center of Harvard College. “They did action art in order to wake up the culture and the society at the time to the AIDS crisis and to other issues related to AIDS including gender identity, construction, and explorations of how art, gender and sexuality intersect,” says Susan Marine, director of the Women’s Center of Harvard College. “We don’t have a lot of opportunities here for students to be directly involved with professional artists who are political in their work and who have politics in the centrality of their work, so to me it seems like a great opportunity to do that.”

STUDENTS ACT NOW

There are hopes that “ACT UP New York” will not only engage students but also inspire them to take action on what has come to be a fairly politically dormant campus. “After 9/11 our ability to be really critical of our government and to protest in public has been demonstrably curtailed,” Molesworth says. “This is a show that shows what happens when citizens insist that the government meet their needs. I guess I’m interested in sharing that history with people who haven’t seen that kind of thing in action.”

Some students have already taken on the challenge. Martha “Martabel” Wasserman ’10, who is a VES and Women, Gender, and Sexuality concentrator, will be creating an exhibition catalogue as her senior thesis. “I think it’s really important to be able to show this event and story outside the Harvard community or people who are coming to the show,” Wasserman says.

Other students are participating in the creative aspect of the show. “It hit me that the students can use the ACT UP symposium as a platform where they can really take some artistic risks,” says Martin, who thinks the artistic handling of AIDS bears the situating of body in space. “My personal feeling is that the art students here and also the students interested in the arts really don’t take the same amount of risks even though we have more liberty to do so. I really wanted to latch onto this opportunity to do a performance piece with students at the symposium in the exhibition space, so that it can function as a gesture to the university but also the student body.”

It is, of course, not an easy task for students to get involved in symposiums such as “ACT UP New York” or to even find opportunities to exhibit one’s work. “It’s not a lack of motivation, or a lack of will to engage in political issues, it’s just the question of: where is the platform to do it?” Martin says.

However Martin hopes that student artists will be inspired by the resourcefulness and persistence of ACT UP, which found means of expression outside of traditional forums. “How can you make sure that the inspiration that the students will feel from this exhibition is going to carry forward? What’s going to happen after the symposium leaves? I don’t think these issues should be forgotten. Nor should the inspiration that one feels when they see how many risks people took to make this work, and also how resourceful the ACT UP members were,” Martin says. “I would really hope that students would take that as a model. You have something to say, you go out and find a way to say it. There is a means to meet that end, no matter how innovative or resourceful you have to be.”

SPEAKING OUT

“ACT UP New York” is an invitation to dialogue. “This exhibition is an invitation to go deeper and think about the political, social, and cultural components of the AIDS crisis, and the fact that it continues, and it’s not over,” Marine says.

Yet the very gesture of gathering visual media from the movement into a gallery is to fix ACT UP in time, and to soften its message that the AIDS crisis is ongoing.

“The fact of representing this exhibition as a historical moment is mixed for me,” Grace says.

Still whether or not “ACT UP New York” will impress the pertinence of the AIDS crisis upon the Harvard population, it serves as an important demonstration of the poignancy of the visual arts.

Citing a principle objective of the exhibition Grace says, “One of them is simply the understanding of the fact that collective organizing and its intersection with visual art can have a real effect on our culture, which is something that I think our generation, yours and mine, is not that in touch with, for whatever reason.”

—Staff writer Susie Y. Kim can be reached at yedenkim@fas.harvard.edu.