In Memoriam with Alexandra Anderson-Spivy Photo by Susan Johann When I was [invited] to think about the meaning of AIDS memorials I began to ask myself whether there are ways in which AIDS memorials differ from the countless other public and private memorials and monuments societies create to commemorate their losses, their tragedies, and their achievements. Of course, when AIDS began to take its toll on the creative world in the early eighties, the great struggle was (and remains) to get Americans to acknowledge the catastrophe, to stop ghettoizing its sufferers, and to aggressively fight the virus. Now those issues are global and the epidemic rages on in Third World countries whose social structures, widespread denial, and lack of access to medical treatment creates a dismal prognosis for men, women, and children alike. In the maelstrom of this disease, commemorating those who have died is a way to keep what has happened from being forgotten or historically marginalized. In the last Artery symposium, Tom Sokolowski observed "None of the anecdotes matter for those who weren't there. Forget everything, you had to be there." As I read, I found myself replying to the screen, "No, Tom, you're wrong." The anecdotes are important for people who weren't there. They are the foundation of the stories we tell, the accounts, fictional or documentary, that we write, to preserve experience and transmit it to those who "weren't there." To counteract ignorance and disregard, the absentees and the not-yet-born have got to know-- and feel-- what happened. Every society commemorates its dead in concrete and symbolic ways. Memorials, monuments and rituals, direct the attention of the living to the lives and achievements of those who have died. They enshrine history for those who weren't there, those who don't know firsthand the nature of some individual or event. Monuments, such as the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, also radically shift meaning according to what each visitor brings to them. Maybe their power can be measured by how many levels of meaning they can possess. In May I saw, for the first time the Ossuarium Monument at Verdun. (130,000 unidentified war dead are interred near the graves of 15,000 identified French soldiers.) Eighty-five years after the struggle, the now-bucolic panorama of those graves made tangible the horror, gross mismanagement, and human carnage of the battle more vividly than any history book can. Here was evidence, bones entombed in marble, of the sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers (540,00 French, 430,000 Germans) who were wounded or died during ten months in 1916 in the most ferocious battle of World War I. While historians still debate the appalling waste of this battle, the monument itself is an essential, implacable reminder, not only of official French patriotism, but of what Verdun cost in lives. Historic monuments are inevitably political, the meaning of what and who they commemorate shifting and contested over time. In Estonia, for example, art historians are currently in a quandary about statues of Lenin and Stalin. The images of these now-despised leaders were made by some of Estonia's most important artists. If the statues are scrapped, something significant in Estonian culture is destroyed. How long will it take for the sting of events to recede so that these figures can be seen as sculpture without the despised political overtones they currently still possess? For now, the bronze Lenins and Stalins remain hidden in Estonian storage facilities and some have already been melted down. Some memorials are ostensibly private. (Think of Saint-Gaudens' sculpture for Henry Adams's wife in Washington D.C.-a depiction of personal grief that artistic authority makes universal.) Every graveyard is a whispering forest of religious, individual, and family memory, markers and stones and photographs (now full-size color transfers in Central European graveyards) retrieving, if not glorifying, the dead so the living will remember them, at least until the inevitable oblivion of time erodes the carved legends and ancient names. Think of the tiny Jewish cemetery in Prague, where generations were interred in layers and memorialized by the gravestones that are so tumbled together, so crowded and stacked, that you can hardly walk among them, although you can still decipher many of the names. This is the evidence of Prague's rich and historic Jewish heritage, a testament that forever puts the barbarity of the Holocaust in high relief. AIDS memorials commemorate individuals who fell in a particular battle against disease, exacerbated by social and sexual prejudices. Because the struggles surrounding AIDS are so passionate and ongoing, memorials to its victims may seem more politically inflected and controversial than other memorials do now. But history will put them into a longer, flatter perspective we can't yet fully perceive. And because so much recent art has been AIDS-related, that art itself has become a collective memorial, not only to those who have died, but also to the struggle to conquer the virus itself. The NAMES Project Quilt, those homespun patchworks so painstakingly and painfully constructed by grieving relatives and friends of the dead, honor the individual lives of people whose passing might otherwise be remarked only privately, or perhaps never at all. The Quilt gives those memorialized another presence, another voice, an identifiable place in the cohort of the fallen. The communal act of creating and displaying these quilts also has allowed the bereaved to express their sorrow and demand increased awareness from the community at large. Memorials works by individual artists have a more complex resonance. New York painter Robert Kushner's "Fallen Angels" series of paintings from the mid-eighties, commemorates irretrievable innocence and pleasure, as well as the loss of dead friends. The choreographed requiems created by Bill T. Jones and Meredith Monk are intimate homages that resurrect art from pain and grief. "Angels in America" is the opera of the epoch. Of course these unofficial memorials are political battle cries in that they bring wider attention to the groups devastated by AIDS, even as they reflect the human condition. Such art finally can do more than officially commissioned monuments to change the ways which people think about the epidemic and its victims. All the visual art, dance, theatre, film, and music, the memoirs and novels that artists and writers in our culture have produced to express the dire effects of AIDS, are essential monuments. They ensure those AIDS took from us and the devastation of the disease, will not be forgotten or unacknowledged or struggled against. Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, the former reviews editor of the "Art Journal," is writing a biography of Adolph De Meyer. She is on the board of HIV-Arts Network. The symposium "panelists'" - Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, Aaron Betsky, Norman Kleeblatt and Dui Seid.