The Unfashionability of AIDS with Barbara Hunt "Unfashionability" implies "Fashionability". Was art about AIDS ever fashionable? Hmmmm...not in the conventional sense of fashion, but I know what you mean. Certainly art about AIDS was more visible in the early days of the pandemic, and artists fought hard to help reduce the stigma around AIDS and to lobby for research funds. It's the invisibility of AIDS itself that seems to be the main problem that we face today. Artists are just like anybody else in responding to--or being lulled by--the declining interest of the news media, the outwardly improved, or apparent, health of many of our friends living with HIV/AIDS, the sheer fact of our entry into the third decade of a battle that seems to be progressing, but still never-ending. And, of course, there's the exhaustion, or death, of the early activists. All these things result in a widespread reduction in public consiousness of the virus, a willful denial, even, of the pandemic. AIDS is still a problem in the Western world, it's just not in-our-faces in the way that it once was, and sadly still is in sub-Saharan Africa or Sotheast Asia. And, of course, nobody in their right mind would wish to return to that state of affairs either. But it has created a vicious paradox: AIDS organizations must work ever harder to raise the funds necessary to support enhanced services for the changing, and increased, needs of people living with HIV/AIDS. It seems inevitable that artistic responses to AIDS have changed to reflect these public perceptions. I speak primarily from my recent experience as Executive Director of Visual AIDS, and especially from my work on Visual AIDS' Archive Project and the exhibition, "Bodies of Resistance." The majority of artists making work about the virus today are artists who are themselves HIV positive--creative individuals for whom the fact of HIV is part of their lived experience. This is different than when AIDS was a more public issue and part of a larger body of so-called political art of the early nineties. I say lived, because the commentary which these artists with HIV offer has shifted enormously, even in the three years since I began working at Visual AIDS in 1997. There is still work--mournful or poetic--which acts as a tribute to those who have died, or as a record of the pandemic in general, such as "Leaves" by Eric Rhein or "AIDS Reliquarium" by Barton Benes. But there is also a tremendous body of work which is less obviously "about" AIDS, and which demonstrates the ways in which AIDS has inflected and infected the vocabulary of contemporary art. In particular, many artistic representations of the corporeal body chart the increasingly complex, social, psychological and physical effects of living with a life-threatening illness. For instance, "Release" by Frank Moore is a delightful, touching painting that captures the fragile relationship between growth and decay, the metamorphic cycle of birth and death which we can understand in nature, and is here transferred to the human body, specifically to (the artist's?) arm which is marked by Karposi's Sarcoma. The artist's signature is a bar code, taken from his insurance papers as the computer-generated mark indentifying the artist Frank Moore, as opposed to the other Frank Moores in the corporate database. Similary, the abstract, brightly hued work of Chuck Nanney owes as much to his understanding of contemporary painting as it does to his interest in electron microscopy and the study of cell mutation, prompted by his experience as an artist living with AIDS. These works enter into the artworld using the conventional approaches of the moment and the language of contemporary art. Their success lies in their sophisticated treatment of AIDS as part of an enlarged artistic vocabulary and a broader set of issues. The artists visually seduce their viewers and then introduce them to complex considerations about the realities of living with AIDS. Another example of this approach is "Birthday Knot," Steed Taylor's site-specific, road tattoo created for the "Bodies of Resistance" exhibition in Hartford, Connecticut. The piece celebrates a day Taylor was told that he would never live to see, after being diagnosed with HIV many years ago. In a 162-feet -long celtic knot tatooed in black housepaint on the black surface of a public street, Taylor and members of the local community inscribed the names of the first 40 babies born in Hartford following his fortieth birthday. Taylor states that the Celtic know "represents infinity, life everlasting." And that "a road is to the public body what skin is to the private body. Roads are the skin of a community. As an individual marks his skin as a means of decoration, communication and ritual, a road can be marked for the same reasons." By turning roads into bodies, Taylors performs a ritual of claiming. At the same time he reminds us of the local impact of HIV/AIDS on every community and the importance of continuity and memory to that community. "Bodies of Reistance," Realized in the United States in December 1999, will travel to Durban, South Africa in July to coincide with XIII International AIDS Conference and may continue its tour to Johannesburg in October. The initial aim of the exhibition was to draw attention to the international impact of AIDS by commissioning new works from 17 artists from ten different countries. We hoped to demonstrate the way in which art could act as a bridge to initiate new dialogue where more conventional methods have failed. At Real Art Ways in Hartford, the show was hugely successful: It provided new impetus for collaboration from workers of different kinds about the pandemic, something that might cause conference delegates to pause and, and to think outside of the usual boxes. And isn't that, after all, the power of art? Barbara Hunt is Executive Director of Artists Space and formerly Executive Director of Visual AIDS. The symposium "panelists'" - David Román, Steed Taylor, Barbara Hunt and Thomas Sokolowski.