Chewing the Fat about AIDS - Arts Today with Nancy Princenthal If there's one thing I'm certain of in criticism, it's that everything matters. There is no single, comprehensive way to talk about art or artists. Advocacy, information, analysis, catharsis, simple human contact--whatever art can offer, art about AIDS has offered. sometimes with breathtaking effectiveness. And that's only when we consider what an artist sets out to do. But there's also the more complicated business (and this gets to the issue of the sero-status of an artist) of watching real life draw its oblique trajectory across the intentional patterns of art. The best way I can discuss this is in terms of an autobiographical novel by Janet Hobhouse, called "The Furies." Hobhouse was an art critic as well as a fiction writer, a combination I'm extremely partial to. "The Furies" was her last book. She died of ovarian cancer before it was finished, although, evidently, most of it was complete. But at the end, there are a few passages that are interrupted by ellipses, where thoughts were clearly left unresolved. Those ellipses are devastating; it's hard to imagine a more graphic expression of death entering where it doesn't belong. Maybe hardest of all is the sheer arrogance with which those visible breaks reduce a powerful text to an almost ancillary role. What becomes primary is a narrative about a fatal illness the author never asked for and couldn't--although she wrote about it unflinchingly--ultimately control in her art any more than she could in her body. This, I suppose, is still the most implacable of challenges produced by art about AIDS. Artworks overtaken by personal and/or social conditions present a paradox that can't be resolved. David Wojnarowicz's work was, in part, a howling, blistering protest against AIDS and the circumstances of a life in which death from HIV must have seemed to him almost inevitable, a final, savage expression of society's cruelty. As a result, it's easy to judge his work in relationship to the disease: recent survey exhibitions confirmed that the sense of rage and loss the work expresses is the same sense that the artist's death leaves in its wake. Likewise for Felix Gonzalez-Torres's elegant disappearing acts, in which his work--stacked sheets of offset prints, heaps of hard candies--is free for the taking. His work was always elegiac and, now that Felix is dead, it is simply more so. Other cases are less simple. General Idea, for example, did an extremely well-known, if not universally well-received, project about AIDS that took off from Robert Indiana's famous "LOVE" icon. But the gaping hole the group's demise leaves--only collective-member AA Bronson is still alive--is much deeper than the premise of that project. Equally dicey is the possibility of revisionism: that the late, quasi-figurative, teasingly erotic work of Scott Burton, along with his funky early performances, might be used to frame his career in a way that displaces his intentions. It is unproductive at best, and dangerous at worst, to appeal to an artist's intentions as the final authority on his work. If artists could say everything they meant to say in simple, declarative prose, they wouldn't be artists. A responsible viewer looks hard at what's in front of her eyes and also takes context into account. That context includes both the life of the artist and all the cultural factors that shape us. When death by epidemic enters the picture, interpretive choices get much less clear. Looking and thinking hard about AIDS is likely to block out everything else. I am wary of paying attention only to the disease, and letting it win twice: By taking away not only the artist but also the work's nuances, or irony, or even its articulation of pain. The artists I've mentioned are roughly my contemporaries. I felt close to their work and each of them-living or not--continues to teach me. Akin to the gently epic landscapes of destruction by painter Frank Moore, Wojnarowicz's work is a reminder that more is barely enough: the eloquence of anger is in the details. General Idea's arch humor, like that of Masami Teraoka's Geisha-filled costume-dramas on canvas, grows more incisive over time. And the work of Scott Burton and Felix Gonzalez-Torres continues to pry open some especially tricky passages in visual culture, making us think hard about the relations between individual and shared experience in public places. Negotiating the boundaries between public and private acts of expression (and reception) is infinitely complicated, and remains one of art's-and an art critic's--biggest tasks. I can't say I consider myself up to speed on work by 20-somethings artists addressing AIDS. But I do know that the influence of AIDS-related art is huge--too large to see clearly, and yet pervasive in an art world that measures the two decades since the crisis began as at least one generation past. Much of the influence is culture-wide: ranging from openness about sexual preferences and active control over healthcare to candor, in the broadest sense, about the previously unspoken. Consider the unabated torrent of confessional literature and art, which has already produced a considerable backlash. Consolingly, denial has waned. Cutting across society with such ruthlessness, AIDS has rendered things visible that won't easily be concealed. Like arguments over proprietary rights to the term "holocaust," debating the emergency status of AIDS seems to me unproductive and a little ugly. It's a colossal problem, and even more complicated than it was at first by issues of class, race, and nationality. If art can continue to focus our attention on the plague, great. And if a focus on AIDS continues to produce art that helps us understand how the stories we write intersect with those into which we're written, that's no small dividend. Nancy Princenthal writes regularly for "Art in America", "Art/Text", and "Art on Paper". She recently published, "whitecloth", a catalogue essay for an exhibition of the same name by Ann Hamilton at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT. Phaidon will publish a monograph on the painter, Robert Mangold, for which she wrote the lead essay, in early 2000. The symposium "panelists'" - Chris Dohse, Stephen Holden, Eileen Myles, and Nancy Princenthal.