In Memoriam with Dui Seid Can the impulse to memorialize co-exist with the impulse to deny the fatal nature of AIDS? During the eighties, before AIDS seemingly became more manageable, many found them to be incompatible. As a contributing writer covering the arts and social services for the New York People With AIDS Coalition "Newsline", I was familiar with the spin AIDS activists gave slogans to promote their agenda in New York City. "Living with AIDS, not dying of AIDS" was a mantra to refute the perception of people with AIDS as submissive victims. It was a battle cry against dying, but it was also a denial of the fact that AIDS, at that time, was a fatal disease. "Long Time Survivor," the designation that prefaced the names of some PWAs in obituaries of the time seemed an oxymoron to me. Was denial at play in ACT UP's 1988 demo protesting the Nicolas Nixon photo show, "Pictures of People," at New York's Museum of Modern Art? The flyer dictated how PWA's were to be represented. "WE DEMAND: The visibility of PWAs who are vibrant, angry, loving, sexy, beautiful, acting up and fighting back." Being a Chinese-American artist with family in Communist China, I am sensitive to similarities between this AIDS activist aesthetic diktat and official socialist-realist art of The Peoples Republic of China. You know those images of happy peasants and and patriotic workers with raised fists. The photographic portraits by numerous photographers of PWAS who looked healthy were deemed acceptable while photographs by Rosalind Solomon showing Karposi Sarcoma lesions and the emaciated PWAs of Nicolas Nixon were not. One morning, while working as a homecare attendant for PWAs, I brought Sonny to New York Hospital's AIDS Clinic for an appointment. In the waiting room, a woman patient looked vaguely familiar. Finally, I realized I had seen her healthy looking portrait by Tom McGovern. Now she was thin, gaunt with hollow cheekbones and lack-luster hair: the virus had surfaced and taken its toll. She and her story were now unattractive and she would become invisible in the eyes of "official," politically-correct activist photographers. Understandably, in the 1980's, without any treatment against the then-fatal HIV virus, part of the battle was to sustain hope and optimism. But the unwillingness to accept the fatality of AIDS generated ambivalence, even hostility toward artworks that implied or acknowledged HIV-related death. The NAMES Project Quilt was disparaged by some AIDS activists as a-political, as being both indulgent and sentimental, thus a waste of precious funds and energy that might be focused on the living. But the Quilt, now too large to ever display in its entirety again, was a tour de force of populist expression for those who witnessed its debut on the Mall in Washington, DC, in 1987, or in "People Magazine." AIDS activists said they wanted to build coalitions. The Quilt did just that for all regions of the country, races, economic classes, genders, sexual orientations, religions, political stripes and ages. It mobilized members of multi-generational families to "come out" about AIDS by making and viewing the Quilt. Likewise, during the Reagan-Bush era characterized by the Great Actor's never having uttered the acronym "AIDS" in public, many attacked the Red Ribbon, a project of Visual AIDS. They termed it politically ineffectual, as something that permitted wearers to feel good about themselves while doing nothing. Frequently the opposite was true. Jamie, a dear friend's nephew, was 13 and living in rural Connecticut, was so upset by the death of Michael, his uncle's friend, that he began wearing a red ribbon to junior high school. For that young boy, it took courage. His mother, Katie, wore her ribbon and then started an AIDS Education Project in a small town to the dismay of some of her neighbors. Wearing a red ribbon in the lower Manhattan of AIDS activists hardly carried the same meaning or involved the same risks. Today, some PWAs are truly "living with AIDS, not dying from AIDS." AIDS has become a manageable disease thanks to protease inhibitors, at least temporarily and for those who have the money to afford them. The prescriptions to disparage visual representations of the physical ill effects of AIDS has eased as looking ill became somewhat rarer. Freed from such narrow, politically correct notions, now artists are free to create and show all viewpoints about AIDS. This new climate has permitted my own work to be shown more extensively. My AIDS-memorial artwork, "Artist's Estate," is a 25-foot-high cascading-mountain of ready-made and hand-made personal effects and medical waste filling an entire exhibition space with a generalized life history. The value of the possessions making up every aspects of a person's life are placed in question: they are often dumped on the street after a death, these artifacts cherished by the deceased but regarded as junk by others. Every urinal is not Duchamp's urinal. And, of course, value is always relative, as is the narrow line sometimes separating art and trash. Dui Seid is an artist whose art has addressed AIDS, DNA, or the U.S. Constitution. He has been making art about AIDS since 1984, which has been shown in museums in the United States, Scandinavia, Canada, Japan, France, and Germany. His AIDS-arts project, "Daily Dispatch", exhibited serially during July, 2000. A former board member of Visual AIDS, he lives in New York. The symposium "panelists'" - Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, Aaron Betsky, Norman Kleeblatt and Dui Seid.