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David Wojnarowicz's "When I put my hands on your body", is still an incredibly moving and heartbreaking work almost ten years after its creation. It makes a fitting, and realistic conclusion to The Body (Politic), striking home the depth of our loss in the face of AIDS, as a society, and more harrowingly, by the millions of lovers, friends and family who have experienced the desperate and impossible urge to hold someone on this earth which this piece describes so completely. Wojnarowicz consistently created works which touch emotions and feelings, and which go to places that many artists dare not, or cannot, attempt to portray. He puts his finger on a spot, which is too sore and broken to take into the light. The power of his work has not diminished with time, and in fact the reverse is true. The knowledge that this talented artist, who was clearly so ahead of his time, died young, (like too many others), creates an anger, a despair and a frustration which, ironically, his own work describes absolutely. The strength of emotion in his work is a full stop to any consideration of the politics of the body in the light of AIDS. "When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending. I feel the warmth and texture and simultaneously I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear. I see the fat disappear from the muscle. I see the muscle disappearing from around the organs and detaching itself from the bones. I see the organs gradually fade into transparency leaving a gloaming skeleton gleaming like ivory that slowly revolves until it becomes dust. I am consumed in the sense of your weight the way your flesh occupies momentary space the fullness of it beneath my palms. I am amazed at how perfectly your body fits to the curves of my hands. If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time to me I would. If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would. It makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss. It makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures to reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain." - Barbara Hunt - Barbara Hunt is Executive Director of Visual AIDS, a not-for-profit which raises awareness of AIDS through programs in the visual arts and which provides a range of direct services to artists living with HIV/AIDS and the estates of artists who have died from AIDS. The work of Visual AIDS can be seen at www.thebody.com/visualaids