Site designed and maintained by Immedia

Back to the future
By
Bren Brophy, Artists' Action Around AIDS Project Co-ordinator

Bren Brophy

Man is distinguished not by his originality but by his range and diversity. Nowhere was this more evident than at the recent XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok! The organisers must be complimented for a monumental cultural programme that at first glance strove to give voice to firstly, ?the community? and second, PLWA?s. I (like many others) was at the Conference in search of cultural interventions, exhibitions and programmes that revisited the role of the arts. I hoped to see evidence of the imperatives implicit in the development of an all-embracing culture of human rights. Frustration ensued and I was not alone. I felt a strange d?ja-vu, which echoed the cultural activism of my formative years ? the freedom struggle of the seventies and eighties.

Michael Kleiman - aerial performance artist - "My diagnosis liberated me"

?Culture as a weapon of struggle is back?, the AIDS movement ?is reminiscent of the eighties? in so much as there ?is a deep sense of humanity?here is ubuntu in practice?a new morality is being forged that affirms life, that celebrates others and gives expression to the values on non-racialism and democracy.? The ?struggle of people living with HIV/AIDS is? a struggle for human dignity, for life?for a new morality.? (Mike van Graan, ArtWit, Mail & Guardian, Dec, 2003)

Within the cultural programme of the Bangkok Conference there seemed to be a palpable, though veiled antagonism between what has come to be known as ?positive art? (created by PLWA?s) and professional artists/curators etc. who were quite simply accused of jumping on the band wagon (and into the piggy bank), of issues that belonged to those best qualified to deal with them - PLWA?s. This reverse racism is a slippery slope indeed. At a panel discussion session it was suggested that art works should be labelled to indicate their maker?s status! What would black artists in the eighties have thought of this?! I overheard a conversation between two artists that went something like this; ?So, are you positive?? ?No, but it would be a good career move!? Gob-smacked, I drew little solace from the lessons of apartheid, equal opportunity, the quota system and (here with a whole new meaning) positive discrimination.

"Whorigami is what I call the art of towel folding, rolling shaping"..."one day we (Thai sex workers) will take on our true title - whorigamists"

Positive artists often relate how their diagnosis liberated a hitherto muffled muse which, faced with a new sense of mortality, accelerated the development of the ?super artist within?. This may well be true - but do we need more ?us? and ?them? boundaries? Interestingly enough the only visible opposition to this kind of benign stereotyping were sex workers who seemed anxious NOT to be perceived as a group unto themselves. Viva. Exclusion leads to isolation, to discrimination, to stigma. We are ALL responsible for prejudice. Laagering is not the answer.

The proliferation of craft projects, AIDS benefits, and ?participatory? projects often designed to solicit the life stories of infected and affected communities (beaded AIDS orphans, body mapping, memory boxes?) need not escape the most basic of our critical faculties. I find it doubtful that centralised craft empires celebrating traditional skills contribute in a major way to alleviating suffering at a grassroots level, despite the ?Zulu Versace? status that their work has acquired globally. Successful marketing has long since recognised that the jaded consumer buys the ?sizzle, not the steak?. We buy cleanliness not soap. The ?sizzle? here is the world of traumatised communities as seen through the lens of a National Geographic camera, pitiful as the picture maybe. Similarly art as ?visual anthropology? requires investigation since these inherently subjective processes are in grave danger of giving rise to a sort of fashionable voyeurism.

Artists, as do we all, have a responsibility to debunk and demystify the circumstances surrounding human suffering. In an interview with Jerome Sans ( Art South Africa, vol 1 2003), the enfant terrible of South African art, Kendell Geers notes that ?I use reality to provoke art and I use art to provoke reality?. Which raises the question - Where has all the resistance art gone? What has happened to protest? During the preparations for a recent visual arts installation on Howard College campus one of the AAAA team inadvertently plonked a red vinyl AIDS ribbon on the bust of Sir Shepstone, not for exhibition purposes but just to get it off the floor while unpacking the other art works. A very aggressive student, mortified at "all you AIDS people and your disrespect? demanded that it be removed. ?It is exactly this kind of bigotry that AAAA is opposed to. Later at the UKZN Pietermaritzbug campus during the same festival of HIV/AIDS awareness, a group of students playing cards adjacent to a public testimonial by a young woman living with HIV/AIDS broke into a raucous rendition of ?Happy Birthday? for one of their friends, oblivious to the callous disruption caused.

Intolerance, stereotyping, indifference and apathy - the struggle may be back, but if you feel like you?re missing out on anything don?t panic, it?s not going anywhere any time soon.