According to The Age newspaper's critic, Bruce James, the Art in the Age of AIDS exhibition in Canberra marked "a shift in the prevailing aesthetics of AIDS from fatality and from the medicalisation to which it commonly surrenders". He surmised, "it is now considered more conducive to cultural production of an original kind to affirm the living in advance of memorialising the dead" (The Age, 30 November 1994). Yet in challenging the stigmatising representations of people with AIDS and 'high risk' groups, the work of artists and activists on display in the National Gallery of Australia constituted a new mythology which, for different reasons, could be considered to be equally stifling and disempowering. Their images left little room for those people who were very sick to speak, for gay men and HIV-positive individuals to admit occasionally instances of unsafe sex, for death and the afterlife to be discussed.
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| Maree Azzopardi, 'Gordon', 1996. | Maree Azzopardi, 'Hanna & Sunflower', 1997. |
Yet in Australia the new, inclusive, 'AIDS aesthetic' had softened community attitudes, and political and public support for the work of community-based AIDS organisations was increasing. Artists working in the second decade of the epidemic thus felt at greater liberty to speak honestly about AIDS and communities at risk, and in the process challenged the representational orthodoxy that had been enshrined in the Art in the Age of AIDS exhibition. The 'Art of AIDS Prevention' project examines the work of well-known and underrepresented U.S. and Australian contemporary artists -- in particular photographer William Yang, visual artist Maree Azzopardi, film-maker Lawrence Johnston, and author Eric Michaels -- whose portrayals of people with AIDS addressed themes that might have been regarded by their predecessors as 'politically incorrect': death, disfigurement, unprotected sex, and transgression.
In America, debates about how best to represent the epidemic predated and were much more bitter than those taking place in Australia. Prominent critics decried the advent of 'victim art', while artists were variously championed or vilified by AIDS activists according to their aesthetics and political outlook. Their stories provide a counterpoint to those of Australian artists who, on the whole, were well received by activists and the communities most affected by AIDS.
Information and preliminary findings about other themes can be accessed by clicking on the headings below.
Please click on the below links for information about other aspects of the project.
