{"id":2258,"date":"2025-03-21T12:29:59","date_gmt":"2025-03-21T12:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/21\/queer-art-and-the-immaterial-griefs-of-the-aids-crisis\/"},"modified":"2025-03-21T12:30:08","modified_gmt":"2025-03-21T12:30:08","slug":"queer-art-and-the-immaterial-griefs-of-the-aids-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/21\/queer-art-and-the-immaterial-griefs-of-the-aids-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Queer Art and the Immaterial Griefs of the AIDS Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Peter Hujar, Ethyl Eichelberger<\/em>, 1979. \u00a9 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The AIDS crisis looms over vast amounts of queer art. Whether or not it was made in direct response to this moment of human tragedy and political carelessness or not, the AIDS crisis forces us to reconsider the ways in which we might understand the work of any queer artist making work through the 1980s and 1990s; a black hole that threatens to swallow up any other way of understanding the work. Peter Hujar<\/a>\u2019s vast photographic practice might not have been designed to specifically be a reaction to what was sweeping through his community of friends and contemporaries, but in the wake of it\u2014and Hujar\u2019s own passing due to AIDS-related pneumonia\u2014so much of his work has come to stand as a record of what\u2019s been lost. Some of this is in the portraits of contemporaries who passed away, like David Wojnarowicz and Candy Darling<\/a>, while some of it is in his images of Christopher Street Pier or ruined buildings in New York\u2019s Soho. Whether we want to or not, we might find ourselves looking at Hujar\u2019s dilapidated landscapes and languid, prone subjects and grieving.<\/p>\n

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Peter Hujar, John Flowers (Backstage, Palm Casino Revue)<\/em>, 1974. \u00a9 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This gesture towards death is what opens \u201cPerformance and Portraiture \/ Italian Journeys<\/a>,\u201d a retrospective of Hujar\u2019s work at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art; one of the first images is Palermo Catacombs #1 <\/i>(1963), something that immediately places Hujar\u2019s work under the shadow of death. But more than that, the work in \u201cPerformance and Portraiture\u201d reveals how Hujar\u2019s photography so often shows moments of the past and the present bleeding into one another; his portraits of David Brintzenhofe<\/a> applying makeup before going on stage show a man caught between states of being. Just as the bodies of his subjects might invite us to think about how thin the gap is between life and death is\u2014the veiled Gary Indiana<\/a> seems to embody this fragility perfectly\u2014and Wojnarowicz\u2019s series Rimbaud in New York<\/i>, also on display as part of the exhibition, is able to take a figure from the past and place him, a vagabond, into the present, Hujar\u2019s work becomes an archive of people and places that have been lost to time. These photographs give us something material to mourn, not just in the faces of artists who have been lost or in the ruins of piers and New York buildings, but in capturing the beauty of these places. Hujar\u2019s images of young men in Italy, sunbathing on the rocks, or the casual eroticism of the cruising denizens of the Christopher Street Pier show us not only the idea of something lost\u2014in the way that his images of ruined buildings or Italian catacombs do\u2014but exactly what that something was.<\/p>\n

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SEE ALSO: Painter Catherine Goodman On Abstract Palimpsests and Other Realms of Consciousness <\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s no wonder that \u201cEyes Open in the Dark<\/a>,\u201d another Hujar retrospective at Raven Row in London, shows Hujar\u2019s work alongside images of the artist made by his contemporaries, including an almost cubist grid portrait by Paul Thek<\/a> and images of Hujar on his deathbed taken by Wojnarowicz. Through this artistic communion, Hujar and those in his inner circle are able to provide us with a kind of lineage, a way to place ourselves within a timeline of queer art and artists ruptured by the AIDS crisis. In contrast to this, Hamad Butt<\/a>, the subject of \u201cApprehensions<\/a>,<\/i>\u201d a retrospective at IMMA in Dublin, moves away from solid and recognizable images of the past. Butt\u2019s work was more explicitly informed by the AIDS crisis and his own diagnosis in 1987; in a video where the artist is interviewed by his younger brother Jamal, Hamad reveals that he was \u201cunable to express what [he] really wanted to say because of the limitations of painting.\u201d While Butt\u2019s work is no less of a document of a time and community ravaged by the AIDS crisis, his work offers a much less material world for us to grieve, instead trying to capture a precarious landscape through more abstract forms or those that foreground Butt\u2019s own proximity to death.<\/p>\n

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When Hamad is being interviewed by his brother, he lies on the sofa as if he were posing for a Hujar portrait. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Ros Kavanagh<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Butt\u2019s work is about language, or rather, the failure of one. Where Hujar offers up understandable visual representations of people and places, Butt seems to be saying that there is no literal, figurative way to respond to the AIDS crisis. Instead, he uses abstraction and metaphor as a way to grieve. In Fly-Piece <\/i>(1990), the installation that opens the IMMA retrospective, a colony of flies\u2014some living, some dead\u2014goes about the motions of life behind the glass doors of a noticeboard. In each of the three sections of the board are texts that offer up declarations on faith, violence, and the intersections of sex with death in no uncertain terms: \u201cWe have the eruption of the Triffid that obscures sex with death,\u201d reads one line of text. The triffid, lifted from John Wyndham<\/a>\u2019s novel, recurs throughout Butt\u2019s work, a shorthand for the way in which the AIDS crisis is presented in his practice: as something apocalyptic.<\/p>\n

Even beyond his installations, the Triffid hovers in the background; in the pastel and pencil drawing No title \u2013 Transmission (Triffids and Line of intent)<\/i>, a piece of paper is bookended by drawings of triffids; five in the top left corner and 2 in the bottom-right, at the end of the page. All that exists between them is the Line of Intent<\/i>, a series of blue dashes moving from one end of the page to the other. The Line might be notches on a bedpost, a tally of the dead, something as simple as the days passing into one another. Butt\u2019s constant return to the alien body of Wyndham\u2019s novel\u2014and the juvenile sexual imagery of his 1990 video Triffids<\/i>, part of the Transmission <\/i>installation\u2014offers the bug as a metaphor for the ill body and for the outcome of an AIDS diagnosis. Butt\u2019s work in the wake of his diagnosis is explicit about the possibility of death; his Familiars<\/i> installation, holding dangerous combinations of chemicals just out of reach from one another, even places the spectator close to death. If Cradle<\/i>, where chlorine is contained is a Newtonian cradle, is looked at from the right angle, it looks as if the blown glass chemical containers are touching, that the slightest force could shatter them.<\/p>\n

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Hamad Butt\u2019s work was more explicitly informed by the AIDS crisis and his own diagnosis in 1987. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Ros Kavanagh<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s ironic, then, given Butt\u2019s formally oblique art that makes such direct references to death, that even as Hujar\u2019s work is more aesthetically direct, he rarely tackles death itself head-on. Even his images of Palermo\u2019s catacombs feel more about the idea of what\u2019s been lost than the idea of death itself. Of course, one of Hujar\u2019s most famous photographs, Candy Darling on Her Deathbed<\/i> (1973), presents Candy close to death, but it\u2019s another image, one in the Raven Row retrospective, that offers a different perspective on Hujar\u2019s approach to photographing the end. In Jackie Curtis<\/a> Dead<\/i> (1985), Hujar photographs Curtis in his casket, eyes closed for the final time, with a flower on his suit and a disco record at his side. While there\u2019s so often an assumption of mortality within Hujar\u2019s work\u2014the poses of his subjects and the context of the AIDS crisis we\u2019re forced to reckon with his work\u2014the way he presents death itself feels different; there\u2019s a stark finality here that exists at odds with the world that he captured. Hujar captured a world that was so alive; even subjects lying prone or deep in thought like John Waters<\/a> and Susan Sontag<\/a> (the former shown as part of \u201cPerformance and Portraiture,\u201d the latter in \u201cEyes Open in the Dark\u201d), are liable to come alive, possessed by some thought or possibility, at any moment. This, inevitably, becomes part of how we grieve a lost community through Hujar\u2019s work; we\u2019re presented with a world of possibilities taken away from us. Instead of capturing the act of losing something, Hujar shows us what\u2019s been lost.<\/p>\n

What might bring these artists together isn\u2019t just the way in which, in vastly different visual languages, they show a world that came undone under the shadow of death and plague, but instead, questions of memory: how is it we can remember what\u2019s been lost? Whether intentionally or not, there\u2019s a moment in \u201cApprehensions\u201d that echoes Hujar\u2019s practice. When Hamad is being interviewed by his brother, he lies on the sofa as if he were posing for a Hujar portrait, offering up a part of himself to us as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Butt\u2019s work understands how fragile and precarious things are, showing them in real-time through ambitious, unsettling installations. It\u2019s these moments, where whatever space there might be between life and death feels so thin that we might be able to glimpse through it if we try hard enough, that Hujar seems to freeze in time. So much of his work is dedicated to the moments of life that are lived in between. This can be seen in his images of performers\u2014Hujar\u2019s images from Italy capture the transience and transformation of live performance like little else\u2014and landscapes; in one of the final rooms of the Raven Row is a series of Hujar\u2019s photos of the Hudson River, the portraits and faces that we so often associate with his work are gone, and we are asked to reckon with the realities of absence and what we can do with the empty spaces left behind.<\/p>\n

\"A\"A<\/a>
Peter Hujar, Stephen Varble (III), Soho, New York<\/em>, 1976. \u00a9 2025 the Peter Hujar Archive \/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, DACS London, Pace Gallery, NY, Fraenkel Gallery, SF, Maureen Paley, London, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Queer<\/p><\/div>\n