General Idea
By Fred Camper
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In an interview General Idea pointed out that, because Indiana never copyrighted his image, it “spread…rapidly through the commercial media”; their use of a similar design thereby suggests the virus’s rapid spread. They also hoped that Indiana’s “Love” design would create for theirs “an aura of familiarity that would allow a more alarming content.” And alarming it is–partly because White AIDS #4-6 are installed on a large wall covered to the ceiling with Blan©, Blan©, Blan©: wallpaper bearing the same logo, though the contrast between the letters and background is more visible than in the canvases. Together these works are the most effective expression I’ve seen of the pervasiveness of AIDS. You strain to read the letters on the canvases, insinuating the word into your consciousness almost as if you’ve created it yourself; their almost-whiteness suggests that AIDS may be present even in apparently antiseptic realms. But then the wall–most commonly white in modern art exhibits–is now also inscribed with the word AIDS: the disease is everywhere. The gallery is no longer a neutral space; AIDS has become a kind of perceptual ground, the basis through which everything else must be seen.
Other works are representational but emphasize the metaphoric potential of their imagery. Black Floaters is a group of nine drawings made by Jorge Zontal in 1993 as he was dying. In each he covered a color photograph of a room interior from a paint catalog with thick, black acrylic paint–messy streaks and cockroachlike blobs. On one level, these are literal depictions that parody the cliched injunction to paint what you see: AIDS patients frequently have eye diseases that can cause a huge increase in “floaters.” By covering these clean interiors with his marks, Zontal also suggests an alienation from mainstream culture. Finally, and most movingly, by depicting his floaters as roaches he “infects” these new, clean rooms with a kind of scourge. Just as roaches hide in walls, the AIDS virus can lie dormant in the body for years before its effects are seen; just as, once you see a roach, you know your place is infested, so once you see the effects of the AIDS virus, you’re already very sick. Both infestations do most of their work out of view; both are seemingly unstoppable.
Staci Boris–the curator of “My Little Pretty: Images of Girls by Contemporary Women Artists,” an exhibition of 24 works by six women now at the Museum of Contemporary Art–writes in her catalog essay that these pieces are opposed to “images of the feminine idea…still fed to us” by the mass media. By contrast, these artists “investigate different aspects of female identity and question the way women and girls are represented in our culture.” This is not exactly new territory for the art world: many orthodox feminists have long questioned depictions of the female form as too loaded, too culturally overdetermined, to be reclaimed. The fact that in this show the artists depict pubescent or prepubescent girls only heightens its provocative quality. One doesn’t have to agree with feminists’ proscription of the female body as a subject to see that they had a point: many of the works here have an erotic edge. Even when the artist’s perspective is different from the male one, it’s often hard to disentangle the girls’ apparent seductiveness from the artists’ proposed critique of voyeurism. But what’s troubling about the exhibit is also what’s interesting, as we’re reminded that few of us can be pure as the driven snow given the tangle of conflicting thoughts, troubling associations, and basic drives that constitute our natures.
