Mars Repetina:

Constructing Disease during the Black Death and AIDS Epidemics

1

There are many parallels between the Bubonic Plague of 1350 and the AIDS epidemic. Though plagues have been present throughout the world’s history, these particular two episodes pose some of the most interesting iconographical questions relevant today. First, artists addressing the Black Death developed a consistent iconography throughout Europe, and second, artists today have purposefully evoked this iconography as a platform from which further exploration of AIDS and image can take off.

Both eras faced hysteric populations trying to come to grips with death and the “victim,” and despite certain paranoid explanations proposed by religious and homophobic commentators today, “AIDS looks to us, as the plague of 1348 did to the people of medieval Europe, like an inexplicable and horrific exogamous calamity.”1 This paper, then, will address the way in which the visual arts of the respective eras both reflected and affected cultural expectations in medicine, politics, economy, and religion when faced with the situation of wide spread death.

I first became interested in the correlation between the two eras when I discovered the work of Robert Farber. His “Western Blot” series, produced between 1991-1994 was a series of 23 painting-constructions that reflected on parallels between the Black Death of

1348-50 and AIDS. The Western Blot itself is one of two tests used to detect HIV, a title that Farber appropriated for works he considered both symbolic and literal in approach and construction. He used quotes within his works taken directly from witnesses and victims of the Black Death and AIDS.2 The striking resemblance in responses is complemented even further by Farber’s view of himself as historian, adding panels upon panels to the works, symbolizing the passage of time. In one of his last interviews, Farber spoke of the current parallel between AIDS and the Bubonic Plague, which served as the key inspiration for his

1 Herlihy, David. The Black Death and the Transformation of the West. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA. 1997. Pg.5 2 Farber, Robert. Someday: Robert Farber, a retrospective. Brandeis University. Waltham, MA. 1997. Pg.29 2 Blot series. “There were so many equivalents: sociology, economically, spiritually… I think that a part of my thesis is that the rituals that people found themselves involved in are paralleled…in the art itself.”3

In one of Farber’s most personal works, Western blot #19, he related his role as artist to that of the chronicler John Clyn of Kilkenny (1349)4. Clyn wrote, “I, as among the dead, waiting till death do come, have put into writing truthfully what I have heard verified. And that the writing not perish with the scribe, I add parchment to continue it, if by chance anyone be left in the future, and any child of Adam may escape this pestilence and continue the work thus commenced.” The chronicle continued written in another hand,

“Here it seems the author died.”5 In response to this statement in his later work #19,

Farber had become aware of his own imminent death due to AIDS related complications, and wanted, like Clyn, to find the courage to continue adding information. “I’m doing the same as he did. Only it’s not parchment; it’s one of my panels.”6

3 Farber. Pg.20 4 Farber. Pg.34 5 Farber. Pg.34 6 Farber. Pg.34 3

In the 20th century the topic of pestilence was not explored until the AIDS crisis brought to the attention of the public once again the incurable infectious diseases.7 AIDS, considered the “plague of the Millennium,” forces us to readdress the same issues the

Black Death brought about in 1350. There are several understandings that I will address when critiquing the works produced at the time. The analyses will focus around the key question of the relationship between man and mortal disease, and how art serves as mediation between the two. These observations will operate with the understanding that, 1.

Disease is a language. 2. The body is a representation, 3. Medicine is a political practice.8

How do visual works express these concepts, and what can we learn from comparing these two particular episodes in history?

It is crucial to look at the Great Death in order to create a discourse around AIDS related artwork today because of the standard in which contemporary artists must navigate.

This standard, though predating the Plague, is one of death and its association with sin.

True, this association does pre-date the Black Death, however in 1350, for the first time,

Europe’s fear of the bubonic plague lead it to be the only disease which developed a specific iconography.9 This iconography carries with it a significant understanding of the foreignness of the Plague disease and the societal reaction to it. Contemporary artists have intentionally invoked these images in order to address the current AIDS agenda. Both sets of artists deal with the same underlying question, that of the “profound ambivalence about origins of illness.” Does one prefer an illness that is caused by who one is, therefore capable of being prevented through “self control,” or does one prefer an external cause that

7 Boeckl, Christine M. Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology. Truman State University. Kirksville, M.S. 2000. Pg.150 8 Treichler, Paula A. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS. Duke University Press. Durham, N.C. 1999. Pg. 35-36 9 Boeckl. Pg.18 4 can be addressed strictly as foreign? In short, does one prefer a medical problem to a life- style one?10

The choice of these two particular epidemics, being the most widespread and relevant issues of their respective times is important to observe in relation to the artwork stemming from them. Each new recurrence of an epidemic caused people to look back to earlier traditions. “Humans tend to cope with overwhelming experiences by reverting to testimonies of earlier generations.”11 While the diseases themselves have been widely assessed and associated, the art surrounding them has received less attention. The visual arts’ world serves as reflection and condemnation of the cumulative experiences of the dead, the dying, and the observer of the dying, and this paper will investigate the artists’ use of specific iconography in context of its exchange with culture.

The visual artist needed to invent modes of representation pertaining to different concepts of the individual and the community in the two periods. These different perspectives lead to vastly different discourses of responsibility and death. European culture and artists defined the Black Plague as completely foreign. The perception of community was based in geography, which enabled the Plague to be considered an

“invader” that attacked a physical region. One particular line of rhetoric surrounding plague was its origin elsewhere.12 As consequence of this construction, the art of the time was invested in images of mass death, like a battle scene. Bodies lay in piles, already dead or in the process of dying, as death, indiscriminate, was an equal opportunity murderer.

Most importantly, public works of art served as mass media. Works commissioned to be viewed in public spaces served to expose the population to a particular construction of the sick “victim.”

10 Treickler. Pg.21 11 Boeckl. Pg.34 12 Sontag, Susan. AIDS and Its Metaphors. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York, N.Y. 1988. Pg. 47. 5 In contrast, AIDS artists today have a dissimilar power of authority. Rather than being/enforcing the mass communication image, the 1980’s were preoccupied with trying to counter it. AIDS artists had to deal with the same question of foreignness, but from a completely different role in society than artists in the Plague faced. Today, AIDS is both an entity from with-out (foreign) but also a constructed one from with-in (lifestyle attached) that artists’ work attempts to deconstruct. Placed into the confines of media generated images of “guilty victims,” homosexuals, drug users, etc, the new “plague” is still associated with Christian concepts of sin. However, a new construction, the “innocent” victim, the hemophiliac, the heterosexual, forced the disease to return to Plague style foreignness. The gay man, as a consequence, becomes a disease vector.

The innocent victim is not altogether a new concept. Many innocent victims were depicted in Black Death artwork. In fact, almost all depictions of Plague victims, despite the Church’s position on Plague being punishment for sin, expressed the innocence and powerlessness of the victim. However, the media’s depiction of a guilty “vector” gay community was rarely glimpsed in actual medieval public works. The artist of the 80’s worked to deconstruct this concept of a guilty gay community. How he/she did this was to create the individual as metaphor. The work became personalized in an attempt to find different receptive audiences. However the repercussions of this movement is the ever present argument of how to depict the Person With AIDS (PWAs), and the even subtler topic of “Yes, but is it art?” Both questions are inevitably linked to the visual probing of the individual when faced with death, especially in context of mass media created stereotypes. Certainly there are few if any paintings in the Middle Ages that assign significant guilt to sailors (who brought the disease to Italian city ports), purely for being sailors.

In 1347 a Genoese fleet departing from Caffa arrived in their Messina harbor in northeast Sicily containing sick and dying crewmembers. Too late, the Messinese harbor 6 authorities tried to quarantine the fleet, and within 6 months half the region’s population had either died of plague or fled. Similar situations occurred repeatedly up and down the coast in ports across Eurasia and Europe. From its principle points of entry into Italy through Pisa and Genoa, it spread to Tuscany and then through Venice and Milan. At the time, Venice, where an estimate 60% of the population died within the first year and a half of the Black Death, was the most populous city in Italy.13 From Italy the plague spread through the Mediterranean basin and reached French ports by 1348 and then spread through the Iberian Peninsula, Germany, Flanders, Holland and up through Scandinavia by late 1348.14

The Black Death was a combination of three strands of plague. Bubonic, pneumonic, and septicaemic, which in combination killed between 25 and 50% of

Europe’s population. The Black Death was not a one-time occurrence, but rather was the first episode of a pandemic that continued to reoccur in outbreaks across Europe until the

18th century.15 The disease was transferred to humans from animal hosts, who served as primary and secondary epizootic victims. Rats carried fleas that in turn carried Yersinia

Pestis, the bacteria responsible from plague. “The fleas carrying Y. pestis turn to humans only after their supply of secondary hosts has diminished…Humans, then, are not a preferred host for Y. Pestis, but rather, the victims of an animal epizootic.”16

The bubonic form of Y. pestis was the most prevalent form. It was carried by flea hosts, and transferred to the human bloodstream when fleas bit them. The incubation period for the bubonic form was 6 days, and the initial symptom was often a swelling bump at the point of contact (bite) from the flea, which lead to internal hemorrhaging and the purple splotches (buboes), from which the epidemic derives its name. Bubonic plague

13 Gottfried, Robert S. The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe. Free Press, Macmillan Publishing. New York, NY. 1983. Pg.48 14 Gottfried. Pgs. 48-60 15 Gottfried. Pg. xiii 16 Gottfried. Pg.7 7 is the least fatal of the three forms, and killed about 50%-60% of those who contacted it.

The pneumonic form of plague, which was fatal in 95%-100% of contacted cases, could be transmitted directly from person to person and had a much shorter 2-3 day incubation period. Little is known about the rare, but 100% fatal, septicaemic form except that it was also insect-born and its incubation period could be as short a few hours, killing before even the buboes could form.17

In Plague art, the skeleton became a personification of death. The image of death, with its characteristic skull, skeleton, scythe and crossed bones, pre-dated the Black Death, but during the 1350’s it became a metaphor for plague, and expressed a constant reminder that death was at hand.18 Pre-dating the first wave of the Plague in Europe, death was a point of constant address due to religious attention to the afterlife. The need to depict the eternal aspect of the soul lead to imagery emphasizing the lack of significance that one should assign to the impermanent of-this-world body. Consequently, skeletons, rotting corpses, images of suffering and religious ecstasy abound. These images however, took on new meaning with the plague, where death became so abundant, perhaps taking up to half the population of Europe (records are inaccurate due to exaggeration).

The human corpse becomes a point of intense religious service rather than an obstacle to it. Where earlier the needs of the body may have prevented one from doing his service to God, now it was a sign that he was in His service. The image of suffering bodies, contorted, in pain, with tortured faces pleading for reprieve presented an image of suffering for God. One was in such severe pain because it was God’s desire. Invoking the memory of human suffering could influence God’s mercy, and saints depicted as “Christ like”

17 Gottfried. Pg.8 18 Boeckl. Pg.47 8 sufferers could intercede on man’s behalf. God would “recognize the sacrifices and sufferings and answer the victim’s prayer.”19

The ambiguity between pre-plague suffering images and Plague art is nowhere more evident than in the iconography associated with meeting of the wealthy with “transi”, decomposing bodies. The transi emerged to play relevant roles in the late 14th century, as death became so commonplace that a “ghoulish” fascination arose with the decomposing body cavity, with emphasis on worms, putrefaction, and gruesome physical details.20 The narrative in which healthy, usually wealthy people accidentally encountered these rotting cadavers lends even more of a religious assertion to the Church’s equation of wealth and greed with sin and death. This storyline served to illustrate the need to address one’s spiritual self above one’s earthly possession (worldly self). The fact that this imagery predates the plague, but is appropriated in plague imagery, shows how inexplicably entwined were religion, medicine, and culture, especially during the time of the first wave of plague epidemic. An analysis between an image of the 1330’s (at one time even suggested to be post first wave), and an image of one completed immediately after, both in

Italy, will serve to demonstrate the theology behind death during the Black Death, and how the visual arts expressed it.

The first work is a fresco in Pisa attributed to the artist Buonamico Buffalmacco, depicting the ‘Triumph of Death,” dating from the 1330’s (pre-dating the 1347 outbreak by over a decade). The fresco “did not mirror the sudden recurrence of plague in Italy but reflected the Church’s far-reaching decisions on life after death.”21 There are cripples that beg for Death to release them from their pain, knowing that they will be rewarded for their suffering in heaven. Much of the mural depicts psychomachia (an allegorical combat between virtue and vice) through the use of angels and demons fighting over the souls of

19 Boeckl. Pg.75-76 20 Tuchman, Barbara W. A Distant Mirror. Alfred A Knopf Inc. New York, NY. 1978. Pg.506 21 Boeckl. Pg.70 9 the dead. “A number of the episodes…seem to reflect Benedict’s theological assumptions on afterlife.”22 The Meeting of the Three Living with the Three Dead is represented on the left side of the work, and Death Threatens a Courtly Gathering with a Scythe on the right end of the fresco. Of great importance, as noted above, are the transi depicted in the

Meeting of the Three. “The three open caskets with bodies in various stages of putrefication emphasize the importance of the immortal soul as stated in Benedict XII’s

Visio Beatifica. The mural represents in these infested cadavers the mortal animal body in contrast to the spiritual body. The former is destined to return to dust, while the latter will be resurrected at the end of time.”23 These very same transi, and in fact the story of the

Meeting of the Three Living with the Three Dead re-occurred often in the art surrounding the waves of plague outbreak.

In comparison to Buffalmacco’s Triumph of Death, Orcagna (Andrea di Cione) painted one immediately after the Black Death in the church of Santa Croce in Florence. In this composition a King and Queen are out hunting when they come across three open graves. “Each one contains a corpse; all worm-eaten, one blackened, one covered with

22 Boeckl. Pg.71 23 Boeckl. Pg.71 10 snakes, one with belly distended, all wearing crowns…The King, it is clear from his expression, has not failed to draw the proper moral…To the right the lepers and the blind, the halt and the lame plead to be relieved of their sufferings.”24 The work invokes much of

Buffalmacco’s religious explanations about suffering in life leading to a promised afterlife.

Comparing these two images serves to demonstrate how closely connected

Christian theology was with every part of man’s life. Early in the first plague outbreak there was little doubt in the Church’s moral stance on the reason for the plague, and the

Church clearly defined the way the plague should be considered by the public. The

Church’s moral superiority would wane by the close of the first outbreak and in successive waves following 1350, which will be addressed later in the paper. Their hold, however, on medicine predating and during 1350 was made apparent by the artwork of the time that correlated their previously existing religious stance with the death the plague brought.

Where did the Church exactly stand in its consideration of the Plague? What images, along with the Triumph of Death, were correlated and appropriated from the Church’s repertoire to indicate the “invasion” of the plague in Europe?

The Catholic view served to create a cultural understanding of the plague. In answer to the opening question, the population of the Middle Ages did in fact view the plague as a foreign enemy, brought upon their sinning selves by God, and the Church played the most pivotal role in spreading this understanding. In the first half of the 1300’s, great works and statements were created and put forth by the town hall or bell tower of a

Cathedral. By the third quarter of the 1300’s there was a noticeable shift when great works where moved to the church or chapter-hall of a religious order, reflecting the shift to where a community’s energy and convictions were centered.25 As previously stated, these works of art were the contemporary form of mass media. They served as explanation and were

24 Ziegler, Philip. The Black Death. Harper Torchbook, Harper & Row Publishers. New York, NY. 1969. Pgs. 275-276 25 Meiss, Millard. Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death. Princeton University Press. Princeton, NJ. 1951. Pg.94 11 understood as fact. The fine arts’ relationship with the Church was propagandistic, and served to visually present the Church’s theological opinions in a time were large segments of the population were partially, if not wholly illiterate.

Needless to say, like almost every aspect of medieval society, medicine was tied into the Church as well. The basis of pre-plague medicine was the theory of humors. The human body was a microcosm of the larger world; consequently the elements that comprised man in some way alluded to the cosmos. The “liquids” within each body reflected the four elements. Blood, being both hot and moist, most closely resembled air.

Phlegm being cold and moist, resembled water. Yellow bile was hot and dry, referencing fire, and black bile was cold and dry like earth.26 “The idea expressed in Plato’s Timaeys of man as microcosm encouraged linking the stages of human life with stages of constituents of the universe as a whole…In the middle ages, the concept of a four-staged human life cycle interacting with other fourfold aspects of the universe was frequently expressed.”27 Physicians at the time considered people whose balance was overwhelmed by hot moist temperament (blood/air) to be most likely to succumb to the plague, and also noted that if they were young, passionate, sensual and female, they were particularly vulnerable.28 One cannot help but notice the “moral” implications of this “medical” observation.

Because the body was treated as such a transcendent concept, the most highly regarded physicians were actually theorists, which where often licensed by the ecclesiastic authorities themselves. These physicians based their study on previously written works from antiquity, the Islamic east, and astrology. Astrology was central to plague theory, and despite the majority of physicians at the time stressing moral reasons, and only a few claiming solely natural reasons, all physicians were in agreement about the importance of

26 Gottfried. Pg.106 27 Siraisi, Nancy G. Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine. University of Chicago Press. Chicogo, IL. 1990. Pg.110 28 Gottfried. Pg.113 12 astrological influence. The three major planets, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were in malign conjunction in 1348, which was apparently the origin of bad air associated with the plague.29 However misguided their acknowledgment of “bad air” was, they were not far off one of the modes of plague transmission, interestingly enough. They may have been observing pneumatic forms of plague, which could be transferred via inhaling infected air.

Many images combine the two (pneumatic and bubonic) forms of Plague, as buboes are depicted on bodies, and people tending the sick tended to cover their mouths in fear of the air (pneumonic).

Professional surgeons did not enjoy the prestige that educated physicians did, and occupied a lower level in the hierarchy of respect in medicine. Little of the physicians’ education came from observing the human body. “…New propositions were usually rehashings of old ideas.”30 These ideas were inevitably of religious theory and the images that stemmed from it where steeped in religious iconography. This medical structure is reflected then in the imagery that was appropriated for Orcagna’s Triumph of Death from

Buffalmacco’s earlier version. Ultimately, death was the responsibility of God. Just as He chose to eliminate physical regions (villages) in the Old Testament (ex. Sodom), so He was doing the same now with the European cityscape.

In the Middle Ages, man’s mental health and his understanding of morality were formed by his relationship with the church. “His faith was unquestioning and his psychological dependence upon its institutions complete.”31 Consequently medicine and religion had the same ultimate goal, that of healing the body through the soul. Physiology was affected by this joining of ideals because there failed to be a distinction between the approach taken by religious philosophers and physicians to the treatment of the human body. There was little separation of the medicinal from the philosophical when pertaining

29 Boeckl. Pg.14 30 Gottfried. Pg.105 31 Ziegler. Pg.259 13 to human physiology.32 Medical explanations for the plague, regardless of if based in astrology or not, still emphasized the idea that the primary cause of the epidemic was

God’s Will.33

This emphasis on God was pivotal in establishing Plague iconography. Plague artists invoked religious death imagery partly of their own volition and partly because they were acting under the influence of Church patronage. Artists purposefully appropriated the previously established images of death in order that the public would remain receptive and be able to comprehend the plague in a certain fashion. The plague as a dealer of death to the immoral was a construction, and one that the religious authority had already previously developed a visual repertoire for to illustrate its decrees on the battle between spirituality and flesh.

The Triumph of Death imagery (which often encompassed multiple vignettes about mortality) did not stand alone as the only visual construction of death by the Church. Some of the other most prevalent appropriated death images of the 1350’s and many successive plague waves are that of the Danse Macabre and meetings of the living and the dead. The

Black Death brought with it an entire slew of new images as well, along with some unique observations of plague movement. “The chiliastic mood which pervades so much of the art and literature of the period can be explained in many ways, but not the least of these is the apocalypse that seemed foreshadowed in the disasters of 1348.”34 The experience of the

Black Death coincided with an already noticeable preoccupation with human mortality and much of the death imagery of the plague originated before the mid fourteenth century.35 In these images we see the way in which death was addressed as a universal entity. In the

Danse Macabre, skeletons dance with every socio-economic fraction of society, indicating

32 Siraisi. Pg.81 33 Siraisi. Pg.129 34 Levin, William R. Images of Love and Death in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art. University of Michigan. Ann Arbor, MI. 1976. Pg. 3 35 Boeckl. Pg.69 14 how none are exempt from death. Death comes to all. The literal dance of the Danse

Macabre itself developed under the influence of reoccurring famine, war, and plague “as a street performance to illustrate sermons on the submission of all alike to Death the leveler.”36

The most famous and earliest known dating visual depiction of the Danse Macabre was in the Cemetery of he Holy Innocents in Paris. The Cemetery of the Holy Innocents served as muse to many artists depicting death. Throughout the duration of the Plague in

Paris, the entire walled cemetery was virtually one mass grave, where bodies rotted quickly and skeletons were moved to open cribs around walls. Upon the cemetery walls, dated from 1424, were long narrative scenes of skeletons dancing with people.37 The frescoes, along with the great cemetery, are no longer existent. The frescoes are only known through a book of woodcut prints published in 1485 in Paris, by the printer Guyot Marchant. He copied the frescoes and transcribed the verses that ran beneath them.

In Guyot’s version, some changes were made due to the book format, but in general the book remains close to embodying the images of the now destroyed frescoes. In his manuscript, the columns that separate the characters represent the stone arches of the cloister. Read this way one can make sense of the death quotes inscribed into the cemetery walls. In the prints (and the frescos) a sergeant says ‘Je suis pris de ca et de la’ (I am being attacked on all sides), 38 once again alluding to the invasion of plague as an enemy who attacks.

The original (and interpretive) Danse work was a commentary on social order and mass death. It maintained the hierarchy of prestige from the peasant to the prince, but all held hands with the skeleton. Similarly, images of three princes encountering three dead bodies with the warning of their future state, embodied a narrative that emphasized the

36 Tuchman. Pg. 505 37 Karp, Diane R. ARS MEDICA: Art, Medicine, and the Human Condition. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia, PA. 1985. Pg.210 38 http://www.geocities.com/pollefeys/dansemacabre/dm01.htm 15 wealthy were no more exempt from death then any other. These images served under the function of ars moriendi… “Remember, you will Die.” The entire genre of moriendi was to emphasize the lack of permanence of the human body. The Catholic Judgment Day always had a presence in work surrounding death. The waves of plague were no exception.

The successive waves of the plague aided to continue the spread of concepts of universal susceptibility, consequently images arise that speak of universality of death. The

Church and Cemetery of the Holy Innocents continued to be a presence in plague art in

Paris, even serving as landscape to Stefano della Bella’s “The Five Deaths” of 1648, which depicted Death in skeletal form as he was historically, but this time carrying a dead child with the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in the background.39 The image of the dead infant gained in prominence in the 1400’s and later in reverse of late 1300’s images of dead mothers embracing live, crying infants. The imagery was probably due to increased infant mortality in the successive waves of plague. Their lack of developed immunity, which older generation that had survived previous plague sweeps had developed, rendered youths particularly susceptible in the 1361 second pandemic. The 2nd pandemic was notorious for its effectiveness in killing youths and aristocrats (who as well had not developed immunity because they had the ability to flee cities during Great Plague).

39 Massar, Phyllis Dearborn. Presenting Stefano della Bella: Seventeenth –century Printmaker. Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York Graphic Society. New York, N.Y. 1971. Pg. 126 16

The imagery associated with the danse macabre and the story of three possibly became increasingly prevalent during plague outbreaks because it addressed the inability to control one’s time on earth. Whether it is the wealthy, prestigious, or pious, none were guaranteed to live. There was an overwhelming infatuation with death at the time.

“…Considering that mortality was thought to be the result of original sin, it is interesting to observe that with the exception of the popular theme of Death and the Miser, the artists of the period rarely linked immorality with mortality, and in fact found more interesting the death of those who deserved to live.” “Lovers die and death loves those who do not deserve to die: the young, the beautiful, the strong.” On the other hand the dance of death become a parody of the earlier dance of love. 40 Rather than love conquering all, death does. Although literary descriptions stressed the eeriness of empty streets, artists preferred

40 Levin. Pgs.4-5 17 to depict as many tragic occurrences as possible including the collection of massive amounts of corpses from the streets.41

These images, the Triumph, Meeting of Three, and Danse Macabre, all were used to mediate the understanding of the plague. They were images the public responded to.

They constructed the concept of death’s association with attaching geographical regions like a predator that no one could escape. People feared the sick and were faced with inevitable death. In Europe they tried to flee to the countryside. In earlier plagues that raged through the Islamic world, individuals did not even bother trying to escape the plague infested cities, operating under the assumption that if it was God’s will, there was nowhere that man could flee physically where God would not be able to strike him.

True, there was a little debate over whether the curse was directed at an individual because of his/her sins or an entire community, but the general consensus was that of the sins of the community as a whole were responsible. Plague votives were numerous and commissioned by any wealthy entity from the town to the religious order, in order to atone for the “collective guilt” of the city.42 The emphasis on the universal sinfulness of mankind, which merited a universal punishment, implicitly denied that plague struck only the individually guilty. The Black Death was “not a plague ‘natural’ to mankind but ‘a chastisement from Heaven.’”43

The repetitive nature and the continuous re-occurrence of similar images in Plague art were indicative of the visual artist’s role in society. As previously stated, the artist helped fill the role now occupied by mass media. The constant use of the aristocracy and nobility being suddenly confronted with their own eventual death is the equivalency of the now widespread use of clichés within printed papers. This is only further enforced by the understanding that painters were dependant on patronage, which often stemmed from the

41 Boeckl. Pg.63 42 Boeckl. Pg. 60 43 Tuchman. Pg.104 18 Church, or from an aristocratic class that was comfortable with enforcing the status quo.

Works of Art were the public word, and a quite one-dimensional view (due to economic factors) at that.

It is interesting to note here that the only particular (not generalized) imagery depicted in plague art were holy figures and cityscapes. The story of Job, being easy to relate to, became far more prevalent, and where as Christ had previously been depicted as addressing both the saved and the damned, post-plague Christ images addressed solely the damned in an apocalyptic final judgment. The damned are depicted suffering Christ’s wrath, with little aid from other intervention.44 This intervention came only in the form of holy saints with reputations as healers, or in the form of the Virgin. Along with a rise in status of Mary as sympathetic to man’s plight, certain saints rose in cult status because they were known for working in behalf of the sick, and in particular was a heightened attention to Sts. Sebastian and Roch.

44 Meiss. Pgs. 68,76 19 Mattia Preti’s produced numerous ex-voto works for the 1656 Plague of Napoli which decimated 1/2 the population (possibly up to 200,000). Only sketches remain today of the now lost frescos which Preti was commissioned to do for the 7 gate entrances of the city in an attempt to end the onslaught of the plague. Both of the two represented sketches represent the Virgin with Patrons of the city at her side who plead for the end of the plague.45 Ex-votos served a very particular role in plague art, and served to reinforce the supernatural understanding of the plague in its’ superstitious nature. The Virgin was also considered a suitable subject for Church interiors, unlike the Horsemen of the Apocalypse for example, as is indicative of Michele da Verona’s sketch for an altarpiece, “Madonna and Child with Sts. Roch and Sebastian.” 46 Interestingly enough, his altarpiece groups the

Madonna with two of the most popular, if not the most popular, saints associated with plague intervention.

The iconography associated with St. Sebastian changed significantly after the emergence of the Black Death. Predating that time, his body was rarely depicted with

45 Corace, Erminia. Mattia Preti. Fratelli Palombi s.r.l. Rome, Italy. 1989. Pg. 86 46 Goldfarb, Hilliard T. Art’s Lament: Creativity in the Face of Death. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Boston, M.A. 1994. Pg.3 20 arrow wounds, as this was only one of the many scenes of his martyrdom. However, after the plague his image became increasingly riddled with arrows as symbol of his suffering.

That Sebastian, although mortally wounded, managed to recover, made him the ideal plague intercessor. This along with a legend that after his death the saint miraculously interceded for Pavia in the 7th century made Sebastian one of the longest surviving cult figures.47

The second most popular saint of the earlier plague epidemics was St. Roch. He himself fell sick of the plague in Piacenza where he hid himself in the woods and miraculously nursed himself to health with only the assistance of his faithful dog that brought him food. The depictions that lead credence to the rumor of his dog are again a glimpse into the observational strength of the time. Independent 20th century studies observed dogs, as hosts to infected fleas, seldom died of plague because they developed immunity to less virulent strains of the disease after carrying it for so many centuries.

47 Boeckl. Pgs.55-56 21 “This would explain the legend that St. Roch’s dog was not afflicted by bubonic plague and was said to have supplied the saint with food during his illness.”48

The emergence of his cult status is credited to the transfer of his body in 1485 to

Venice’s Scuola di San Rocco. The association of Venice with St. Roch and plague intervention was particularly active because Venice was an active port city and was consequently subject to regular infestations of plague, even taking the lives of such artists as Giorgione in 1510, and Titian in 1576. The Scuola served as an extraordinarily large patron of ex-voto works incorporating St. Roch’s image.49 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo produced “St. Roch seated in Profile,” 1730. Tiepolo’s Profile was only 1 of 13 pictures commissioned by San Rocco members to use as ex-votos. The plague bubo is visible under the wrappings of his upper right leg.50 The bubo is still the only plague depiction artists invoked to demonstrate its affects on the body. The artists never chose to invoke the image of the spots and internal bleeding that were associated with the pneumatic form, or the

48 Boeckl. Pg.10 49 Boeckl. Pgs.57-58 50 Goldfarb. Pg.9 22 coughing of blood. The bubo was the only sign that distinguished the plague from any other sickness, and St. Roch was one of the only figures ever continuously depicted with actual the actual Plague wound.

The increased use of the multiplying arts post Black Death greatly changed the rhetoric the visual arts had erected through its earlier use of saints and religious salvation.

“Just before the turn to the 16th century a powerful millennial movement emerged. It is exemplified in Albrecht Durer’s wood cut series of the Apocalypse. Since the New

Testament specifically stated that pestilence was one of the events to usher in the end of the world, the idea was even more appropriate in plague iconography. While specific chiliastic references were less pronounced in Plague paintings they appeared prominently in print.”51 In Durer’s time, major paintings were undertaken only under commission. The work “embodied the collective beliefs of those in power, in this case representatives of the church and state. It seems safe to say that an artist is always commissioned to represent a patron’s point of view.”52 Painters at the turn of 15th century were typically restricted in subject matter to portraits and accepted religious themes.

The multiplying arts permitted the artist to take up his own initiative instead of waiting for a commission. As a result, the artist could produce works more of his own invention, and because he could produce copies in great numbers which were then sold at comparatively economic prices, the artist could still support himself with out the dependant income of a patron. The graphic arts still had to conform to a large extent with contemporaneous social standards. There would be no receptive buying audience if they did not, but tastes could be affected through exposure to graphic works in return. Graphic media became a vehicle of self-expression much earlier than the major arts.53 Even “in the

51 Boeckl. Pgs.87-88 52 Atkins, Robert. From Media to Metaphor: Art about AIDS. Independent Curators Inc. New York, N.Y. 1991. Pg.24 53 Panofsky, Erwin. The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer. Princeton University Press. Princeton, N.J. 1943. Pg.45 23 sphere of religious representations the engraver and woodcut designer was freer than the painter: he could select subjects unsuitable for altarpieces, such as the Apocalypse, and could be unconventional in his representation of others. In the secular field his liberty was altogether unlimited.”54

To further emphasize the impact of prints and engravings, one must address the questions surrounding multiplying arts’ ability to gain access among new audiences and be received in different environments. No longer restricted to public spaces heavily controlled by the church, state, or extremely wealthy, prints could be owned by a much larger fraction of the population, and could be placed within an individual’s house. Art now had the ability to propagate the artist’s agenda rather than that of the Church and State’s, and was far more accessible to different social-economic classes. An artist could not only bring new interpretations to the audience, but could reach that audience through a different environment than that of the controlled hallways of the chapel.

The plague struck Nuremberg (Durer’s residence) many times in the late 1400’s, enforcing the wide spread belief that the world would end at 1500. The Apocalypse became a fascination among particular print artists. Durer’s “Four Horsemen of the

Apocalypse” of 1498 perfectly demonstrates the emerging role of the artist and the nature of his ability to personalize the images of Plague. The plague had just struck in the summer of 1494.55 His Four Horsemen was designed to illustrate the Revelation of St. John, and is

1 of 15 images that does so. The riders are death, war, pestilence, and famine. Death rides a sickly pale horse and is the only figure that touches the ground.56 It is mostly in the horrific depiction of the attacking horsemen that this print differs from earlier works in subject matter. Still, even with the new opportunities widespread printmaking offered, the personal influences of the Church, on the individual are still apparent, as is noted by the still present

54 Panofsky. Pg.45 55 Panofsky. Pg 8-9 56 Goldfarb. Pg.2 24 correlation between the mass death caused by the plague, and Judgment Day, an association also made when appropriating pre-plague Triumph of Death images.

With the emergence of prints, not only could the artists advance different religious and political views, he could render his understanding of the plague more accurately, This is important in reflecting on the knowledge of Medieval Europe during the Plague.

Scientific observations, such as the presence of dead animals, demonstrate how medieval society was not altogether ignorant of the way in which plague waves spread. In many images, such as those of Marcantonio Raimondi’s “The Morbetto” of 1514 a heap of dead animals lies in the right hand corner,57 demonstrating this acute observation of the time.

The painter under the patronage of the Church probably had a more complex understanding of the Plague than the clergy commissioning the work permitted him to express. The Church was still trying to maintain its authority on the religious nature of the

57 Goldfarb. Pg. 4 25 plague as being punishment for sin, but the new works in print format could begin to break that construction down.

This new wave of artists was able to break way from previous plague imagery because it was given greater leniency now freed from dependency on the wealthy conservative patron. Their personal views were sliding away from the rigid understanding of the plague that the church had put forth as well. In Durer’s print, there is no concept of possible intervention, and above all, the image is fatalistic about the presence of death. The dead bodies in the foreground are not transi. They are not metaphors for the struggle between the soul and the body; Durer’s bodies are just that…dead people. Here we see the first signs of the foundations for a new discourse about art, death, and science. “The inventiveness and the creative power of the age manifested itself in a darker realm of

26 fearful, strenuous yet often uncertain piety, brightened only by mystical transports and visions of supernatural splendor.”58

Successive waves of plague kept the concept of mass death on people’s mind. But the Church’s plague, which emphasized religious devotion and inability to escape, caused its own collapse. The populations’ comprehended that along with commoners, the clergy and parish priests were just as likely, and maybe even more likely to die of the plague.

Because the clergy were required to stay with the sick and dying, they were often exposed to disease and consequently even more likely to contact it. It is due to the very fact that they put themselves in positions of contact with the sick, but not without hesitation, that forfeited the community’s respect.59 A new religious fervor arose during the Black Death that led to the decline of plague authority of the Church.60 This new brand of fearful and hysterical religious fervor is important to note for its contribution to the artistic vision of the time. “It is above all the works of the artists that the mood of the age finds its most vivid expression. The favourite themes were those of suffering and of retribution: Christ’s passion or the tortures of Hell.”61

Fractions of the population became so hysterical they took it upon themselves to try and repent for the sins bringing about the plague. Titled Flagellants, they took ritual into their own hands, marching through town centers while whipping themselves before the public. They became increasingly supported by locals and took upon themselves the role of interceders with God for all humanity, rather than supporting the clergy in doing so. The movement that began as an attempt through self-inflicted pain to save the world from destruction, caught the infection of power hunger and aimed at taking over the Church.”62

The Church forced their disintegration in 1351 when the plague was waning and hysteria

58 Meiss. Pg.61 59 Ziegler. Pgs.260-261 60 Ziegler. Pg.267 61 Ziegler. Pg.275 62 Tuchman. Pgs. 114-115 27 was less extreme. The Plague, joined by the other disturbances, tended in fact to polarize society toward strenuous religiosity on the one hand and moral and religious dissidence on the other. The culture of the time is characterized by a heightened tension between the two.63

Though plague literature frequently described the loss of faith by communities, abandonment by the clergy, and doubt in divine justice, this was never visually depicted.64

The lack of address in the visual arts was probably due to the fact that the more conservative forms of society, along with the church, were still the chief patrons of the arts until the rise in popularity of the multiplying arts. Wealthy families began to feel their position was threatened, and so endorsed a less worldly, more assertive on behalf of the authority of the Church. The artwork the wealthy and the Church itself sponsored tended to embrace the stable, enduring, preexistent, social hierarchy. “All sections of the middle class were, in any event, clearly united in their desire for a more intensely religious art.”65

Consequently paintings between 1350-1375 become more religious in a traditional sense, more ecclesiastical, and greatly resembled earlier art pre-dating Giotto.

Everyone suffered under the biblical original sin, and though prostitutes were somewhat sectioned out, little credence was given to any source (outside of God’s punishment) by the ecclesiastic authority during the panic. There was a somewhat more uniform effort to blame the Jews for plague outbreak, but even then, the authorities pointed out the loopholes in the theory. The population’s hostility turned on Jews and lynching began as early as 1348 because of particularly strong rumors of Jews poisoning the drinking wells with plague. The Jews were easy targets because they lived in ghetto areas and were not integrated into the surrounding landscapes. Their property could then be

63 Meiss. Pg.93 64 Boeckl. Pg.90 65 Meiss. Pgs.70-73 28 easily looted and confiscated after their deaths.66 Both medical practitioners and Church authorities at the time did not support these theories, pointing out that the plague hit regions where no Jews lived, and that in regions where they did live, they died in equal numbers as the Christians.

It is interesting to note the authorities opposition to mass rumors about the origin of plague, which is why many theories generated by public rumors failed to manifest in the commissioned works of the time. One can only theorize as to why the Church did not encourage the rumor or manipulate it to its own benefit. The fact that the victimization of the Jews remains absent from sponsored works of art that the time, but it well documented in literary circles such as Frenchman Jean de Venette’s “The Chronicle,” 67show the

Church’s control over propagating the understanding of the plague. The Church’s ability to propagate its agenda and create the masses’ understanding of plague veered away from religious based battles, and possibly re-focused the blame on the sexual. What “sins” was the population blamed for in bringing the plague upon themselves? Returning to the

Meeting of the Three Living with the Three Dead, the dominant understanding of sin was in decadence, whether it was sexual or monetary. Decadence was always the primary agenda of the Church, hence the appropriation of concepts and imagery through the ages pertaining to the extravagance of sinners to the worldly pleasure of revelry.

It is the construction of any sexual experience outside of child bearing as

“decadent’ and so “sinful” in nature, which has given the Church the ability to mobilize arguments against homosexuals today in a way it could not against the Jews in 1350.

While in 1350’s Europe the Jews were “guilty” victims (people who were themselves dying but somehow responsible for everyone’s death), the guilty victim of the AIDS era is the gay population. Faced with the introduction of exposure and mass media, the gay male

66 Tuchman. Pg.109 67 Gottfried pg.73 29 identity has had to face many questions about depicting disease. While Church and

Medical authorities denied the Jews’ responsibility for the plague of 1350, these same institutions have done much to “blame” the gay population for the AIDS epidemic. “In an alarming revival of ingrained Judeo-Christian prejudices, the common place reading of

AIDS, from the Bible Belt to the White House, is that its afflicted have transgressed moral law and have earned their terrible fate, which in turn should provide a fire-and-brimstone lesson to any potential sinners.”68

The difference, however, with the treatment of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980’s versus that of the Plague in 1350, is the representation now of AIDS not killing everyone

“across the board” in Danse Macabre style, but targeting specific cultural communities.

The geographical construction of the community in Plague years, supposedly encompassing the entire social-economic strata in a distinct location, no longer exists. This epidemic is different.

This then is where a contemporary artist who’s content addresses AIDS and People with AIDS (PWAs) differ from Medieval and Renaissance artists’ work dealing with the bubonic plague. The artist of the 1980’s and today is faced with trying to counter the mass media images of PWAs, and trying to establish an identity of the “victim” that is not aligned with the erected contemporary religious and political structures. Many artists have done this by purposefully invoking Plague images such as the skeleton, the transi, and specific holy persons, along with developing a new set of images in an attempt to deconstruct earlier depictions of the Gay community as deserving of death and responsible for its spread to the innocent.

The agenda of 80’s mass media, whether conscious or not, was to create a dichotomy between the “guilty” and “innocent” victim. “AIDS is endlessly and inaccurately read as a venereal disease, like syphilis and gonorrhea, rather than the result of

68 Farber. Pg.64 30 a blood disease.” This has lead to AIDS being grouped with negative sexual conduct and promiscuity, and consequently this discourse facilitates AIDS association with a particular sinner. “The practice of HIV testing in STD clinics only serves to reinforce the highly misleading notion that AIDS is intrinsically sexual…social values continue to define the sexually transmitted disease as uniquely sinful.”69 Consequently AIDS is “is still popularly thought of as a self-inflicted condition, and an index of moral turpitude.”70 The relevance to the visual world in reflecting upon and gaining a voice of critical judgment affecting this construction is vital. The acquired voice of the artist is used to deconstruct the basically medieval applications of plague disease on this new era.

The focus of this next passage will be the discussion around the “victim.” In the

Middle Ages, there was little if no discourse surrounding who constitutes a victim, only why. The general acceptance was that a community was paying repercussions for their collective sins. However, there was a concept of normalcy then that came with the plague being completely exterior to the community and attacking it. Polarization, part of the religious fanaticism of the Middle Ages, finds its weighty place in the 80’s as well. It is stuck somewhere between the extremes of native and foreign.

The origin of AIDS in America, though steeped in rumors, first became “public” in

1981 when a rare form of cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) was diagnosed in 26 homosexual men, most of who were under the age of 50. Soon afterwards the media began to portray

“gay cancer” patients as promiscuous homosexual males. “The syndrome is partly blamed on ‘lifestyle’ or sexual preference. The risk of sexually transmitted diseases and the transmission of a ‘new’ agent were linked at this early stage.” Not that there wasn’t a little voice of disagreement, but its position within the accused population lead to its delegitimization in the eyes of the accusatory public. A local San Francisco newspaper the

69 Watney, Simon. Policing Desire: Pornography AIDS and the Media. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. M.N. 1987. Pg.10 70 Watney. Pg.145 31 “San Francisco Sentinel” expressed disdain for the government’s lack of attention to the outbreak of Kaposi’s sarcoma by comparing the lack of address of the outbreak with the instantly acted upon 1976 outbreak of Legionnaires that affected 29 Philadelphians.71

Only almost a full year later did the current acronym, AIDS (Acquired Immune

Deficiency Syndrome) finally replace the earlier terms GRID (Gay Related Immune

Deficiency) and CAID (Community Acquired Immune Deficiency). In August of 1982 the apparent dichotomy between victims developed. Newsweek ran an article titled

“Homosexual Plague Strikes New Victims,” outlining hemophiliacs that accidentally received blood transfusions contaminated with AIDS. The article read, “The homosexual plague has started spilling over into the general population.” Following Newsweek, the first Wall Street Journal article on AIDS ran only after 23 heterosexual men and women were diagnosed with AIDS.72

The photojournalist depiction of AIDS set the background contemporary artists and activists must address. It is here that the dichotomy between sinful and non-sinful death began. Hemophiliacs became the innocent transition victims, and “innocent” women whose partners fail to tell them of bisexual tendencies. These unsuspecting victims then pass the epidemic onto other unsuspecting heterosexuals. An article in Working Woman titled “AIDS-Who’s Next?” went so far as to describe a 53-year-old mother of two. “She is the perfect image of middle-class respectability. Yet June has contracted AIDS…June is a middle-aged, middle-class, presumably white (or her race would be mentioned), and assumed without a question to be a heterosexual as a mother of two…She embodies the notion of the ‘innocent victim’ in the media rhetoric of AIDS, the blameless person who

71 Atkins. AIDS Timeline. Pgs.2-3 72 Atkins. AIDS Timeline. Pgs.2-3 32 has contracted AIDS as a direct result of someone else’s perfidy, the ‘guilty victims’ – the queers, the blacks, the junkies, and the prostitutes.”73

Consequently, the media and photojournalist images created two AIDS epidemics.

The first one caused by who you are. A disease of the gay, the drug user, the minority, brought about by the Wrath of God by their own lifestyles. It is still a community based, medieval concept as was the plague, however while the plague lay waste to geographical communities, a subtle (or not so) accusatory finger points at AIDS and a lifestyle community, and so alluding more directly to specific behavioral sins. The second image of

AIDS strictly coincides with the bubonic era concept of plague. Characterized by June, hemophiliacs, and heterosexuals in general, the second AIDS is now on the rampage and will lay waste to everyone, oblivious of lifestyle, in bubonicesque fashion, thanks to the guilty victims who passed it on of course.

This dual nature of AIDS is what artists and communities have to deal with today.

AIDS has been created into a phenomenon that is both within and without the community.

Artists emphasize the victimization of people, and arguments spill all ways to this day.

Protests against negative coverage led to 1985 founding of Gay and Lesbian Alliance

Against Defamation. (GLAAD). Gran Fury, a collective of AIDS activists, began retaliating against government and social institutions that Fury felt were capitalizing on the spread of AIDS in order to make financial profit. Through visual manipulation of mainstream advertising strategies, Fury provoked direct action to end the AIDS crisis. Fury brought the discourse around AIDS to sections of the American population not usually addressed by the government by placing their ad parodies on such objects as New York

City buses.74

73 Watney. Pg.33 74 http://www.creativetime.org/citywide/past_proj/granfury.html 33 One of the strongest organizations to emerge in the late 80’s was ACT-Up which since its founding in Manhattan in 1987, ACT UP has endorsed an agenda through non- violent direct action, often using vocal demonstrations and civil disobedience, to draw attention issues surrounding the AIDS crisis. The acronym ACT UP stands for the AIDS

Coalition to Unleash Power.75 Battling apathy, ACT-UP created street performances with representations of Nazi Antigay rhetoric and the slogan SILENCE=DEATH.76 ACT-UP’s street performances are a distinct ring similar to the long ago Danse Macabre street performances.

In 1989, the media had presented the public with three depictions of people with

Aids (1989). 1. AIDS victims abandoned by their own family and gay friends/lovers. 2.

Irresponsible gay male vectors, 3. Whispered voices of broken men from sick beds stating the need for monogamy in self-recrimination and denunciation of their own lifestyle.77

Images were packed with Christian based theories on judgment and morality in the face of death. As in plague art, the Church appropriated concepts of the “proper” lifestyle into their visual agenda. In 1350, the rich, the extravagant, the people who placed too much emphasis on worldly pleasure would be suddenly confronted by death. Apparently this theory has changed little in 650 years. The artist today is given a different role in the propagation of this theology, however. Rather than to enforce it, one is entitled to be as critical about it as one would like.

How does one deconstruct the negative identity placed on the gay community identity that is attached to AIDS? On tactic is to recreate AIDS as the Plague, with the ability to transcend particular stigmatized communities, and not as the socially bound entity it is now. “AIDS should never be referred to as if it were an attribute of any social

75 http://www.actupny.org/ 76 Saslow, James M. Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the visual Arts. Viking, Pinguin Putnam Inc. New York, N.Y. 1999. Pgs. 263, 278 77 Watney. Pg.124 34 group as such. It is a complex medical syndrome, not a property of persons.”78 Many artists have tried to appropriate Plague imagery for this purpose, but have used them to different ends. Artists set out to address emotional and political toll of AIDS. “Campaigns against ignorance and for a cure were stalled by a crafty virus and a public still hostile to the plague’s main victims among sexual and ethnic minorities, sadly providing ample time to ferment an art steeped in elegy and outrage. AIDS art speaks in many voices…mounted a scathing attack on the hostility behind media images of sex and illness.”79 These ends are the simultaneous creation of both a world community and the individual. These two developments can be seen in the photography series of Nicholas Nixon, and the paintings and prints of Keith Haring.

Nicholas Nixon reinvented the “transi,” when he exhibited his photo series of

People with Aids in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. “It was the first time Nixon had chosen a subject that was an issue of public importance, let alone one so charged with emotion and controversy…Now the subject was defined first as an idea, and one whose significance outweighed Nixon’s private artistic mission. With this came the hope that if the pictures were good they might matter…but in a specific sense having to do with

AIDS.”80 Nixon was in fact photographing the transi in a chronological setting. Rather than a static painting of a late stage of decay, a time line of images created the narrative of a decaying body.

78 Watney. Pg.32 79 Saslow. Pg.277-278 80 Nixon, Nicholas. Pictures of People. Museum of Modern Art. New York, N.Y. 1988. Pg.26 35

Outraged by how Nixon’s victims were depicted, such organizations as ACT-UP expressed dismay at the death images. In counter of Nixon’s exhibition ACT-UP stated, “ in portraying PWAs as people to be pitied and feared, as people alone and lonely, we believe that this work perpetuates general misconceptions about AIDS without addressing the realities of those of us living everyday with this crisis as PWAs or as people who love

PWAs…We believe that the representation of people with AIDS affects not only how viewers will perceive PWAs outside the museum, but ultimately, crucial issues of AIDS funding, legislation, and education.”81

The discussion about how PWAs should be depicted is unresolved to this day, but the origins in the art world of this discussion were embodied by the above ACT-UP statement. Should PWAs be depicted as “victims”? The transi in Nixon’s work are not generalized symbols of the mundane world vs. the spiritual one; these PWAs are “real”

81 Atkins. AIDS Timeline. Pgs. 2-3. 36 people. Placed into a context of photojournalist production of AIDS, Nixon’s 15 characters were just that. Actual characters. The intimacy of photographing them up through their death, accompanied by literary material collected by Bebe Nixon from numerous interviews of the subjects, their friends, and family, did not allow the viewer to categorize.

There was a de-emphasis of any particular community, which encouraged the deconstruction of AIDS as a lifestyle community target. The opposition from ACT-UP came not in Nixon’s creation of individuals, but rather of their being depicted specifically in context of their chronological loss of life.

On the other end of the spectrum, Keith Haring chose to return to the unspecified sufferer in his works. On his agenda was public information and education. He was actively involved with many ad campaigns for sex-education and safe sex practice, which should be kept in mind while viewing his work. His approach to deconstructing the lifestyle community was to construct the world one. Brought his work into the international public space, including condom use advocacy campaigns and Gran Fury’s

IGNORANCE=DEATH campaign which he designed billboards for.82 The untitled work of 1983 he did embodies his active attempt to bring AIDS to the knowledge of the public appropriating plague imagery to serve his purpose. In his own words, “everything is symbolic if you look at it that way. Everything refers to something else or it can mean something else. So its not really using symbols, as much as understanding how a thing becomes codified or gets turned into a sign…Maybe its being aware of how the uses of certain things can add to, or take away from, their meaning; how repetition can add a different meaning.”83

82 Atkins. Pg.38 83 Debs, Nick. Arts’ Communities/ AIDS’ Communities: Realizing the Archive Project. Visual AIDS. Visual AIDS. New York, N.Y. 1996. Pg.41 37 Haring’s use of the energized nondescript figure can be applied to his very own theory of meaning through repetition. In his this particular untitled work, Haring once again uses, ageless, faceless, genderless, non-ethnic, figure he was famous for. This little figure has the potential to be anyone, anywhere, at any time. Here, they are all suffering, dying, collapsing in a heap on the floor. This is the pile of dead bodies so often depicted in

Plague art. However, whereas plague victims harbored the “common man” look of the region in 1350, Haring’s dying figures are completely transcendental. Death could reach anyone, at any moment…a quite purposeful contemporary mirror of the ars moriendi theme from the Middle Ages. This appropriation is not lost on Haring, who adds the consistently used skull, and even a serpent (one of the images associated with the transi corpse) into the narrative. Haring draws attention away from any particular group with this particular imagery.

In addition to Nixon’s and Haring’s work, since there are multiple sides to the question of depicting PWAs, there are art movements that address many issues associated with lifestyle identity. ACT-UP demonstrates the ever-present discourse on how a “victim” should be depicted, and not everyone has been won over by the argument of equating

AIDS with Plague concepts of random or strictly geographical selection. Especially with

38 the continued need to relate sex education to the various demographics, many artists are not invested in separating imagery about AIDS from various sub-cultures.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Self-Portrait with Skull-Cane,” of 1988 has the appearance of carrying the image of AIDS to the level of the individual once again. This particular image, taken 1 year before his death related to AIDS complications, is a unique adaptation of skull imagery. Mapplethorpe’s face is a presence in the picture, asserting the ravaging process of the disease and the artist’s mortality. Stylistically his face has a disembodied quality that complements the skull planted atop his walking cane. The skull here functions in the traditional “memento mori” symbol. The two “skulls,” Mapplethorpe’s emaciated face and the traditional skull create a haunting anticipation of death. “The iconic image of

Mapplethorpe, the last of his self-portraits, forever records the artist’s confrontation with death.”84

Mapplethorpe, however, was not trying to eliminate any sexual/ sexual preference concept from his self-portrait as Nixon had done to his individuals. Mapplethorpe’s self-

84 Goldfarb. Pg.15 39 portraits were metaphors for entire communities. When placed into the context of an entire series of self-portraits he did, his “Self-Portrait with Skull-Cane,” is revealed in a different light. In his series of self-portraits, he staged himself in different fashion and positions to reveal different sexual and social roles. At times he dressed in neutral fashion, and at other times he made direct sexual narratives, dressing in sadomasochistic leather and displaying a whip protruding from his anus. The ambiguity Mapplethorpe set up between individuals and communities earned the support of many but the disdain of particular power structures, including that of the ever-present Christian right.

Washington D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art cancelled Robert Mapplethorpe’s retrospective traveling exhibition in 1989, which was immediately followed by an art community boycott of the museum.85 June 1989, Christina Orr-Cahill, director of Corcoran

Gallery of Art said the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) would withdraw $30,000 in funding to the gallery unless she cancelled the post-humous Mapplethorpe retrospective.

Her eventual bowing to the NEA’s demand after 3 months of pressure86 kicked off the

85 Atkins. Pg.42 86 Fritscher, Jack. Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera. Hastings House. Mamaroneck, N.Y. 1994. Pg.109 40 ongoing battle between access to and denial from show spaces for artists dealing with

PWAs who do make references to sexuality and/or drug use. This incident was followed by the NEA’s attempt to withhold (which was later reinstated) grant money for the traveling exhibition “Witness; Against Our Vanishing.”87 Witness was originally denied access to

NEA funding because of the inclusion of David Wojnarowic's “Sex Series” 1988-89.

Wojnarowic was notoriously outspoken in “his disgusted realization that, having contracted HIV… ‘I’d contracted a diseased society as well.’”88 He even clashed images of

Catholic traditional martyrdom, such as Saint. Sebastian, with American currency, indicating his view on the “mounting greed,” and to “mourn forgotten spirituality.”89

Some of the art world’s solidarity about AIDS actually derives in its ability to unite under a common enemy of censorship, which attempts to discredit it, particularly when the imagery deals with sexual imagery and the gay man.90 The need to actively host art exhibitions addressing the subject of PWAs becomes a pivotal factor in the new generation of artists’ visions gaining exposure in the public. When curators staged the exhibition

Private/Public at the Chicago Art Institute, their intention was “to show a range of artists who were able to continue their careers without hiding their HIV status, and demonstrate that a significant public institution was willing to support this effort,” especially in light of how few had exposed their HIV status to the public at that point.91 The 1980’s saw the emergence of gay art’s dependency on large institutionalized organizations to press the gay agenda. “Nothing made gays run for shelter of solid institutions more than the tornado of

AIDS…in major U.S. cities, up to half of gay men were infected.”92 But institutional support was not always forthcoming.

87 Atkins. Pg.62 88 Saslow. Pg.279 89 Saslow. Pg.279 90 Atkins. Pg.26 91 Debs. Pg.23 92 Saslow. Pg. 274 41 “Not surprisingly, attempts to portray the impact of AIDS have provoked a backlash…When Arlene Croce used the term “victim art,” to criticize the choreography of

Bill T. Jones, who is HIV+,” the terminology “victim art’ became a delegitimizing terminology that expressed a substitution of personal drama for aesthetic quality. How can such work be criticized in its aesthetic effort to depict death, especially if the artist’s suffering is the underlying basis of the work? Victim Art then, then, is a type of propaganda, manipulated in intent, and not “true” art that allows for a viewer’s reflection.93

Croce’s terminology embodies the “ongoing discourse about art informed by multiculturalism of ‘Identity Politics’…as well as with a continuing discourse about

‘quality’ in art…”94

This argument is relatively new in the discussion around the visual depiction of death and victims, and artists today have to deal with this duel standard in a way medieval artists did not. Why is this? Because the artist today is advancing his/her own view, while in the Middle Ages the artist needed to advance the view of the patron. Medieval artists did not have to counter institutionalized images of victims because they created those images under that patronage of the institutions. There was no one to counter the artist’s representations in the visual world. It is today’s artist’s cultural, political, and medical rejection of the authorities’ AIDS agenda that leads to censorship and the consequent need for public show space.

This need for show space now serves the new parallel function of the patron in the

1350’s; the only realm in which the government and church have control over the artist’s ability to be viewed. In withholding funding and publicly condemning a particular show space, the government attempts a certain level of control that patrons took for granted in the 1300’s. The ability to create the visual public understanding of death. Patrons only

93 Debs. Pg.22 94 Debs. Pg.22 42 began to lose this ability with the increased use of the “multiplying” arts (prints). What the multiplying arts began in the 1400’s, the museum countered in the later centuries.

Museums re-established an authority over the arts and created a new dependency on acceptance for public reception. Now, however, the new digital movement has emerged to bypass the need for institutionalized spaces in much the same way the multiplying arts by- passed the patron. “Like other groups set apart by sex or ethnicity, the post-Stonewall subculture exists in dynamic tension with mainstream institutions of art, money, and power…That culture is postmodern in style, postcolonial in politics, and, increasingly in the West, postindustrial and digital.”95

The question of today’s Church is then not one of inability to intercede on behalf of those who are sick (as in multiplying art related to the Plague) but one of outright rejection of the sick. Contemporary artists, however, are dealing with this church. An artist with a religious upbringing faces a different situation than that of his predecessors in the plague, one of trying to reconcile this rejection. Adrian Kellard completed “The Promise/ I Will

Never Leave You,” in 1989. Kellard was raised Catholic, and wanted to integrate traditional pietistic religious motifs with powerful and direct popular imagery in wood relief form in ex-voto style. He purposefully invoked images of saintly intervention and ex-voto superstition to comment on the turned back of the Church. Kellard had “conviction and a lot of hope, and the feeling that religion has to deal with day to day life.” In The

Promise, he represented the legend of St. Christopher. Christopher was rumored to have carried the infant Christ across a river despite the fact that the youth became increasingly heavy. The incident stood as metaphor for Christopher’s eventual martyrdom under the burden of early Christian persecution. St. Christopher, Like Sts. Sebastian and Roch, was invoked against the plague. He had a steady following until the end of the 16th century and again in a remerging movement in the 20th century.

95 Saslow. Pg.261 43 Kellard associated the burden of carrying Christ with the figure of death, using the traditional skeleton sneaking up on St. Christopher. But he also tried to offer solace of faith and reaffirm his own belief in God’s grace for the seriously ill.96 In short, The skeleton stands not only as a metaphor for AIDS related death, but also as a symbol of the Church’s abandonment of the sick. The Saint and the ex-voto style, however, allude to a spiritual realm that transcends the negligent institution and addresses Christ’s mercy directly.

Kellard, then, is a metaphorical Flagellant. A man who has by-passed the Catholic institution in his discourses with God, and has taken it upon himself to request God’s

Mercy.

One of the ultimate questions pertaining to AIDS related artists and artwork, which

Kellard address in his Promise is who the work is for. Kellard is quite explicit in his ideas that art should be made accessible to the individual. “I have always tried to keep my work

96 Goldfarb. Pg.17 44 on a human scale as a statement that art should be understood as an integral part of life.”97

Perhaps the most public work addressing the AIDS agenda is the NAMES Community

AIDS Memorial Quilt. The quilt serves as a transitional piece between the community and the individual that characterizes contemporary art. When viewed from afar it is like a medieval ex-voto; masses of dead bodies strewn across the foreground. These images of death are the new transi. When Cleve Jones and Joseph Durant made the first two fabric memorials for two dead friends, they purposefully made the panels the dimensions of human graves (3 feet by 6 feet)98. These transi however, are like Nixon’s, they are individuals. They also allude to death, but the panels avoid images of death while instead referencing memory and past life. The quilt is viewed more intimately; it is a collection of private grievances for unique individuals.

1984, San Francisco had become the “Ground Zero of the Plague.”99 The emotional start of the quilt was a concept of individual and collective mourning.100 Once it gained in popularity, however, the arguments began spilling in as to whom this particular public work was for. The Church, an enduring presence in the association of death and sin was still fighting under similar moral authority as it had for centuries. When the Pope visited

San Francisco during the early stages of the quilt, several pieces were presented to him.

When the Pope visited the church, the local congregation decided that is how they would welcome him. According to Jones, the original artist “responsible” for the idea behind the

Memorial Quilt, “the people at Mission Dolores had asked us to bring some sections of the

Quilt to the ceremony.”

Not everyone was pleased. In Jones’ words, “That set off an uproar. While I saw the Pope’s acknowledgement as a useful breakthrough, others were outraged. They said the

97 Debs. Pg.46 98 Jones, Cleve. Dawson, Jeff. Stitching a Revolution: The Making of as Activist. HarperSanFrancisco. San Francisco, CA. 2000. Pg251 99 Jones/Dawson. Pg.99 100 Jones/Dawson. Pgs.108-109 45 Quilt was made for gays by gays and it was sacrilege to present it to a homophobe, the man who represents the Catholic patriarchy, two thousand years of oppression. The loudest naysayers were the ACT-UP people, a new generation of gay activists for whose identity

AIDS was an explosive part. It’s not enough to make a quilt, they sneered; the quilt is a passive thing. The pope’s blessing, they felt, would be a mockery of everything they had fought for. I took a few deep breaths and told them then, as I tell them now, that we never said the Quilt is enough…I’d repeat that we would never restrict participation, that we weren’t going to exclude anybody.”101 The NAMES Project Quilt, influenced by venerable folk art “puts a human face on the mounting death statistics in order to move both makers and viewers: it consoles hushed visitors, who lay floral tributes as if on a pilgrimage to sacred relics, while raising consciousness and money.” The quilt has not escaped scrutiny, as all work pertaining to PWAs has not, and the quilt has been criticized for being

“…‘soft’ in both materials and attitudes.”102

The AIDA quilt’s history, however, has emphasized community and education through visualization. Arguments directed at its lack of political scrutiny fail to take into account the quilts ability to provide its own educational agenda and its own ability to reach different national and international communities, as was Jones’ original intention. The

AIDS quilt takes the art world’s role in the discourse about AIDS to the next level. It brings levels of exposure to various regions that would otherwise be alienated by

America’s cultural understanding of AIDS. AIDS, as reflected in many works of art, is many things to many different people. Just as Medieval art relied on the visual to communicate concepts that may not other wise have been received by illiterate fractions of the European communities, the AIDS quilt has the ability to transcend linguistic differences between countries, making it an important instrument in creating a world

101 Jones/Dawson. Pgs.126-127 102 Saslow. Pg.280 46 forum. The quilt reaches various people of varying age, religion, culture, and social- economic status in an increasingly relevant way to addressing AIDS within each community based on the community’s relative needs. The objection to its’ “oft” material fails to take into consideration the purposeful inclusion of fabric and craft/folk art culture as a way of expressing mourning which is more palatable to individuals.

In further attempts to expand expose to the quilt, in January of 1994, NAMES began photographing each panel for a website (which became accessibly in Dec. 1995), and in the same month began a pilot phase of National High School Quilt Program in order to enhance HIV prevention education among youth. In September of that same year the quilt traveled to 34 universities in America. IN 1995 they began to collaborate with the

National Interfaith program and sections of the quilt traveled to spaces of worship around the country. By 1996, pieces of the quilt had traveled to over 200 locations worldwide, and began addressing non-regional geographically based communities by having special online projects dedicated to African Americans who died of AIDS during Black History Month

(Feb. 1997) and quilt patches of female AIDS victims during Women’s History Month

(March, 1997). With the 1998 international expansion with new affiliates in Europe,

Africa, and Asia, the quilt became increasingly invested in being used as an educational piece. 5 students accompanied the quilt to Hong Kong highlighting prevention and education for chapter affiliate Teen AIDS Hong Kong in 1998, and by the close of the following year, quilt exhibitions were regularly accompanied by HIV prevention education programs, testing and treatment information and local referrals.

The quilt began a joint campaign with the South African government on WORLD

AIDS DAY in December of 1999. The quilt displayed at the Parliament of World

Religions in Cape Town, South Africa, as part of a broader effort in South Africa to spread awareness through the encouragement of quilt making, and to promote HIV prevention education and outreach. NAMES project chapters worked with U.S. and South African 47 counterparts to organize quilt making and quilt displays in townships and rural areas across

South Africa.103 The expansion of AIDS into different areas of the world has once again forced contemporary groups to reflect on the consequences of the AIDS epidemic. No longer strictly associated with the homosexual American, today’s AIDS related artwork needs to once again challenge mass-media generalizations. Only the images and counter images deal with cross-cultural and cross-geographical stereotypes on a world level.

In the early 90’s AIDS expanded past its association with the western gay community and took on an even greater semblance to the Plague with its geographical expansion into Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Though still present in the developed western “First World” countries, the discussion around the role of AIDS as a social as well as a medical epidemic that challenges conflicting values, and is a complex cultural issue, sharply contrasts with the discourse around AIDS about “Third World” countries. “In the developing world- AIDS is believed to lead a much simpler life. Even when these cultures themselves are seen as mysterious, AIDS is seen as a scientifically understood infectious disease that, without our help, will devastate whole countries, whose passive citizens struggle against it in vain.”104

Western, specifically American, mass media takes special care to document the

AIDS “crisis” in third world countries in a method consistent with American understandings of the socio-political-cultural readings already associated with the area.

Photojournalism, in specific, attempts to represent a “truth” that reproduces familiar narratives about “victims” in these countries. Many photojournalists display third world healthcare facilities that rarely show doctors or technology and instead show sick people on plain cots or on mats on the floor. The poor AIDS victim wilting away from AIDS related complications looks an awful lot like the poor suffering starved victim that is

103 Jones/Dawson. Pgs. 259-265 104 Treichler. Pg. 99 48 wasting away from lack of nourishment. Both images reinforce an inattentive government that has turned its back on a population either because of lack of sympathy or due to lack of organization and capability in the internal structure.

The images from a National Geographic article from 1988 transformed the “text’s bleak assertions into an almost utopian narrative of elegiac fatefulness in which aesthetic universality redeems individual suffering.”105 In short, westerners were “moved” by the dying individuals littered on the spread pages of the magazine. The U.S. depictions of

AIDS victims in developing country AIDS borrows heavily then from the previously existing language of mass suffering in plague art. In the hospital rooms tons of passive helpless victims beg for relief like the slew of dead and dying bodies that begged Mary or the Saints to intervene on their behalf. But who is the modern day intervention Saint?

Western Medicine? A 1990 New York Times series played a significant role in continued attention to AIDS crisis in African countries without making the same mistake national geographic and other publications did earlier. Despite Times’ article being titled “A

Continent’s Agony,” the series did not invoke the a typical apocalyptic theme that

“overwhelmingly dominates U.S. AIDS coverage in developing countries.” The article actually showed Africans actively and creatively responding to the epidemic instead of being passive victims. Unfortunately, even in this article there was still an incorporation of previously existing rhetoric about African countries. Such notes as “statistics may be

‘understated’” was an allusion to the “primitive” technology already associated with the continent (and depicted in National Geographic). 106 A second assumption was the classification of “all” of Africa. All 45 countries seemed to be grouped together into one big geographical and cultural site.

105 Treichler. Pg.105 106 Treichler. Pg.206 49 In contrast to the American press, interior and national news photojournalists from third world countries tend to publish specific areas that are equipped with facilities to handle AIDS related complications, by representing fully equipped modern hospitals with plenty of personnel. “A very different view emerges in African publications, which catalogue multiple efforts to fight the epidemic by governments, women’s organizations, church groups, school authorities, nongovernmental organizations, artists, prostitutes’ groups, and so on. In African medicine publications, Western AIDS coverage is criticized.

Traditional African medicine is discussed with respect; although it is sometimes criticized, it is not, as in the West, treated as a curiosity or with derision. 107” The clash between the two depictions of AIDS leaves the population the very precarious position of needing to critique interior understandings of AIDS, as the gay American community had to, but unlike in America, artists in the third world must also work in different spheres of visual access. The dichotomy between depictions serves to show the Us vs. Them mentality

American media has managed to maintain about AIDS. In addition to being a “lifestyle” disease due to immoral deviant sexual behavior of the gay American man, AIDS is now also the disease of the immoral backwards behavior of the third world foreigner.

Artists have tried repeatedly to use their work to deconstruct American concepts of native passivity and incapability of addressing AIDS on home soil. On the cover of a

January issue of Sauti yo Siti (1992), artist E. Mtaya displayed images for two Tanzanian calendars which depict 1) an extension worker carrying out AIDS education, and 2) a diverse cross section of the Tanzanian population marching in unity against the epidemic.

Furthermore, the calendar the artwork was for was itself an AIDS initiative in its attempt to raise funds for AIDS intervention.108 The artwork addresses the community’s internal response to the AIDS epidemic within its own borders. How are relative art space of a

107 Treichler. Pg.209 108 Treichler. Pg. 233 50 region has responded to the needs of the community, and how the art reflects those understandings as well?

Each country has developed its own visual vocabulary to stimulate a discourse around AIDS. In sub-Sahara Africa, booklets were designed for the public and the health extension workers that cover an array of topics related to HIV/AIDS. In the Central

African Republic (1988) a pamphlet written in the native Sango language adapted a visual representation of AIDS in order to facilitate discussion in a country where the literacy rate was only 1% among Sango speakers. The Central African Republic was therefore faced with the same question of how to visually represent a non-visible disease as artists in the

1350’s were. Their solution, a hybrid creature whose bat wings represented an invisible approach and robbing of one’s health. The creature had claws to represent stealing and death grip, spines of a porcupine, the tail of a scorpion, horns of a rhino, and the beak of a parrot. The creature also had the eyes of a chameleon to indicate AIDS ability to adapt and manifest in different symptoms in different people. This creature tapped into animal symbolism of the local region in order to attempt to present a comprehendible image of

AIDS in visual format. The little creature appeared on AIDS related material in order to draw the attention and realization of the viewer as to what was being addressed.

Complications arose however when villagers misinterpreted the symbol not as a representation of AIDS, but as AIDS itself.109

109 Treichler. Pgs.227-229 51

Other countries have tried to avoid the same pitfall by encouraging local artists and craftsman to represent AIDS within traditional art fashion. The integration of new subject matter into traditional styles of art has not only enhanced exposure to AIDS by the distribution of the finished themed projects, but has also enabled the artist to perform a particular role of educator, which creates a new power structure in support of the artist. In

Kwazulu-Natal, art addressing HIV/AIDS has taken the form of telephone wire-basketry, a long-standing tradition that taps into the countries colonialist history and was already symbolic of self-empowerment for that very reason. The wire basketry was originally a source of weaving that incorporated erected power lines because of the plethora of available material, and because power lines served the self-interests of colonialist further expansion onto native lands. Projects in recent years have developed workshops nationwide to provide open discussion and encourage the production of contemporary art pieces. 110

110 Roberts, Allen F. “Break the Silence.” Art and HIV/AIDS in KwaZulu-Natal. African Arts. Vol XXXIV #1. Pg.39 52 Kate Wells, the founder and organizer of the “Break the Silence” project in

KwaZulu-Natal, described such works “as providing women artists ‘a platform to talk openly. Affirming their knowledge by development of truly contemporary artifacts using messages with meaning has lead to knowledge empowerment and confidence for the future in the face of the daunting AIDS epidemic in Kwazulu-Natal’” Wells notes the “workshops attended by the crafters ‘illuminated the invaluable and powerful contribution that design concepts can make to demystifying the threat of the AIDS virus in rural communities…The ways in which such a vital goal is being achieved reveal aspects of the dynamic nature of symbols extending far beyond these particular circumstances.”111

Generations upon generations have had to come to understandings about mass death. AIDS has forced the issue long forgotten back into the foreground of politics, religion, and medicine, and the artists’ role within the discussion is pivotal. With contemporary discussions surrounding censorship and depiction, coupled with medieval artistic economy of patronage, the discourse around artist’s work is not only what they are depicting, but also what they are not. On a simple level, medieval depictions of plague deaths avoided taboo subjects with the church. Their work tended to emphasize divine intervention, was superstitious in nature, and served to emphasize the church’s doctrinal conclusion on sin and redemption. Through triumph of death imagery, painters expressed previously comprehended theology surrounding man’s death, and the inevitable production of work in public spaces (again in preferred areas put forth by the patron), these works served to expose the population to a particular understanding of the plague.

With the weakening of the Church due to religious fanaticism and a shift in medical thought, society slowly drew different conclusions about the plague. These conclusions were not visible in commissioned paintings, however began to emerge with increased use of print media. A new generation of artists began to break away from direct monetary and

111 Roberts. Pg.45 53 theological dependency on the Church. This breakaway was characterized by shifts in imagery that reflected more physical observations of the surroundings and placed a greater emphasis on the inevitable Judgment Day and the church’s inability to intervene.

The Church’s inability became a non-issue with the rise of the AIDS epidemic, but was instead supplanted by critiques of the Church doctrine’s direct hostility to the sick and dying. Contemporary artists displayed a vast number of different images of PWAs, as the break from any particular single source to provide the “meaning” of the spread of AIDS has lead to a spectrum of conclusions as to how to depict someone with AIDS and for what reason. Many artists have tried to deconstruct the concept of a guilty community which mass media and conservative theology has forced upon them, while others have made specific references to sexuality in order to not separate the two into different realms when sexual contact, being one of the modes of transmission of AIDS, should not be completely ostracized from the conversation.

To this day there is still an active attempt to control what is and isn’t viewed by the public when addressing the spread of AIDS and creating the concept of the victim.

Censorship takes the place of a commission in its ability to dictate what the population is exposed to. The artists, however, of the 1350 and throughout later stages of plague waves in Europe, served as one of the primary sources of exposure to images of the victim, and his work emphasized the spread of AIDS through regional invasion. Today, artists are countering the primary sources of exposure, and are trying to create varying discourses around AIDS, PWAs, and “victimization.” First, in the early 80’s artists were trying to deconstruct the concept of the guilty victim associated with American deviant lifestyles.

With the global expansion of AIDS the argument has become more universal, though still operating under the dichotomy of PWAs versus “healthy” people. “How do people behave, when their environment becomes life threatening? History here can serve, it remembers

54 how societies coped in the past with the threat of mars repentina, unexpected death.”112

Both episodes resort to creating categories of “other” through their verbal and visual rhetoric. AIDS still appropriates military language to emphasize foreignness in much the same way the Plague did. Discourses around the “origin” of AIDS still reinforce cultural stereotypes pre-existing in America and Europe in much the same way Plague discourse around origin did in Europe. “Illustrating the classic script for plague, AIDS is thought to have started in the ‘dark continent,’”113 and moved on to America in much the same way

Plague invaded Europe from the enigmatic east. Mass media today still invokes First

World stereotypes of less economically wealthy regions as well as continuing to appropriate Church doctrine against “alternative” lifestyles. Artists both regionally and demographically are now faced with the role of empowering their communities both internally and on a global scale through visual dialogue.

112 Herlihy. Pg.18 113 Sontag. Pg.52 55

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List of Images

1. Robert Farber. Altar #1 2. Robert Farber. Western Blot #19 3. Buonamico Buffalmacco. Triumph of Death 4. Guyot Marchant. Danse Macabre 5. Stefano della Bella. Death Carrying Child 6. Mattia Preti. Ex-voto for the 1656 Plague 7. Michele da Verona. Madonna and Child with Sts. Roch and Sebastian 8. Tanzio da Varallo. Saint Sebastian 9. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Saint Roch Seated in Profile 10. Albrecht Durer. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 11. Mercantonio Raimondi. The Morbetto 12. Nicholas Nixon. Tom Moran, Boston, January 1988 13. Keith Haring. Untitled 14. Robert Mapplethorpe. Self-Portrait with Skull-Cane 15. Robert Mapplethorpe. Self-Portrait 16. Adrian Kellard.The Promise/ I Will Never Leave You 17. E. Mtaya. Cover Art for Tanzanian Calendars 18. Central African Republic Pamphlet. SIDA Awareness

58