Ulteriori informazioni
AIDS & Representation explores portraits and self-portraits made in response to the AIDS epidemic in America in the 1980s and 1990s. Addressing the work of artists including Mark Morrisroe, Robert Blanchon and Felix Gonzalez-Torres through the interrelated themes of sickness and mortality, desire and sexual identity, love and loss, Fiona Johnstone shows how the self-representational practices of artists with HIV and AIDS offered a richly imaginative response to the limitations of early AIDS imagery. Johnstone argues that the AIDS epidemic changed the very nature of visual representation and artistic practice, necessitating a radical new approach to conceptualising and visualising the human form. An extended epilogue considers the ongoing art historicization of the epidemic, re-contextualising the book's themes in relation to contemporary photographic works.
More than just a historical discussion of the art of the AIDS crisis,
AIDS and Representation contributes to an emergent body of scholarship on the visual representation of illness. Expanding the established genre of the autopathography or illness narrative beyond the predominantly textual, this important contribution to art history and health humanities sensitively unpicks the entanglements between aesthetic form and the expression of lived experiences of critical and chronic ill health.
Sommario
List of IllustrationsIntroduction1. A Crisis of Representation: constructing an epidemic
2. Putting a face to AIDS: critiquing documentary portrait photography
3. Mark Morrisroe: a grandiose aesthetic encounter
4. Robert Blanchon: abjection, 'absence' and autobiography
5. Felix Gonzalez-Torres: falling out of time
Epilogue: In/visible: picturing HIV in 'endemic time'
EndnotesBibliographyIndex
Info autore
Fiona Johnstone is an art historian and a researcher at Durham University's Institute for Medical Humanities.
Riassunto
How might artists choose to represent themselves before their own death?
Prefazione
Explores the impact of the AIDS crisis on the visual representation of the body, and how this life-threatening condition became a active agent in American art production.
Testo aggiuntivo
Enjoyable and accessible, this book bears witness to Mark Morrisroe, Robert Blanchon, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ queer tactics of portraiture, meanwhile locating their work within well researched and fascinating contexts that illuminate a kinship of ideas, connections, and tensions across disciplines and timelines.
