In honour of The Day With(out) Art, AIDS ACTION NOW! (AAN) last week launched at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) eight new collaborative activist art works as part of the posterVIRUS project. They are being plastered across the streets of Toronto while being simultaneously launched online via AAN’s posterVIRUS Facebook and Tumblir pages. 

I had the opportunity at the AGO launch to catch up with posterVIRUS curators Jessica Whitbread and Alex McClelland and to chat with them about the event. 

John McCullagh: In honour of The Day With(out) Art, AAN has launched eight new posters as part of the 2012 posterVIRUS project. So what’s The Day With(out) Art? 

Alex McClelland: The Day With(out) Art happens every year around World AIDS Day to recognize artists working in HIV. It was begun in the late 1980s by artists and art institutions to acknowledge the impact that HIV and AIDS has had on the artistic community. Later, the bracket on the “out” part of “without” was added to recognize both the loss of individuals and that people are still living with HIV and producing art. 

John: And posterVIRUS? What’s that all about? 

Jessica Whitbread: posterVIRUS is a project that started within AAN to bring art and activism together to create a collective messaging that’s framed in art. What we try to do is look at issues that are silenced or less talked about within the HIV mainstream discourse, to bring those issues out into the open in order to provoke discussion.  

John: In your curatorial statement, you say that you’re making new assertions about HIV and AIDS, that you’re inverting the hierarchy. What do you mean by that? 

Alex: Well, as two relatively young people living with HIV, we want to assert a different voice in the HIV world. In the beginning of the epidemic, the HIV response was led by activists. But subsequently, the response has become increasingly institutionalized and driven by academics, experts, doctors, public health agencies. And these are the people who today are driving how we talk about HIV. We wanted to put that discussion back in our hands and make new assertions about what it’s like, living with HIV in the 21st century. How HIV has changed, how living under a regime of neo-liberalism constrains those of us living with HIV. As well as to address increasing criminalization and state violence that’s actively working to destroy us. 

John:  And activist art, of course, has a long history of transforming a culture, of changing politics, and it then becomes the artist who leads the discourse. So perhaps we could look through some of the posters and talk about what kind of conversations you’re wanting to provoke through them. 

Alex: We originally had seven posters and then the supreme court decision on the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure came down. As people living with HIV that really took a blow to us, emotionally and on lots of other levels, so we asked Ryan Conrad, one of the artists who’d already made a poster, to do another one related to the supreme court decision. It resulted in his Fuck the Supreme Court, with the footnote Condoms and low viral load required by law, which acknowledges our anger at that decision. 

Jessica: Jessica MacCormack’s Hey Girl I’ll Tell You When I’m Ready is, I think, quite meaningful because it looks at the complexities and the difference between disclosure and aggravated sexual assault which the criminal justice system lumps together when, in reality, they are completely different. 

Alex: Micah Lexier, a well-known text artist-based artist, worked with AAN veterans Darien Taylor and Eric Mykhalovskiy on the AAN poster, the AIDS Action dot dot dot poster, on treatment access:  AIDS Action If you Live in the City, AIDS Action If you Take Control, etc. The intent is to address some of the things that enable or constrain access to medicines. It also takes us back to our roots in talking about treatment access, which was one of the founding principles of AAN. 

Jessica: Also it’s not just a message about treatment access because it also critiques the privilege that it takes to be engaged in activism. Not everyone has the time or the supports to be activists. 

Alex: Then we have the Ryan Conrad poster called Working Conditions: exposure / disclosure / stigma / criminalization. Ryan wanted to do something to address the issue of male sex workers, particularly in light of the upcoming supreme court hearing around sex work. And so he highlighted some of the conditions surrounding male sex workers, which is a population that has often been overlooked in the sex worker rights discourse. 

Jessica: It’s interesting because this poster, although it’s more suggestive than explicit, got Alex and posterVIRUS banned from Facebook for a number of days and then other people who promoted it and put it on their wall also got letters of warning from Facebook. So this one was highly censored. 

Alex: Which is interesting because when you look at Facebook there’s lots of groups that are very sexually suggestive but this poster was flagged, no doubt, because we’re activists and it’s queer. 

Jessica: Then there’s the spacesuit poster. This one was really fun because it was actually based on something that was said on a date: I don’t need to wear a spacesuit to fuck you. Among queer women there’s no discourse around HIV. Like it doesn’t even happen. Though there’s an insistence from the mainstream, in sexual health workshops, on “wear gloves, use dental dams, wrap your body in latex”, even though queer women have the lowest rates of HIV transmission. But there’s this folk law going around saying it can happen. 

Alex: So the poster takes the messaging away from public health who drive the regulation of women, queer women, queer people, regulating their sexuality. 

Jessica: Another poster is the one on prisons, Prisons Kill, Prisons Kill. It was started when the artist Neal Freeland, working with long-time prison right activist Giselle Dias, was actually in prison. It says: Canada’s solution to homelessness, drug use, mental health, HIV/AIDS...Lock ‘em up till they die! I remember we had conversations about that, wondering if it was too much, but Neal said no because that’s what’s happening, it’s important to me and it needs to stay. So we said, you’re the artist, this is your experience, go with it. 

John: Then you’ve got the Silence=Sex poster. 

Alex: That’s by Jordan Arseneault. He has a poem to accompany it, that he read at the launch tonight, that talks about the complexities of disclosure for people living with HIV. The poster also explores one of the things that we’re trying to do with posterVIRUS, which is to call back the past iconography of AIDS activism by referencing ACT UP’s Silence=Death poster. 

John: This has been an extraordinary year with the remounting of Larry Kramer’s Normal Heart and the release of a number of movies about the early history of the AIDS movement: We Were Here, United in Anger, How to Survive a Plague, Vito. Does this presage a new era of AIDS activism, do you think? 

Jessica: I think so, yes. There was a huge lull for a number of years and there wasn’t a lot going on. And even when we did posterVIRUS last year there were equal amounts of excitement and pushback. People told us you can’t say Fuck positive women or that I party, I bareback, I’m positive, I’m responsible. But we’re like: What do you mean, we can’t say that? These kinds of discussions, these things are happening, and I think that using art, there’s an honesty you can put into it. Art’s really playful, unlike a public health campaign. Artists are not restricted by funding, we’re not restricted by being on the tight leash of the government or of donors. We’re doing it because we’re reflecting what’s actually happening in our communities. 

Alex: We’re at an inspiring moment when people are remembering the history and recalling the origins of our movement but we’re also at a really, really hard time in our response because we’re constrained in terms of what we’re able to say as HIV activists. We don’t have a strong activist response in Canada, we have a highly institutionalized response, which does a lot of amazing work, but we need more social change work to happen. 

John: Thanks, Jessica and Alex, for taking the time to talk to PositiveLite.com about posterVIRUS 2012. 

Jessica and Alex: You’re welcome, John.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

You can see all the posters and read the artists’ statements at AAN’s posterVIRUS Tumblir page. 

This year has been full of festivities marking the 60th year of the Queen’s succession to the throne. One of the ways that the Government of Canada decided to honour the Queen for her years of service was to mint 60,000 Diamond Jubilee Medals that honoured significant contributions and achievements by Canadians. I was honoured and extremely surprised to be named a recipient. 

When you live in England, the value of the monarchy is instilled in you at an early age. I remember sitting on a stool up at the kitchen “counter” or island as it is now called; my father was trying to get me to eat some last spoonfuls of porridge and I had my mouth firmly clamped shut... enough was enough! He was trying tricks like “open the tunnel, here comes a train”, with no reward... but then he said the magic words, “one more for the Queen!” Immediately, I knew it was my “duty” to open my mouth, how could one refuse the Queen? 

You see, that is what the Queen means to many English children and to the public at large. The only way I can describe it is that she is like a well-respected grandmother. Each Christmas, we would gather around the television in the morning to hear the Queen’s message. My parents looked grave and listened intently but to be honest, I rarely paid attention to what she said - we just knew we were “expected” to sit and listen - no questions just quiet reflection... and then my father would say: “is that turkey in the oven?” 

This is the world I was brought up in. 

My father wrote to me once when I had moved away from my home town to say he had managed to “nab” a job as pass inspector to the Royal Enclosure at the Ascot horse racing course. We were all incredibly excited. He, a mere mortal, would be checking seating tickets of the elite! We loved his stories of who he had seen and how they had behaved. Obviously, no need to check “you know who!” 

Then, when I emigrated to Canada, my father wrote by air mail and told me he had been invited to a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace. He was a member of the Executive of the National Union of eachers and had received an invitation in the mail. We were elated and he sent me a copy of the invitation. 

You can see... we were totally smitten with the Queen... I have to say that we looked up to her more than the Prime Minister. We felt that she was the representative of England. 

With that prequel, when I heard that I would receive the Diamond Jubilee Medal, I was very emotional... for three reasons. 

First, to somehow be tied to the Queen’s sixty years of service and awarded a medal celebrating it, is an incredible honour for any English person because we know she has carried out her duties in such a emarkable way. 

Secondly, when I came to Canada, I was so grateful to be allowed in this country, to be able to live in such a beautiful place, with a diverse and accepting population, where someone’s lower economic status or race would not be mocked ruthlessly, as was still the case in England. To receive a medal from my caring and loving “foster” country meant the world to me. 

Lastly, in 1996 I had been infected with HIV for seven years. I was finally diagnosed in 1994 and had been hiding my illness, listening to people around me insanely talking about those with HIV without them knowing the truth or the facts. I had to decide whether to carry on my life in secrecy, with just a few people knowing, or whether I cared enough that people learn the truth and what their empty-headed words meant to me, a person who was infected with the virus and whose family was living every day with their comments.

Now, I know, it hasn’t exactly worked out as planned!.. but there have been some amazing changes and more people do care... and, in fact, incredibly, there is often too much apathy and some even think the pandemic is over! 

But in the last week, we had terrible news from the Supreme Court that got the ranters raving and standing on their soap boxes again: 

“Those people out there trying to infect us... let’s segregate them... I hope they all die, they deserve it!”

I have to say I’m tired... tired of saying time and time again: 

“How about thinking before you start typing or opening your mouth? How about considering the  terrible challenges people already face living with this disease? How about finding out the facts, the science, the truth?”

But then, there is the Medal, and it makes me feel that facing these type of people may not change their ignorance but it does say something about who I AM. It says: I will not lie down while you talk rubbish; I will not stand idly by while you treat people with an illness in a miserable way; and I will not stop educating people because maybe someone, just one person, will “get it”. And if that happens then it may be worthwhile. If I get a Medal then my conscience can reaffirm that I’m doing the right thing.