The Melancholia of AIDS: Interview with Douglas Crimp Author(s): Tina Takemoto Source: Art Journal, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 80-90 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3558492 . Accessed: 17/01/2014 23:36 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.151.244.46 on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions In I987 From I977 to I990, Douglas Crimp was an editor of the journal October. Cultural AIDS: entitled issue on he edited the October AIDS, special Analysis/Cultural Activismand published as a book in i988.I This collection of critical, cultural, and theoretical responses to AIDSwas a formative work in AIDS activism and Onthe a founding text in queer theory. Crimp is author of AIDSDemoGraphics, and AIDS on and Moralism: Melancholia most Museum's Queer Ruins,and, Essays recently, the Politics.2Crimp is Fanny KnappAllen Professor of Art History at University of Rochester in New York. Catherine Opie. Douglas Crimp,2001. C-print. 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm). Courtesy of Gorney Bravin + Lee, NewYork, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Calif. ? 2001 Catherine Opie. TinaTakemoto: I thought we could begin by discussing your October special issue on AIDS.This publication marked a significant moment in AIDSactivism as well as a turning point in your own work as an art critic and activist. Can you describe what was going on at that time in relation to popular representations of AIDS? Douglas Criimp: When I started to do work on AIDS, it was with the view to include materrialin the journal October,so I was thinkingrather narrowly about the art world resiponse to AIDS. It wasn't until I got further into working on the publication that I begganthinkingmore about representations of AIDS in popular culture, though of course, as a gay person livingin New York City, I was livingin the grip of the epidemic, and I was aware of media repreTinaTakemoto sentations of AIDS. Initially,I was interested in featuringa few articles on AIDS in October.I had commissioned MarthaGever to write a piece on Stuart Marshall'sBrightEyes, one of the first activist video-art responses to AIDS, and I was going to include reviews of a few art exhibitions as well as a review of Simon Desire.3By this time, I had seen the Homo Watney's book Policing C m Videoexhibition, curated by BillOlander, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and I had discussed this work in the first Dia Discussionsin ContemporaryCulture.4I had already become aware of the privileging of artists who were dying of AIDS as against ordinary people dying of AIDS, and I was also troubled by the assumption that artists could only respond to the epi1. DouglasCrimp,ed., AIDS:Cultural Analysis/ demic by fundraisingor creatingworks that express human sufferingand loss. When CulturalActivism,special issue of October43 I saw the pilot for Testingthe Limits,5I got in touch with Gregg Bordowitz, who was (Winter 1987), republished as Douglas Crimp, Activism ed., AIDS:Cultural Analysis/Cultural a member of the Testing the LimitsCollective. He told me that if I wanted to be (Cambridge: MITPress, 1988). involved with what was going on with AIDS I should go to ACT UP (AIDS Coalition 2. Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston, AIDSDemo Graphics(Seattle: Bay Press, 1990); Douglas To Unleash Power) meetings. This was the summer of 1987. ACT UP started in The Melancholia of AIDS: Intervie N with Douglas 4 ri p Crimp, On the Museum'sRuins(Cambridge: MIT Press,1995);andDouglasCrimp,Melancholia andMoralism: EssaysonAIDSandQueerPolitics (Cambridge: MITPress, 2002). 3. BrightEyes, videocassette, directed by Stuart Marshall(Chicago: Video Data Bank, 1984); MarthaGever, "Picturesof Sickness: Stuart Marchof 1987 and by June or JulyI started going to meetings. Takemoto: How did your involvement in ACTUP affect your approach to the October publication on AIDS? Crimp: The experience of ACT UP changed everything for me. After all, AIDS was a personal crisis as well as a public issue, so I was pulled into it in ways that were very emotionally direct. When I got involved with the movement, I was going to (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, meetings and demonstrations regularly,and that meant I had a completely different 1987). 4. HomoVideo,curatedby BillOlander,New relation to AIDS. I was coming from a fairlyradicalizedsocial agenda regardingart in Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986; Hal Foster, in Contemporary the first place, which was partly the agenda of October,and then I became increasDiscussions ed., DiaArtFoundation: CultureI (New York:New Press,1987). ingly involved in what is now called identity politics. I decided that I needed to do 5. Testingthe Limits,videocassette, directed by a full special issue on AIDS, and I brought my theoretical trainingto bear on it. As I Testing the Limits(San Francisco:Frameline, became more aware of the issues, I realized that the culturalaspects were only part 1987). Marshall's Analysis/ BrightEyes,"inAIDS:Cultural Cultural Activism,1988, 108-26;SimonWatney, AIDSandtheMedia Desire:Pornography, Policing 81 art journal This content downloaded from 128.151.244.46 on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions t I This content downloaded from 128.151.244.46 on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions I I Testing the Limits Collective. Still from Testingthe Limits, 1987.Video, 28 min. Photograph courtesy of Testing the Limits. of the picture I would have to address. It was clear that AIDS was a political issue and there were activist responses that also needed to be part of the special issue. That's when I began commissioning work from people who weren't involved in academic discourse but were involved in the activist struggle from other perspectives. SILENCE=DEATH button for ACT UP NewYork. I3 x 1%in. Takemoto: Can you describe how ACTUP differed from other grassroots political organizations? (4.5 x 4.5 cm). Crimp: ACT UP was innovative for activist politics partly because it wasn't made up exclusively of traditionalleftists. It was basicallya bunch of queers, and some of them had traditionalleftist backgrounds-especially the women-but a lot of them didn't.6Many members had rather mainstream politics, but they had AIDS and they were fightingfor their lives. For instance, Peter Staley,who was a significant member of ACT UP and a founder of the Treatment Action Group and AIDSmed.com, was also a bond trader. He worked on Wall Street and then he was diagnosed with AIDS. He didn't have a leftist backgroundat all, but he had access to information and money. He is a fairlytypical example of some of the members in ACT UP who had privilegeand access that people in traditionalleft movements tended not to have. Takemoto: Weren't there also many artists and designers involved in ACTUP? 6. See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archiveof Feelings: Trauma,Sexuality,and LesbianPublicCultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). See especially chapter 5, "AIDSActivism and Public and Feelings:DocumentingACTUP'sLesbians," of Trauma,Legaciesof chapter6, "Legacies Activism: Mourningand MilitancyRevisited." Crimp: Yes. Some of the most sophisticated people in the art world who were queer were also in ACT UP duringthat time. David Wojnarowicz and Zoe Leonard were in ACT UP. Terence Riley,who is now the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, was a member of the ad hoc committee that designed Let the RecordShow. . ., a piece displayed in the window of the New Museum in 1987. Many people who studied at the Whitney Independent Studio Programcame to ACT UP-for instance, Tom Kalin,Gregg Bordowitz, Catherine Gund, and Ray Navarro. Manyart world insiders became members of Gran FuryLoringMcAlpin,Donald Moffett, Marlene McCarty,John Lindell,RichardElovich. 82 WINTER 2003 This content downloaded from 128.151.244.46 on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Takemoto: One of the things that was unique about ACTUP was its use of visual strategies. Can you talk about how ACTUP was able to transform the impact of activism by working with strategies from the media and advertising? Crimp: Within ACT UP, there was a sophistication about the uses of representation for activist politics. This awareness came not only from people who knew art theory but also from people who worked in public relations, design, and advertising. The idea of doing press kits and producing a graphic identity,for instance, did not come from the art world but from people working in publicityand advertising.So ACT UP was a weird hybridof traditionalleftist politics, innovative postmodern theory, and access to professional resources. It used techniques of mass production to make posters that were visuallyand graphicallyinteresting. One of the most emblematic images associated with ACT UP was the SILENCE=DEATHlogo, composed of a simple pinktriangle on a black backgroundwith white sans serif type. This image was created by a group of gay designers who organized the Silence=Death Project before ACT UP even started. Although they didn't design the logo for ACT UP, they lent it to the movement, and it was used on T-shirts as an officialemblem. The fact that everybody would be wearing identicalshirts made ACT UP look incrediblywell organized. Takemoto: ACTUP also provided a lot of solid information about AIDS through the high visibility of its protests, posters, independent media, cable-TV production, and activist videos. Can you describe how ACTUP was able to offer an alternative voice? Crimp: Through 1989, ACT UP got a lot of media attention and had a number of real successes. Its fundraisingefforts led to art world auctions that raised thousands of dollars. ACT UP radicallychanged the public discussion about AIDS in the media from one of hysteria and blamingthe victim to one of recognizingAIDS as a public health emergency. GMHC (Gay Men's Health Crisis) ran a cable access program called LivingwithAIDS,which produced and aired many activist videos. It worked againstthe luridand horrible television stories and images that fueled hysteria rather than contributingin any positive way to stopping the epidemic. For example, in 1988 Cosmopolitanran an article sayingthat ordinarywomen were not at riskfor HIV.7ACT UP staged a demonstration that got on nationaltelevision. The video Doctors,Liarsand Women:AIDSActivistsSay No to Cosmo(I 988) by Jean Carlomusto and MariaMaggentidepicted this event very entertaininglyand intelligently.Also, ACT UP managed to impartto the media important information about and criticism of the way the Reagan administrationand later the Bush administrationmishandled the epidemic. Reagan'srefusalto even speak the word "AIDS"duringthe first six years of the crisis was so clearly irresponsible. In so many ways, ACT UP's critique of representations of AIDS caught on and really stuck. Takemoto: AIDS:Cultural Activismis considered a founding text in Analysis/Cultural queer theory. Can you talk about the rise of queer theory in relation to the presence of ACTUP? How did discourses on AIDS transform the academic field and the idea of being a public intellectual? 7. Dr.RobertE.Gould,"Reassuring News about AIDS,"Cosmopolitan 204, no. I (January1988): 146-47. Crimp: I think there is a misperception about the chronological development of queer theory in relation to AIDS activism. The writing that was done about AIDS in the 1980s, such as that by PaulaTreichler,Cindy Patton, and Simon Watney, was 83 art journal This content downloaded from 128.151.244.46 on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions among the earliest work on AIDS from a sophisticated, postmodern theoretical perspective.8 In many ways, this writing could be called the first queer theoretical work, alongside a few works in literarystudies by writers such as Eve KosofskySedgwick and D. A. Miller.9AIDS:CulturalAnalysis/Cultural Activismwas published in 1987. In it, "Isthe Rectum a Grave?"by Leo Bersaniwas one of his first essays dealing directly with queer politics.10So the sense that queer theory informs AIDS activist politics is a bit wrong way around. This is, of course, with the exception of Michel Foucault's Historyof Sexuality.' In David Halperin'sbook on Foucault,he suggests that everybody who came to ACT UP brought along a copy of The Historyof Sexuality.'2This is hyperbolic, but it is a way of sayingthat many people involved in ACT UP had been reading postmodern theory, includingFoucault'sHistoryof Sexuality,which (certainlyto me and to the students in the Whitney Program) had something of the effect that Herbert Marcuse'sErosand Civilizationhad on politicalmovements during the 1960s.13So Halperinisn't wrong, it's just that there were of course many members of ACT UP who never would have heard of Foucaultor would have disdained him if they had. But in general, AIDS became an issue that people in the academy began to think about from a radicalperspective. If you consider some of the earlier work that now counts as queer theory, much of it focused on AIDS because some of the starkest expressions of homophobia in the late 1980s and early 1990s were in relation to AIDS. In other words, there was theoretical input into the activist movement and activist input into the theoretical development of queer theory, but in the 1980s queer theory did not exist as such. Remember, such founding texts of queer theory as Sedgwick's Epistemologyof the Closetand JudithButler'sGender Troublewere published in 1990.14 8. See PaulaTreichler,How to Have Theoryin an Cultural Chronicles Epidemic: of AIDS(Durham: Takemoto: When I read your work, it becomes clear how significant visual culture is to your understanding of cultural studies and the representation of AIDS. In "Portraitsof People with AIDS"you discuss certain problems with the tendency to demand "positive" images.' Duke University Press, 1999); Cindy Patton, Sex andGerms:ThePolitics of AIDS(Boston:South End Press, 1985); Simon Watney, PolicingDesire. 9. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: EnglishLiteratureand Male HomosocialDesire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), and D. A. Miller,The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1988). 10. Leo Bersani, "Isthe Rectum a Grave?"in AIDS: Cultural Activism,197-222. Analysis/Cultural I I. Michel Foucault, The Historyof Sexuality,vol. I (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 12. See David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault:Towards a Gay Hagiography(New York:Oxford University Press, 1995). 13. Herbert Marcuse, Erosand Civilization:A intoFreud(Boston:Beacon, Philosophical Inquiry 1966). 14. Sedgwick, Epistemologyof the Closet (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1990), and Judith Butler,GenderTrouble:Feminismand the Subversionof Identity(New York: Routledge, 1990). IS. Douglas Crimp, "Portraitsof People with andMoralism, AIDS,"inMelancholia 83-107; first published in CulturalStudies,ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and PaulaA. Treichler, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 117-33. Crimp: Duringthe late 1980s, it was very clear that we were being barragedwith images of AIDS based on negative stereotypes. A typical example would be the representation of a person with AIDS who is visibly physicallyill,wasting, and has Kaposi'sSarcoma lesions. The people who circulatedthese images often claimed that it was helpfulto see such images because the viewer could sympathize with them and see the terrible effects of the disease. I recognized that the effect of the images could be just the opposite. That is, they could produce a phobic effect in which the last thing one would ever want to do would be to identifywith their subjects. A viewer could see them neither as human nor as possible self-images, but rather as images of abjection and otherness. At the same time, I was aware that by simply askingto replace visible pictures of illness with positive images of health one could become complicit in saying, in effect, "We don't want to see an image of a sick person." So how can we resist the idea that an image of a sick person is a negative image or the idea that we should only see people livingwith AIDS who, as ACT UP demanded in response to Nicholas Nixon's portraits of people with AIDS, are acting up and fightingback?It's interesting because the positive images that activists were callingfor at that time are now everywhere and are very disabling.If you look at the advertisingfor antiviralAIDS medications you will see images of hunky men climbingmountains that deny the fact that people takingthese drugs often have 84 WINTER 2003 This content downloaded from 128.151.244.46 on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions problems with diarrhea, lipodystrophy, heart disease, and various other debilitating side effects. I tried to make the argument that it is damagingto suggest simply that a picture of someone dying is a bad thing, because of course people do die. On the one hand, we were fightingagainstthe notion that AIDS is an inevitable death sentence, and on the other hand, we wanted it known that people were dyingfrom a terrible disease. Takemoto: There is also the taboo against the representation of illness and sexuality as well as the aversion to the idea that a person who is ill can also be desiring and desirable. Crimp: I think that the combination of those two things-the terrible frightabout sexual transmission and this horrible, fatal disease-led to a kind of phobic representation. The picture itself acts as a psychic defense againstthe possibilitythat a viewer could still desire and actuallywant to have sex with a person with HIVdisease. I came to this realizationthrough my encounter with a wonderful counterexample, Stashu Kybartas'svideo Danny,in which Danny is depicted both as dying, with visible KS lesions, and as explicitly sexually attractive to the videomaker. 6 When you study representation, you realize that inscribedwithin any image are a whole host of symbolic and psychic effects that are not immediately apparent. An image isn't simply negative or positive but rather is the product of social relations and produces contradictory social effects. I was tryingto examine how the images that were being put forth in the media or even called for by activistscould be problematic in various ways. Stashu Kybartas. Still from Danny, 1987.Video, 20 min. Courtesy of and distributed byVideo Data Bank. Takemoto: These images were perpetuating certain ideas about what is and is not representable in our culture. How does this relate to current attitudes towards sex and sexuality? 16. Danny,videocassette, directed by Stashu Kybartas.(Chicago: Video Data Bank, 1987). 17. EricaGoode, "With Fears Fading,More Gays Spurn Old Preventive Message," New YorkTimes, (August 19, 2001): final section, I, 30. Crimp: Havingworked on AIDS for a long time, I believe that, from the very beginning and continuingthrough today, the discourse on AIDS is driven by a terribly moralisticattitude towards sex. This moralism asserts that certain kinds of sex are good and other kinds of sex are bad. To give you an example, there was recently an article in the New YorkTimes,"With Fears Fading,More Gays Spurn Old Preventive Message," 7 about the so-called return to unsafe sex, especially among younger gay men. It addresses the fact that many young people have not experienced the epidemic at its worst. They have not watched friends dying,visited people in the hospital, or gone to memorial services, and they haven't seen a lot of visibly ill people on the street. And it suggests that these young men believe that even if they become infected there are drugs availablethat would keep them reasonably healthy.As a result, they are not practicingsafe sex. This is a significantarticle because it makes it clear that there isn't enough discussion about AIDS going on now. 85 art journal This content downloaded from 128.151.244.46 on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Takemoto: Is this a symptom of the active forgetting of AIDS that you are talkandMoralism? ing about in your recent book Melancholia Crimp: Absolutely. Inthe article the writer interviews young men who say things like, "Iwas depressed and feeling really lonely, so I went to a sex club and had risky sex and then I immediately regretted it and I was terrified."Within such a discussion, a gay man goes to a sex club and puts himself at risk because he's depressed and lonely. It would never occur to the writer of such an article that going to a sex club is something many gay men do routinely because we have purposely developed a culture of sexual pleasure. So it isn't necessarily about being depressed or lonely or drunk or high at all. Of course, it is still possible that people are taking risks because sex itself is so psychicallycomplex that they don't necessarily want to stay completely rational.Sex can be about transgression and it can be about moments of real intimacy.But the moralism suggested by this picture of a lonely, depressed guy putting himself at risk in a sex club is that the proper situation is to have a boyfriend, live in a monogamous relationshipin a nice home, and have sex in your bedroom. In fact a great many people put themselves at risk in precisely this kind of situation in which two men are in love, are at home in their own bedroom, think that this is forever, and so they have unsafe sex, because the last thing a person wants to do when he's fallingin love is ask, "Areyou positive?"or say, "Oh, by the way, I'm positive." Takemoto: In other words, the risk of infection also exists within so-called morally righteous, monogamous gay relationships. Crimp: We still suffer from the notion that all gay sex is an indulgence and thus that you must either be ashamed of havinggay sex or just give it up. The whole discourse about sex is a shamingone, a moralisticone, and what people tend to forget is that within much of mainstreamculture all gay sex is seen as wrong because it's not reproductive and because gays can't be married. At the same time, we have a conservative gay politics that suggests that as long as gays imitate a certain kind of sexual morality,then everything will be fine. But the arbiters of morality in the U.S. today-right-wing Christians,Catholics, the president-do not accept this logic. To them, there is no such thing as good gay sex. I also think that the shift in attitude toward sex is partly a generational issue. Unlike today, gay men in the 1970s in urbanAmerica had a highlycreative ethos about sexual pleasure; it was one of the few movements in the history of this country that built a culture on a great variety of forms of affectional and sexual relationships,a proliferationof variously organized friendshipsand community relations, which made for a great many options for obtaining pleasure and forming human connection and intimacy.The normative couple was only one of many possibilities,so if you weren't inclinedtoward that form of connection, you didn't feel weird, left out, and miserable. Takemoto: You also suggest that the gay culture of the 197os actually helped invent the idea of safe sex. One of the important messages that came out of this community is that safe sex is not necessarily limiting and that there are many inventive ways to engage in safer sex. Crimp: Right,and we taught ourselves to practice it. I don't think it is only because of the development of protease inhibitorsthat there has been a return to unsafe sex. What has happened is that there is no longer a supportive gay community with peer relations that support the necessity of keeping up safe-sex practices. Instead, 86 WINTER 2003 This content downloaded from 128.151.244.46 on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions many gay men meet other men for sex only on the Internet. When I speak with younger friends now, gay men who are havinga lot of sex with people that they meet over the Internet or at clubs, I find that they almost never get tested, rarely talk about safe sex, rarely consciously think or talk about HIVat all. Because this public arena does not include seeing and hearing safe-sex messages, few are willing to bringit up. We have lost public discourse about safe sex, and that is a dangerous problem. It is such a complicated issue, because over the long term people realized that safe sex can also be debilitating. Strong fantasies of unsafe sex can develop because havingconstantly to be aware of the threat of transmission is such a downer. But the lesson we need to learn from this is not to put our heads in the sand and never talk about safe sex or HIV.Unfortunately,though, we have lost the strong sense of community around HIVdis- N_^|-E cussionandactivismthatkeptthe issuefrontandcenter. ^B^ 1^ For gay men, this is very dangerous. uoR cantmarciSTakemoto: _/_ | inthemilitary Youcan'stserve ifyou'redead. Youcan'tmarchintheSaintPatrick's Dayparadeifyou'redead ifyou'redead. asdomesticpartners Youcan'tregister ACTUP! Takedirectactionto endtheAIDScrisis. onMonday Cometoourweeklymeetings night at7:30 s attheLesbian &GayCommunity ServicesCenter, 208West13 Street In your 1990 essay "Mourning and Militancy,"8 you begin to consider some of the psychological aspects of the AIDSpandemic. Can you describe the climate of ACTUP at that time? Crimp: There is a certain kind of heroics of activism that I see as destructive, masculinist,and posturing. But what I always felt being an activist, being out on the streets, screaming and getting arrested, is that it isn't heroic at all. It feels incrediblyawkward and it's embarrassing.ACT UP made it possible for people to engage in a kind of antiheroic activism by queering it, by makingit campy, funny, and ironic. The humor and queerness of ACT UP came from such things as the fact that the men facilitatingthe meetings wore skirtsandnecklaces.So even thoughthere were still some traditionalheroics going on, there were also ways of debunkingthem. On one level, ACT UP was very good at puncturingactivists' tendencies to take themselves too seriously. What ACT UP never was very good at was acknowledging more difficultemotions related to feelings of cumulative loss, terrible fear, and an overridingsense that this was a battle that we were not winning. canmake a difference. Oneperson Alessandro Codagnone, poster forACT UP NewYork, 1993. II x 82 in. (27.9 x 21.6 of the artist. cm). Courtesy Takemoto: Is this when you began thinking through the ambivalent relationship between mourning and activism? Crimp: Yes. Only a couple of years after ACT UP began, it was becoming clear that ACT UP was facing problems of burn-out and internalantagonism, and I became very aware that there was a denial of a pervasive sadness. All along, people in the activist group were dying. At the same time, we were trying desperately to uphold a rhetoric of survivalthat was necessary againstthe kind of fatalismthat was rampant 18.DouglasCrimp,"Mourning andMilitancy," inthe media.Itwas verydifficultto maintaina strongactivistvoice andto acknowl- in Out There:Marginalizationand Contemporary Cultures,ed. Russell Ferguson, et. al., (Cambridge: MITPress, 1990), 233-45. functionedas a kindof defensemechanism.Peoplesaythatactivismkeepsthem 87 art journal This content downloaded from 128.151.244.46 on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions healthy. I think this rhetoric may be useful and necessary, but it is also untrue. Of course it's important to have a sense of hope, and it's thought that a positive mental attitude helps maintainphysical health. But this only goes so far when there's a virus that is destroying millions.It was great to feel like we were havingvictory after victory, but every death contravened those victories. Death was the very opposite of victory. So we focused on our victories and tried to forget or repress our losses. This just was not sustainable and, at a certain point, the losses became overwhelming and people began leavingthe movement because they just couldn't handle it emotionally anymore. That's what I recognized when I wrote "Mourningand Militancy."It's also an important subject of Gregg Bordowitz's autobiographicaldocumentary Fast Trip,LongDrop."9 '/ . "^^_BL Gregg Bordowitz. Still from FastTrip,Long Drop, 1993. Video, 54 min. Distributed byVideo Data Bank, Chicago. Courtesy of the artist. 19. Fast Trip,LongDrop,videocassette, directed by Gregg Bordowitz (Chicago: Video Data Bank, 1993.) 20. Sigmund Freud, "Mourningand Melancholia," in GeneralPsychologicalTheory:Paperson Metaphysics (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 164-79. 21. MarshallKirkand Hunter Madsen, Afterthe Ball:How AmericaWillConquerIts Fearand Hatred of Gays in the '90s (New York: Doubleday, 1989). 22. Randy Shilts,And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDSEpidemic(New York: St. Martin'sPress, 1987); LarryKramer,The Normal Heart (New York: New American Library,1985); Gabriel Rotello, "Sex Clubs Are the KillingFields of AIDS," New YorkNewsday (April 28, 1994); Michelangelo Signorile, "H.I.V.-Positive,and Careless," New YorkTimes (February26, 1995): E15; and Andrew Sullivan,VirtuallyNormal:An Argumentabout Homosexuality(New York: Vintage, 1996). 23. Andrew Sullivan,"When Plagues End: Notes on the Twilightof the Epidemic,"New YorkTimes Magazine(November 10, 1996): 52-62, 76-77, 84. 24. Crimp, Melancholiaand Moralism, 10. Takemoto: In some circles, there's skepticism B^H^v/ about the usefulness or relevance of psychoanalysis for productive cultural critique. How was Sigmund Freud's notion of melancholia useful to your understanding of grief? Crimp: In Freud's "Mourningand Melancholia,"20 there are some revelatory insightsabout the process of grief that ended up informingmy work. The title of my recent book Melancholiaand Moralismrefers to Freud'stheorization of melancholiaas a form of In his melancholia comes from incorporatingor introjecting reading, introjection. the love object who has rejected the melancholic. In other words, this introjection becomes a form of self-abasement. I realized that this self-abasement or internalized moralistic rebuke was what I had been writing about from the very beginning.In "Mourningand Militancy,"I criticizethe book Afterthe Ball,21which demands that gay men grow up and become responsible citizens. I later went on to criticize other writers whose response to AIDS was to identifywith or adopt the positions of the people who were vilifyinggay men, writers such as Randy Shiltsand LarryKramer, or, closer to the present, Gabriel Rotello, MichelangeloSignorile,and Andrew Sullivan.221am interested in the ways that various psychic mechanisms such as defense or projection inform reactionaryjournalisticwriting and conservative gay politics. I argue that figures such as Shiltsand Sullivan,who are extremely moralistic writers, occupy a melancholic position, which, as Freudtheorizes it, becomes a moralisticposition. Takemoto: Is this symptomatic of the way that our culture is handling the idea of AIDSin the present? Crimp: Ingeneral, I believe that there is currently a massive repression of AIDS. It has become conventional wisdom that once protease inhibitorswere developed and came on the market in 1995-96, the epidemic, as we had known it, was over. Andrew Sullivan'sSunday New YorkTimesMagazine article "When Plagues End"23 was one of numerous media stories proclaimingthat the epidemic was essentially over, that even if there wasn't a cure, AIDS had become a chronic, manageable illness. But I argue that as early as 1989 there was a pervasive repression of AIDS on 88 WINTER 2003 This content downloaded from 128.151.244.46 on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions the part of the society in general and especially on the part of the people who were most affected. Takemoto: In other words, this turning away from AIDSwas not so much about the availability of protease inhibitors. Crimp: This turningaway from AIDS preceded protease inhibitorsby at least six years. The fear AIDS produced was so horrifyingthat people looked for ways to forget it. It was an unconscious response that predated the conscious knowledge that at a certain point fewer people were dying of AIDS-that is to say, more accurately,fewer privilegedpeople in developed countries were dying. If you look at the obituary columns in the New YorkTimesnow as compared to before 1995, the difference is very stark. But we should remember who does not get represented in obituary articles, certainly not poor people in this country or ordinary people living in Africa or Southeast Asia. It's important to realize that just as the psychic need to turn away from AIDS very much precedes the development of protease inhibitors, the rise of a conservative gay politics and the moralisticself-abasement within gay politics begin much earlier as well. andMoralism, Takemoto: In Melancholia you talk about Sullivan in relation to your own circumstance as an HIV-positive gay activist.You suggest that in some ways you both occupy the same world of "well-informed yet recently infected gay men who find it hard to explain, even to ourselves, how we allowed the worst to happen to us," but you clearly do not share the same world view.24The significant difference between your narrative and his is that you are willing to acknowledge the ambivalence and complexity of these circumstances, whereas he appears to be in denial of his own past, which he continually disavows. When he says, "It's too late for me. The damage has already been done," he suggests that it's too late for him to be saved by living according to the rules of normative heterosexuality, but it doesn't get him out of the ambivalence of his situation. Crimp: No, of course not. It is clear that Sullivanturns to moralism as a false solution because he is deeply trapped in a sense of shame. His moralism is the clearest symptom of a melancholic position. He is unable to recognize the intractabilityof our society's homophobia because he identifies with the homophobe's repudiation of him, and then reproduces this repudiation by projecting it onto others. I argue that Sullivan'sview is symptomatic of a widespread psychosocial response to the AIDS crisis that is expressed in conservative gay politics. Takemoto: You suggest that moralism is one symptom of melancholia as a form of self-abasement that is projected onto others, but you also talk about a melancholia that occurs in response to the overwhelming effects of cumulative loss. Are you suggesting that there are other forms of melancholia that can resist a moralizing tendency? Douglas Crimp, NewYork City, early 1970s. Photobooth photographs. 74 x I ' in. (19.7 x 3.8 cm). Courtesy of Douglas Crimp. Crimp: Yes. A certain melancholic disposition can also inform a useful political position. If mourning is achieved by severing attachments to the lost object and moving on, in melancholiathere is a form of attachment to loss that can be politicizing. Maintainingan attachment to the lost object, the lost loved one, or in the case that I'm interested in, a lost gay sexual culture can be productive of an antimoralistic politics. I believe that the attachment to a culture of creative gay sex can actually 89 art journal This content downloaded from 128.151.244.46 on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions produce a genuine responsibility,a responsibilitythat I call queer. This responsibility can be experienced in the exhilarationof sex itself and an unwillingnessto acquiesce to conventional moralism as well as in the burden and ambivalence of sex duringan epidemic of a deadly sexually transmitted disease. Not only is it something that is aware of the dangers of moralizingas a form of false resolution, but it also seeks to keep the wound open in order that we not forget that the culture of gay sex and the AIDS crisis are not over. Takemoto: In closing, can you reflect on how your involvement in activism and queer theory has affected your identity as an art critic and theorist? Some might see these as conflicting identities; how have you managed to negotiate the demands of each? And, finally, what projects are you working on now? Crimp: At this point, I feel that I suffer from a kind of either/or mentality.There is a perception that if you do work on queer culture and AIDS, then it means that you are not doing work on art or you just don't care about art anymore. There was a period of time when I felt I'dsaid what I had to say about AIDS, and I found myself getting more interested in the art world again,going to more exhibitions, finding artists who interested me. At first I felt guilty,as if I was abandoningthe political struggle, but then I realized that it isn't a question of abandoningthe struggle and that it could remain front and center in my work. My current project on Andy Warhol's films is informed by my own autobiographicalexperience with his milieu after I arrived in New York in the late 1960s, but also by my valuingof a certain kind of queerness that is represented within these works. To me, Warhol's work is valuable because of what it can teach us about queerness that we really need to know now. But I don't think I could analyze Warhol's films and extrapolate out of them what is of significantvalue to our culture if I didn't understand what's going on in them at the most abstract formal level. I understand Warhol's films because I am sensitive to aspects of lighting,framing,editing, and camera movement that are part of my trainingin formal analysis.At the same time, I have no interest in formalismfor its own sake. Warhol is a particularlyinstructivefigure because he himself was completely involved in a queer milieu and involved in producing popular culturalobjects. Warhol abrogated the traditionaldistinction between high art and the world of commodity and fashion and fame. He fully inhabitedthe culture in which he found himself and made something truly interesting,valuable, and exciting out of it. So, on the one hand, I feel that my abilityto understand popular culture, media culture, and other discourses, and my abilityto weave meaning into these events and representations has to do with how I have learned to read works of so-called high culture. Infact, what I understand about representations of AIDS and queer culture is fully informed by my trainingand my professional work as an art critic. At the same time, I feel that my commitment to thinkingabout works of art comes from activist politics and, as someone who values queer culture, a queer ethos, and queer politics. To be able to inform one with the other and to see them as part of something larger is what matters to me. I think you can do this best if you understand that the stakes in both involve survival,memory, subjectivities,and cultures. Tina Takemoto is associate professor of visual studies at the CaliforniaCollege of the Arts. Her essay "Open Wounds" appears in ThinkingThroughthe Skin,ed. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (London: Routledge, 200 1). 90 WINTER 2003 This content downloaded from 128.151.244.46 on Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:36:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions