Silence Still = Death

Extremely provocative art about a very hot issue got the full treatment from art critic Lucy Lippard in this 1991 essay dealing with the work of Michael Nash. Even though the artist, and his cohorts in ACT UP, claimed to care more about the politics than the art, Lippard views Nash's ACT UP campaign as an artwork. She takes her critical analysis all the way, including citations of historical precedent, awareness of the work's social context and understanding of the technology employed. —Eds.

What I am doing is not ART.
I don't care about making ART as a final product.
I don't care if it is not looked at as ART.
My images are about FUNCTION.
My images are about INFORMATION.
My images are about VISIBILITY.
My images are about PRESSURE.
My images are about CHANGE.
My images are about ACTION.
My images are about COLLABORATION.
My images are about COOPERATION.
My images are about AIDS.

—Michael Nash

Billboard, Michael Nash and ACT UP/Denver, Denver, Colorodo, 1990. Photo: Michael Nash

In the last two years, Michael Nash has collaborated with ACT UP/Denver on a striking, and ongoing, series of visual interventions on the AIDS crisis. The partnership began after Nash, a Boulder photo-activist who was working on his MFA thesis at the University of Colorado, had a blood transfusion. Although HIV-negative, he became enraged when he learned what the government wasn't saying and doing about AIDS. He contacted the Denver group, and found a task that has come to obsess him and fuel his work.

The first product of this righteous rage was a unique, interactive computer publication, the impressive centerpiece of Nash's 1990 thesis show that was billed as an ACT UP project called "Silence Still = Death," rather than as a Michael Nash exhibition. The second was a series of extraordinarily ambitious and provocative billboards in Denver last fall.

The computer disk was produced to establish interaction and alliances among activist groups and community-service organizations dealing with the AIDS crisis. Its Macintosh Hypercard format is an indexing and cross-referencing tool that allows input from readers. The information comes on electronic "cards," rather like a series of rolodexes, all interlinked with others, so the event spreads out into the community as the information is read, and/or reproduced, on a printer and further distributed in hard copy. It is a lively program, hard to escape. When you try to disengage, it is likely to say something to the effect of "Wait, you don't really want to go yet, do you? How about the bibliography? Another article? A letter to your senators?"

The disk, with its simultaneous commitment to information dissemination and retrieval, provides an incredible amount of practical visual and textual information, including model letters to public officials or offending corporations, complete articles and analyses, statistics, local newspaper items, press releases, activist ideas, resources and addresses, and lists of issues and groups needing attention through political action and support. There are also hard-hitting photo-text poster and flyer models, that can either be printed and xeroxed from the disk, or acquired in higher resolution on request—altered to include specific information about local events anywhere. The unique part of the project is that it is distributed on disk with its participatory element intact, and the hard copy is only a by-product.

"Silence Still = Death" was to be evaluated by community groups and health agencies, then sent out quarterly as a publication, with amendments and additions from regional and national participants. Although this idea was superseded by other projects, the disk has been passed around to some extent, and the group still hopes to update and continue its dissemination. Groups would be encouraged to add information of their own to the files, which would then be incorporated into master files. The publication would act as a source for information exchange about HIV testing, safer sex practices, drug trials and current AIDS and health-care legislation. Critical responses to the AIDS crisis would be solicited, "critical dialogue being a necessary part of the search for an eventual cure."

Hoping to form alliances in order to reach "those communities that seek identities of their own," and to dispel the "us versus them" line of thought prevalent in government and media coverage of AIDS, Nash and ACT UP/Denver also planned to put the publication in public settings for "real-time access." No computer knowledge is necessary. The basic idea, says Nash, is that "it may be too late for AIDS information to be given if it is given in response to a question. It must be readily available, and stated in understandable terms before initial questions arise."

Colorado is a conservative state, isolated from the coasts, with a classic urban/rural split (Denver vs. the people "out there on the plains"). But AIDS affects 35 of its 65 counties. When Governor Roy Romer referred in late 1989 to AIDS as a "coming crisis," ACT UP replied loudly and strongly that the crisis is already here and it's everyone's crisis; we are all "living with AIDS." Their computer project encourages the exchange of thoughts and ideas with an emphasis on unique local issues, while making an acceptance of "local differences by the wider audience a 'routine part' of this audience's thinking." Jan Zita Grover has written that the government continues to generalize on geography, race and culture, while specific local analysis is the key to progress: "What works well in volunteer services in San Francisco does not work well across the bay in Oakland; what works well for a gay white man in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood does not play equally well in Riverside or the Bronx, much less in Franklin County, Ohio."

Nash has chosen a "de-aestheticizing" form, along the lines suggested by the Gran Fury collective in New York, and by video artist Greg Bordowitz. Greg Bordowitz has challenged artists to articulate the crisis, "to deal with AIDS in whatever form they want, but to do it in a way that reveals what their stake is—to do it in a way that doesn't pose as objectivism, that doesn't pose as removed for any academic reasons, or reasons of aestheticism."

For years now, ACT UP has been using the continually updated line "With 108,949 Dead, Art is Not Enough." But as critic Douglas Crimp has said, "Art does have the power to save lives.... But if we are to do this, we will have to abandon the idealist concept of art. We don't need a cultural renaissance; we need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS."

But there are many who find this dichotomy unnecessary. To see expressive, expressionist, ironic, beautiful or "idealist" art on AIDS in a positive light takes nothing away from the effectiveness of ACT UP's preference for graphic, media-competitive activism like the "Silence Still = Death" project. At Nash's show—which symbolically took place in the more public hallway of the art building rather than in the gallery—his graphically effective flyers were available on pads, to be torn off, taken away and posted, duplicated, used in the broader community. Other visuals included a postcard to those supporting the products of Burroughs-Wellcome, manufacturers of Neosporin, Sudafed and the AIDS treatment drug AZT. Although AZT is providing Burroughs-Wellcome with obscene profits off of PWAs (People With AIDS), the company continues to deny access to the drug to those who can't afford it.

Among the flyers on the disk are images of kids or families with the caption, "What Do People With AIDS Look Like?" The question is borrowed in response to Nicholas Nixon's "Faces of AIDS" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988, attacked by activists for its relentless pathos and "victimization" of PWAs. Another features the image of a plump, braided, bespectacled Girl Scout and the question, "Dear Mr. President, can my friends and I catch AIDS?" The most chilling, however, had no image. In a straightforward public service format it read, "Here is a simple AIDS test." There are two boxes, a choice between "I care about my health and value my life" and "I don't." The questionnaire ended: "Get informed, get tested, get real. If you don't care, good luck."

At one point during the project an AIDS testing team was available in the art building. The university was a particularly important place to mount a project designed to create dialogue about AIDS and its impact on the community. Statistics from the American College Health Association show that a projected one in five hundred students on campuses across the nation are HIV-positive. The 1988-89 survey was based on unrelated blood samples at 20 major universities including the University of Colorado; teenagers tested more recently, when entering the military, turned up a ratio of one in 3,000; women aged 17-18 tested higher than their male counterparts and also die more quickly.

In the spring of l990, ACT UP/Denver took a highly controversial stand regarding AIDS on college campuses by using gender and class analysis to an ironically extreme degree. After having been invited to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, where they were met with indifference, ignorance, denial and even ridicule, ACT UP members developed a startling position: They would not take their AIDS flyers to any more college campuses.

These college kids are the sons and daughters of the power structure in Colorado...Why help this future generation of leaders stay free of HIV so they can continue to believe the myth that AIDS is only a problem for the underclass? Fuck 'em! Let these kids get infected and die and then maybe their parents will decide to outlaw AIDS....Yes. Fuck a suburban teenager today. Pass HIV along...Share it with a college student. And tell them to pass it on. Want to bet we'll see a cure before a few hundred of them have died.... It feels right and sounds like fun! ACT UP has lots of leftover flyers. Any ideas on what to do with them?

Their position created a furor and, as they intended, drew more attention to the issues. "Hate us for our methods," they say, "but think about AIDS."

In November, 1990, Nash and other members of ACT UP/Denver embarked on another ambitious project. With support from the Chinook Fund, they produced five images and spent $3,300 to display them on 51 billboards around Denver. The images were portraits of local men with AIDS, three white, one African-American, one Latino. A call had been put out for people willing to declare their status publicly, and the five were selected from the pictures received. Hoping to reach the broadest possible audience, they worked hard to include a woman and a child, but the few willing to consider going public with their diagnosis withdrew at the last moment to protect relatives. The texts— "AIDS is not killing David Esquibel [for example]...YOU ARE. What haven't you done about AIDS?"—were printed in English and Spanish. The photographs ranged from family snapshots (one with wife and child, one with a cat) to handsome studio portraits. None pictured the emaciated "victim" that has become the AIDS stereotype.

Some of the billboards remained up after the contracted four months, during which time four of those pictured succumbed to the disease. The billboard company was supposed to write "DIED" across the appropriate boards if this happened, but they didn't, so a spray-paint team from ACT UP did it themselves. "Rationally," says Nash, "I know that the billboards had nothing to do with their deaths, but three of the four deaths actually seemed quite sudden. In the last few weeks, I just wanted to pull it down."

At a vigil and rally in late April, David Esquibel was the only PWA left to speak. Few of the invited mayoral and City Council candidates showed up. "It seems government agencies would rather see these people disappear than to address communities they do not understand," says Nash. "Genocide comes to mind." While the Chinook Fund received favorable mail about their part in the billboards, ACT UP received a death threat from the father of one of the PWAs.

Somewhere down the line, Nash would like to establish an "electronic co-op" for computer image production by activists, consisting of a central site, with a few terminals that would allow members of any group to produce work on a regular basis. In the meantime, Nash and ACT UP continue to assail the authorities and the people of Denver with variations on the themes of denial and memory. They feel it's a matter of life and death—rather than art—to compete with the major media, and to incorporate electronic production with greater originality and sophistication in their visual work.

This essay originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Fall 1991.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002