Fantastic Refusals: Surrealist Imagery in American Queer Photographic Representations from the HIV/AIDS Epidemic
Lead Research Organisation:
University of York
Department Name: History of Art
Abstract
Since the early 1980s, photography has been a privileged means to document the visible symptoms of AIDS on the human body. On the one hand, this has been used by mass media and medicine to promulgate totalising and moralising narratives of the HIV/AIDS crisis. On the other hand, photographs of queer symptomatic bodies have given artists, activists, and art historical criticism a threatening visual language of loss, death, and illness to advocate for healthcare and for political resistance against the dismissal of an ongoing health crisis by the US government.
Though more recent writings on HIV/AIDS-taking into consideration pharmaceutical advancements to lower HIV-related mortality and transmission-have begun to decouple queer experiences of AIDS from death and illness to end the stigmatisation of seropositive people and to contextualise its effects on queer mental health, the significance of photography as a form of psycho-social therapy for queer artists dealing with HIV/AIDS has seldom been recognised.
This project considers five photographers whose life and works-despite being marked by grief, trauma, and anxiety arising from HIV contagion-have been excluded from AIDS visual histories in order to analyse the socially destabilising and therapeutic potential of decentring the human body from photo-representations of the AIDS crisis. Jimmy DeSana's photographs of clumsy, inorganic prostheses; Steven Arnold's staged primordial dreamscapes; David LaChapelle's camp angelic imagery; Ryan McGinley's portraits of youth merging into the environment; and Paul Sepuya's photocollages amalgamating studio space and fragmented black bodies-all these works use Surrealist imagery to avoid representing queer experiences of AIDS through symptomatic bodies and to indicate possible coping mechanisms to comfort their mental health. Early 20th century Surrealist photography, rediscovered in multiple exhibitions in the USA in the early 1980s, not only discards the idea of photography as a documentation of reality to suggest instead possible ways of depicting psychological states but also offers these artists a possible way of working through the negative effects that AIDS and social abjection have on their mental health.
By transcending to fantastical (sur)realities populated by nonhuman figures-that is, angelic, environmental, inorganic, animal, and cosmic figures-these works distance themselves from human biology in their attempt to redefine queer experience outside the anthropocentric, death-bound terms of HIV contagion, AIDS illness, and ensuing stigmatisation. These artists' shared intention of "touching people with light" (LaChapelle, 2018) and of creating "metaphors for life" (Arnold, 1990) underpins both their disavowal of negative representations of illness and their works' psychically soothing purpose.
Crucial to analyse the relationship between therapy and these artists' departure from human embodiment are the anti-humanist writings of Bataille (1949) and Deleuze and Guattari (1972), which provide a critical framework on visual culture's ability to envision societal comfort beyond human systems of production. My research also converses with recent theories by Muñoz (2020), Barad (2015), Love (2016), and Haritaworn (2015), which, intersecting with disability and prostheses theory (Kim, 2015; Lorenz, 2012), contextualise queer responses against AIDS stigma and homophobia by locating queer subjectivity outside structures of human recognition. These are combined to Coleman's (1979) problematisation of photographs as objective documents, especially in the context of HIV/AIDS (Crimp, 2002).
Pairing these writings with relatively little-used archival materials, this project shines a light on the relevance of Surrealism and non-documentation in the visual histories of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic and recentres queer therapy as the starting point for further inquiries.
Though more recent writings on HIV/AIDS-taking into consideration pharmaceutical advancements to lower HIV-related mortality and transmission-have begun to decouple queer experiences of AIDS from death and illness to end the stigmatisation of seropositive people and to contextualise its effects on queer mental health, the significance of photography as a form of psycho-social therapy for queer artists dealing with HIV/AIDS has seldom been recognised.
This project considers five photographers whose life and works-despite being marked by grief, trauma, and anxiety arising from HIV contagion-have been excluded from AIDS visual histories in order to analyse the socially destabilising and therapeutic potential of decentring the human body from photo-representations of the AIDS crisis. Jimmy DeSana's photographs of clumsy, inorganic prostheses; Steven Arnold's staged primordial dreamscapes; David LaChapelle's camp angelic imagery; Ryan McGinley's portraits of youth merging into the environment; and Paul Sepuya's photocollages amalgamating studio space and fragmented black bodies-all these works use Surrealist imagery to avoid representing queer experiences of AIDS through symptomatic bodies and to indicate possible coping mechanisms to comfort their mental health. Early 20th century Surrealist photography, rediscovered in multiple exhibitions in the USA in the early 1980s, not only discards the idea of photography as a documentation of reality to suggest instead possible ways of depicting psychological states but also offers these artists a possible way of working through the negative effects that AIDS and social abjection have on their mental health.
By transcending to fantastical (sur)realities populated by nonhuman figures-that is, angelic, environmental, inorganic, animal, and cosmic figures-these works distance themselves from human biology in their attempt to redefine queer experience outside the anthropocentric, death-bound terms of HIV contagion, AIDS illness, and ensuing stigmatisation. These artists' shared intention of "touching people with light" (LaChapelle, 2018) and of creating "metaphors for life" (Arnold, 1990) underpins both their disavowal of negative representations of illness and their works' psychically soothing purpose.
Crucial to analyse the relationship between therapy and these artists' departure from human embodiment are the anti-humanist writings of Bataille (1949) and Deleuze and Guattari (1972), which provide a critical framework on visual culture's ability to envision societal comfort beyond human systems of production. My research also converses with recent theories by Muñoz (2020), Barad (2015), Love (2016), and Haritaworn (2015), which, intersecting with disability and prostheses theory (Kim, 2015; Lorenz, 2012), contextualise queer responses against AIDS stigma and homophobia by locating queer subjectivity outside structures of human recognition. These are combined to Coleman's (1979) problematisation of photographs as objective documents, especially in the context of HIV/AIDS (Crimp, 2002).
Pairing these writings with relatively little-used archival materials, this project shines a light on the relevance of Surrealism and non-documentation in the visual histories of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic and recentres queer therapy as the starting point for further inquiries.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| James Boaden (Primary Supervisor) | |
| Gregory Tiani (Student) |