Michael Clarke & General Idea Transcript
The Monday of Pride is the vigil, one of the most important days of the big weekend. It’s a time where we come together and reflect on the people that we’ve lost to AIDS over the years.
The first work that I’d like to talk about is this wallpaper by General Idea. General Idea were a trio of Canadian artists living in Toronto who were conceptual and media based. They were working together from 1967 until 1994. In 1986 they moved to New York. The American Foundation for AIDS Research was putting together a fundraiser, which included over 25 galleries asking their artists to come together to make work for the fundraiser or to donate work for the fundraiser. General Idea had taken the work by Robert Indiana and adapted it for their own work. That work by Robert Indiana was the ‘Love’ painting in the 1960s. What General Idea had done with ‘Love’ was actually change something that was so liberal in the 1960s, to something that was quite deadly in the 1980s.
The three artists, AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal, would spend the next 7 years working with this image. In 1986 the American government had not publicly said the word AIDS, and as an act of protest and activism, the artists created this work, and started to use it in billboards, on trams, carrier bags, and in posters, and in wallpaper that we can see here. The wallpaper also has a double domestic meaning, the first thematic meaning being that people who were at home with an advanced illness of AIDS were spending more and more time and were confined, but that the domestic also housed healthy people who were living with HIV/AIDS within the home as well. The repetition of the AIDS design also replicates what the virus does to the host cells within the body, and rather than being a wallpaper for the home, it was actually a wallpaper that was designed for public spaces to educate people about AIDS.
As the AIDS vigil is online and people are being remembered digitally this year as we can’t come together in person to remember those people that we’ve lost to AIDS, I thought it might be quite nice to remember Derek Jarman from a portrait that we have within the collection called ‘The Gardener.’ In Michael Clark’s portrait he captures Jarman just before his death in 1994. There are many elements of Jarman’s life within this work playing out. His iconic status as filmmaker, queer icon, activist, and one of only a handful of public figures that had come out acknowledging their HIV status.
Michael Clark visited Jarman at Dungeness on the Kent coast, a cottage that Jarman had acquired and retired to for the last few years of his life, working in his garden, the elements of which can be seen within Michael Clark’s portrait, that have actually been taken from Derek Jarman’s garden.
We can see that Michael Clark has also depicted Jarman’s face with two sides; the side which is still living and still bright and still vivid, and this side which has been erased. It’s almost like his public and private persona acting out within the portrait; his public persona being so known and so iconic which is so vivid, and his personal and private persona being removed and taken to Dungeness, away from the spotlight of the public glare. It could also mean that, as Jarman was approaching the end of his life, that his life is slowly slipping away, and thus the unclear depiction of one side of Jarman’s face. The outstretched hand underneath the head of Jarman is almost like that acknowledgement of Jarman’s iconic status as filmmaker, stage designer, gardener, and author. The red on the hand almost depicting the stigmata, almost confirming his iconic status before his death, but also it could be read that the red on his hand is acknowledgement of being nailed to the cross, Jarman’s anger at dying of AIDS, being nailed to the cross for being gay. It could also be read that the blood on the hand is Jarman being nailed to the cross because of his coming out as being HIV positive and dying of AIDS, making that sacrifice to challenge the stigma that society has about the disease, which is something which is still ongoing and which is being challenged today.
Queering The Whitworth 