AIDS and Representation: Queering Portraiture during the AIDS Crisis in America

(Paperback)

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AIDS & Representation explores portraits and self-portraits made in response to the AIDS epidemic in America in the 1980s and 1990s. Addressing the work of artists including Mark Morrisroe, Robert Blanchon and Felix Gonzalez-Torres through the interrelated themes of sickness and mortality, desire and sexual identity, love and loss, Fiona Johnstone shows how the self-representational practices of artists with HIV and AIDS offered a richly imaginative response to the limitations of early AIDS imagery. Johnstone argues that the AIDS epidemic changed the very nature of visual representation and artistic practice, necessitating a radical new approach to conceptualising and visualising the human form. An extended epilogue considers the ongoing art historicization of the epidemic, re-contextualising the books themes in relation to contemporary photographic works. More than just a historical discussion of the art of the AIDS crisis, AIDS and Representation contributes to an emergent body of scholarship on the visual representation of illness. Expanding the established genre of the autopathography or illness narrative beyond the predominantly textual, this important contribution to art history and health humanities sensitively unpicks the entanglements between aesthetic form and the expression of lived experiences of critical and chronic ill health.

Reviews

Johnstones book provides excellent context for the emergence of visual art in the time of crisis and during the emergency years of the AIDS crisis in particular. AIDS changed art, this book argues, showing us how to develop a complex appreciation and understanding of these crucial portraits. * Monica Pearl, Senior Lecturer, Twentieth Century American Literature and Film, University of Manchester, UK *
Arguing for a more expansive understanding of self-portraiture in its revisiting and queering of AIDS portraiture in the 1980s and 1990s, this book offers a critical reappraisal of the significance of portraiture as an aesthetic and activist response to crisis. * Lisa Diedrich. Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University, USA *
Enjoyable and accessible, this book bears witness to Mark Morrisroe, Robert Blanchon, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres queer tactics of portraiture, meanwhile locating their work within well researched and fascinating contexts that illuminate a kinship of ideas, connections, and tensions across disciplines and timelines. * Theodore (ted) Kerr, co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (2022) *

Author Bio

Fiona Johnstone is an art historian and a researcher at Durham Universitys Institute for Medical Humanities.