The feats and failures of Gran Fury

IT WAS VULGAR AND IT WAS BEAUTIFUL: HOW AIDS ACTIVISTS USED ART TO FIGHT A PANDEMIC. BY JACK LOWERY. Daring Kind Books, 2022. 432 pages.

THE PAST DECADE has seen an outpouring of what author and organizer Theodore Kerr calls AIDS Disaster Revisitation, a style outlined by its nostalgia for the pre-1996 years of HIV/AIDS activism, notably ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Energy). A serious contribution to this literature, Jack Lowery’s intricately researched historical past of Gran Fury trains its highlight on the artists and designers who collaboratively authored a lot of ACT UP’s iconic propaganda. Repackaging the collective’s travails for a mass-market viewers, Lowery deftly untangles the lives and contributions of Gran Fury’s eleven core members—Richard Elovich, Avram Finkelstein, Amy Heard, Tom Kalin, John Lindell, Loring McAlpin, Marlene McCarty, Donald Moffett, Michael Nesline, Mark Simpson, and Robert Vazquez-Pacheco—whereas cementing the group’s significance inside the bigger saga of ACT UP. But he stops in need of making heroes of those protagonists, who emerge in his telling much less as geniuses of postmodern picture conflict—“really, a lot of their work isn’t superb,” he readily concedes—than as all-too-human comrades and lovers.

True to its style, It Was Vulgar and It Was Lovely: How AIDS Activists Used Artwork to Struggle a Pandemic affords a celebratory view of this historical past, albeit one which omits most different cultural activism round AIDS. Complicating his narrative, nevertheless, Lowery treats Gran Fury’s failures with as a lot seriousness as their successes, airing copious soiled laundry alongside the best way. This ambivalence is implied by the guide’s title, which conjoins vulgarity—the provocative, the potty-mouthed, and the oversexed—with the great thing about pressing, but clearly articulated, expression. For Lowery, Gran Fury’s activism embodies a type of “civic rhetoric,” a time period borrowed from thinker Jason Stanley, who defends the need of “a species of propaganda” calculated to “pressure a dominant majority to develop the area of respect and empathy to incorporate a persecuted and ignored minority.” At their greatest, Lowery argues, Gran Fury contributed to altering the phrases of debate on a variety of points, from the homophobia of the Catholic church to the profiteering of Large Pharma. However they weren’t at all times at their greatest, and most of the guide’s most evocative (and politically salient) episodes concern the breakdown of communication alongside traces of gender, race, and sophistication, each inside Gran Fury and in its efforts to propagandize on behalf of individuals with AIDS. “That is additionally a narrative of civic rhetoric’s limitations,” Lowery insists. “Gran Fury embodies that too.”

Contemplate AIDS: 1 in 61. Produced within the first weeks of 1988 as an accompaniment to ACT UP’s protest of Cosmopolitan journal, which had lately revealed an article downplaying the danger of heterosexual HIV transmission, AIDS: 1 in 61 was a take a look at run for the group. Of their rejoinder to Cosmo, they paired a picture of a discarded doll (maybe symbolizing maternal misery) with the statistic that one in sixty-one infants born in New York Metropolis had been discovered to have HIV antibodies, confirming the truth of heterosexual transmission in addition to the racialization of the illness, which disproportionately bothered Black and Latinx New Yorkers. Glutted with fine-print info and mixing English- and Spanish-language textual content on a single sheet, AIDS: 1 in 61 “failed in each conceivable approach,” Lowery claims, noting that the poster could not have been accomplished on deadline, because it was not deployed on the Cosmo protest. However, the work occasioned Gran Fury’s first affirmation of collective objective, figuring out the group as “a band of people united in anger and dedicated to exploiting the facility of artwork to finish the AIDS disaster.”

Gran Fury’s members started to hit their stride round “9 Days of Rage,” a nationwide mobilization of ACT UP chapters within the spring of 1988. Working as an open committee, with completely different members pitching in on an advert hoc foundation, they contributed a number of posters to the Rage protests, every akin to a unique day’s demonstration. Echoing George H. W. Bush’s marketing campaign catchphrase, two variations of the poster Learn My Lips—one depicting smooching sailors, the opposite a pair of Nineteen Twenties-era vamps—marketed a kiss-in within the West Village. For a day of motion addressing the affect of AIDS on girls, Gran Fury focused its message at heterosexual males, juxtaposing a picture of an unsheathed erection with the slogans “SEXISM REARS ITS UNPROTECTED HEAD,” “MEN: USE CONDOMS OR BEAT IT,” and “AIDS KILLS WOMEN.” One other contribution paired the declaration “ALL PEOPLE WITH AIDS ARE INNOCENT” with a easy graphic of the caduceus, the official image of American medical apply.

A lot of Lowery’s evaluation issues the political usefulness of those designs, a few of that are deemed “smash hits,” others relegated to the class of “duds.” “What typically made Gran Fury so efficient,” he suggests,

was that scores of individuals would maintain the identical signal, put on the identical pin or don an identical T-shirts. Gran Fury’s Learn My Lips, a T-shirt of two kissing sailors produced to fight homophobia, is such an iconic picture solely as a result of ACT UP’s membership made it so ubiquitous. Shirts like this visually recognized ACT UP and gave ACT UP a visible cohesion. What a military positive factors from its uniform, ACT UP drew from Gran Fury.

Implicit in Lowery’s account of Gran Fury’s success is the desirability (actually: the erotic enchantment) of semiotic coherence and, accordingly, the undesirability of a garbled code. With Learn My Lips, the T-shirt marks the wearer as a solider (moderately, a sailor) for the trigger, but in addition as a person indistinguishable from the collective—therefore the message “READMY LIPS,” not “READ OUR LIPS.” Within the case of AIDS: 1 in 61, nevertheless, the poster’s illegibility additionally implies, and thus makes seen, ACT UP’s awkward negotiation of race, gender, class, and multilingualism inside the AIDS group in addition to its personal ranks. Tautologically elided in Learn My Lips, these axes of distinction had been unmediated and undisguised in AIDS: 1 in 61, and in different of Gran Fury’s clunkers as nicely, putting these initiatives below the signal of what Jack Halberstam calls “the queer artwork of failure”—a technique (it could even be a reflex) of aesthetic subversion that refuses to “acquiesce to dominant logics of energy” and that “acknowledges that alternate options are already embedded within the dominant and that energy is rarely whole or constant.”

Lowery didn’t got down to write a historical past of queer failure, however that’s what his guide delivers at its most consequential moments. A excessive level within the guide’s narrative—additionally it is a nadir of types—happens within the winter of 1990, throughout a protracted marketing campaign to induce the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention (CDC) to incorporate signs skilled by girls within the medical definition of AIDS. At this level, Gran Fury—now a closed group autonomous from ACT UP—had begun to make good on its promise to “exploit the facility of artwork to finish AIDS,” seizing the bully pulpit of the 1990 Venice Biennale, the place its agitprop set up, dubbed “The Pope Piece,” attracted censorship threats from curatorial officialdom, the Italian legislature, and even the Vatican. After getting back from Europe, Gran Fury started work on a brand new undertaking, Girls Don’t Get AIDS, They Simply Die from It, commissioned by the Museum of Up to date Artwork, Los Angeles, in partnership with New York’s Public Artwork Fund to be put in at a whole bunch of bus shelters in each cities. As backdrop forthe poster’s paradoxical slogan, Gran Fury was contemplating a photograph of a magnificence queen pageant, the concept being to hyperlink “the obsoletion of this picture [of femininity] with the obsoletion of the CDC’s definition of AIDS,” per McCarty. Nonetheless, the purpose was shortly raised that the photograph’s three swimsuit-clad contestants had been white, whereas the poster’s important viewers of working-class Angelenos was prone to be majority brown and Black. When one member insisted that race was irrelevant to the poster’s message, Vazquez-Pacheco—an activist of Puerto Rican descent and Gran Fury’s lone member of shade—informed the group “I’m executed” and stop in frustration.

For Gran Fury, Girls Don’t Get AIDS, They Simply Die from It marked a low level. It was, in impact, the start of the top, aggravating pent-up frustrations that portended the collective’s disintegration in 1995. For ACT UP’s functions, nevertheless, Girls Don’t Get AIDS, They Simply Die from It proved extra useful than dangerous. The poster lent clout to the CDC marketing campaign, marking it as a particular precedence, and Gran Fury’s phrases featured centrally in a Girls’s Caucus protest at CDC headquarters in December 1990, printed on yellow sashes in a callback to the sweetness pageant photograph. A video nonetheless reproduced in It Was Vulgar and It Was Lovely reveals a gaggle of Black girls on the CDC protest brandishing an array of placards, together with one emblazoned with the Gran Fury slogan: a picture of propaganda in motion. But the scene visibly contradicts the beliefs of “civic rhetoric” and militaristic message-discipline: Standing at proper, a protestor sporting a Gran Fury sash and pink triangle hat affords a slogan of her personal, scrawled on a home made poster: “FUCK THE CDC – WOMEN ARE DYING.” The poster’s design, like its message, is as vulgar as they arrive—a far cry from Gran Fury’s skilled branding. However what it lacks aesthetically, it makes up for in authenticity. This too, I wish to say, is what democracy seems to be like.

Within the guide’s final pages, Lowery presses his case for Gran Fury’s ongoing salience, revisiting the query of artwork’s pandemic-fighting powers:

I believe what’s now wanted, greater than science, is figure like that of Gran Fury, work that adjustments minds and shapes folks’s attitudes. We’d like extra than simply campaigns to encourage vaccination. We’d like work that addresses the underlying causes for why so many individuals proceed to refuse a public well being measure that’s confirmed to be efficient and secure. We’d like photos that higher folks’s relationship to science, that mould their sense of civic duty, that higher form their concepts of freedom and selection.

Shifting focus from AIDS to Covid-19, Lowery right here requires one thing much less like civic rhetoric and extra like governmental public relations, speaking dangers and duties to the unvaccinated. Whereas in keeping with liberal discourse, this sentiment is difficult to sq. with Gran Fury’s politics. It misses the purpose of their tireless haranguing of establishments just like the CDC and FDA, in addition to the drug producer Burroughs Wellcome, which the collective accused of profiteering and homicide—“your malignant neglect KILLS”—in its 1988 Wall Avenue Cash marketing campaign. Covid has made heroes of those villains, however it has hardly diminished the necessity for protest. Within the US, the CDC’s shortening of its advisable interval of self-isolation has needlessly endangered staff whereas benefitting employers; its rush to scrap masks mandates and social distancing dangers making casualties of the immunocompromised. Globally, the inequitable distribution of mRNA vaccines has left a lot of the world’s inhabitants uncovered to reinfection, all however guaranteeing the emergence of novel virus strains. As Jason Stanley reminds us, efficient activist propaganda “share[s] the angle of a gaggle whose perspective has been made invisible, thereby stopping democracy; civic rhetoric is the device required within the service of repairing the rupture.” If we be taught something from Gran Fury, it must be to respect this rupture, wherever it seems—and to ask, at each flip, whose well being counts as public.

— Daniel Marcus