A Crisis of Representation: Constructing an Epidemic -- Putting a Face to AIDS: Critiquing Documentary Photography -- Mark Morrisroe: A Grandiose Aesthetic Encounter -- Robert Blanchon: Abjection, 'Absence' and Autobiography -- Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Falling out of Time -- Epilogue: In/Visible: Picturing HIV in Endemic Time.
Summary:
"AIDS & Representation explores portraits and self-portraits made by artists 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 book's 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 the medical humanities sensitively unpicks the entanglements between aesthetic form and the expression of lived experiences of critical and chronic ill health"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.