Until this dance is stopped: AIDS, Queer (Dis)appearance, and Artistic Strategies of Political (In)visibility, 1977-2000

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In 1993 Leo Bersani wrote: "Once we agreed to be seen, we also agreed to be policed." This statement suggests the necessity of re-assessing the representational crises unleashed by the formal outbreak of HIV/AIDS in 1981. Faced with public ignorance and political inaction, artist-activist groups such as ACT-UP and Gran Fury developed strategies for correcting ongoing misrepresentations of homosexuality in order to demand meaningful recognition. Such an articulation of "political visibility" has been greatly influential to the development of identity politics and its intersections with contemporary artistic practice. But how has this affected queerness? Indeed, existing scholarly work has begun to address the contingencies as well as the untapped possibilities of artist-activist responses to the epidemic. These analyses, in my opinion, haven't fully considered the late liberal political tradition's relationship to vision, knowledge, and subjecthood and how its terms have gridlocked critique. What does it mean to be seen, who is doing the looking, what are the risks of showing? In considering these questions, my project examines artistic positions from the late '70s to the end of the '90s that evoke what I term an aesthetics of the (in)visible and a politics of (dis)appearance. These include Larry Mitchell's novels The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (1977) and The Terminal Bar (1982), Derek Jarman's final feature film Blue (1993), and Terre Thaemlitz's digital audio productions, specifically the albums Love for Sale - Taking Stock in Our Pride (1999) and Interstices (2000). Rather than attempting to devise a proper or better representation of (homo)sexuality, these positions approach the specificity of queerness as both an incommunicable presence and a practice of disavowal. Within the pages of Mitchell's fictions, queer liberation is imagined as withdrawal, concealment, and refusal. His revolution involves "no movement and high invisible energy." How does this position come to terms with the annihilation set into motion by AIDS? For Jarman, the problem lies in the impossibility of language and the failure of the image. "Thinking blind, becoming blind...how are we perceived, if we are to be perceived at all? For the most part, we are invisible," he reflects, suggesting an iconoclastic exercise of attuning the senses to the (in)visible. Fast-forward to the "aftermath" of the crisis, Thaemlitz's work shifts the focus from the visible to the audible, "secretly encoded signals for those 'in the know.'" Sampling, distorting, and jamming the "lost" sounds of New York's house music undergrounds, her position tackles the blinding positivity of the queer "liberation model" and its wholesale commodification of sexual identity. These positions are unevenly distributed in time, localized in space, and formally varied as media. What they have in common, I propose, is a subject that cannot be shown or represented. Thus, they each reinterpret "political visibility" beyond its conventional equivocation with transparency, clarity, and exposure. Methodologically, to test this counter-narrative it is necessary to set up the wider cultural-political field surrounding each position. This will allow me to trace networks of association between places, people, ideas, and phenomena, so that I can address crucial differences and variations. Additionally, the project affords the composition of urgent oral histories, as many of its agents are still alive. The outcome of this project is twofold: (1) to discursively reconstitute radical concepts deployed on the margins of queer history and (2) to assemble these into a framework for queering late liberalism's entanglement of sovereignty, agency, and perspective. My question throughout is: how can an artistic position that complicates disappearance transform what is understood by political appearance, offering an other means for expressing the (in)visible persistence of difference?