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

直到这支舞蹈停止：艾滋病、酷儿（不）外表和政治（不）可见性的艺术策略，1977-2000

• 批准号: 2251727
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Oxford
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2019 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2251727
• 关键词: Until; dance; stopped; AIDS; Queer

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?

1993年，Leo Bersani写道：“一旦我们同意被看到，我们也同意被监督。"这一发言表明，有必要重新评估1981年艾滋病毒/艾滋病正式爆发所引发的代表性危机。面对公众的无知和政治上的不作为，ACT-UP和Gran Fury等艺术家活动家团体制定了纠正对同性恋的持续歪曲的策略，以要求有意义的认可。这种“政治可见性”的表达对身份政治的发展及其与当代艺术实践的交叉产生了巨大的影响。但这对同性恋有什么影响呢？事实上，现有的学术工作已经开始解决突发事件以及艺术家-活动家应对流行病的未开发的可能性。在我看来，这些分析没有充分考虑晚期自由主义政治传统与愿景、知识和主体性的关系，以及它的术语如何阻碍了批评。被看到意味着什么，谁在看，展示的风险是什么？在考虑这些问题时，我的项目考察了从70年代末到90年代末的艺术立场，这些立场唤起了我所说的“可见”美学和“消失”政治。其中包括拉里·米切尔的小说《革命之间的同性恋和他们的朋友》（1977年）和《终点酒吧》（1982年），德里克·贾曼的最后一部故事片《蓝色》（1993年），以及特雷·泰姆利兹的数字音频作品，特别是专辑《爱在销售-在我们的骄傲中进行评估》（1999年）和《间隙》（2000年）。这些立场不是试图设计一个适当或更好的（同性恋）性行为的代表，而是接近酷儿的特殊性，因为它既是一种不可传达的存在，也是一种否认的做法。在米切尔的小说中，酷儿解放被想象为退缩、隐瞒和拒绝。他的革命涉及"没有运动和高无形的能量。"这一立场如何与艾滋病引发的毁灭达成协议？对贾曼来说，问题在于语言的不可能性和形象的失败。"盲目思考，盲目思考...如果我们真的要被感知的话，我们是如何被感知的？在大多数情况下，我们是看不见的，"他反映，建议一个偶像练习协调感官（在）可见的。快进到危机的“后果”，Thaemlitz的工作将焦点从可见的转移到可听的，“为那些知道的人秘密编码信号。采样，扭曲和干扰纽约的家庭音乐地下"失去"的声音，她的立场处理同性恋"解放模式"及其大规模商品化的性身份的盲目积极性。这些职位在时间上分布不均，在空间上局部化，并作为媒体形式多样。我认为，它们的共同点是一个无法展示或代表的主题。因此，他们每个人都重新诠释了“政治能见度”，超越了其传统的模糊性，具有透明度，清晰度和曝光度。在方法论上，为了检验这种反叙事，有必要围绕每一种立场建立更广泛的文化政治领域。这将使我能够追踪地方、人、思想和现象之间的关联网络，以便我能够解决关键的差异和变化。此外，该项目还提供了紧急口述历史的组成，因为它的许多代理人仍然活着。这个项目的结果是双重的：（1）话语重构部署在酷儿历史边缘的激进概念，（2）将这些整合到一个框架中，以解决后期自由主义对主权、机构和视角的纠缠。我的问题始终是：一个使消失复杂化的艺术立场如何能改变人们对政治表象的理解，提供另一种手段来表达（不）可见的差异的持久性？