Fantastic Refusals: Surrealist Imagery in American Queer Photographic Representations from the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

奇妙的拒绝：艾滋病流行期间美国酷儿摄影表现中的超现实主义意象

• 批准号: 2606097
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of York
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2606097
• 关键词: Fantastic; Refusals; Surrealist; Imagery; American

Since the early 1980s, photography has been a privileged means to document the visible symptoms of AIDS on the human body. On the one hand, this has been used by mass media and medicine to promulgate totalising and moralising narratives of the HIV/AIDS crisis. On the other hand, photographs of queer symptomatic bodies have given artists, activists, and art historical criticism a threatening visual language of loss, death, and illness to advocate for healthcare and for political resistance against the dismissal of an ongoing health crisis by the US government. Though more recent writings on HIV/AIDS-taking into consideration pharmaceutical advancements to lower HIV-related mortality and transmission-have begun to decouple queer experiences of AIDS from death and illness to end the stigmatisation of seropositive people and to contextualise its effects on queer mental health, the significance of photography as a form of psycho-social therapy for queer artists dealing with HIV/AIDS has seldom been recognised.This project considers five photographers whose life and works-despite being marked by grief, trauma, and anxiety arising from HIV contagion-have been excluded from AIDS visual histories in order to analyse the socially destabilising and therapeutic potential of decentring the human body from photo-representations of the AIDS crisis. Jimmy DeSana's photographs of clumsy, inorganic prostheses; Steven Arnold's staged primordial dreamscapes; David LaChapelle's camp angelic imagery; Ryan McGinley's portraits of youth merging into the environment; and Paul Sepuya's photocollages amalgamating studio space and fragmented black bodies-all these works use Surrealist imagery to avoid representing queer experiences of AIDS through symptomatic bodies and to indicate possible coping mechanisms to comfort their mental health. Early 20th century Surrealist photography, rediscovered in multiple exhibitions in the USA in the early 1980s, not only discards the idea of photography as a documentation of reality to suggest instead possible ways of depicting psychological states but also offers these artists a possible way of working through the negative effects that AIDS and social abjection have on their mental health.By transcending to fantastical (sur)realities populated by nonhuman figures-that is, angelic, environmental, inorganic, animal, and cosmic figures-these works distance themselves from human biology in their attempt to redefine queer experience outside the anthropocentric, death-bound terms of HIV contagion, AIDS illness, and ensuing stigmatisation. These artists' shared intention of "touching people with light" (LaChapelle, 2018) and of creating "metaphors for life" (Arnold, 1990) underpins both their disavowal of negative representations of illness and their works' psychically soothing purpose.Crucial to analyse the relationship between therapy and these artists' departure from human embodiment are the anti-humanist writings of Bataille (1949) and Deleuze and Guattari (1972), which provide a critical framework on visual culture's ability to envision societal comfort beyond human systems of production. My research also converses with recent theories by Muñoz (2020), Barad (2015), Love (2016), and Haritaworn (2015), which, intersecting with disability and prostheses theory (Kim, 2015; Lorenz, 2012), contextualise queer responses against AIDS stigma and homophobia by locating queer subjectivity outside structures of human recognition. These are combined to Coleman's (1979) problematisation of photographs as objective documents, especially in the context of HIV/AIDS (Crimp, 2002).Pairing these writings with relatively little-used archival materials, this project shines a light on the relevance of Surrealism and non-documentation in the visual histories of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic and recentres queer therapy as the starting point for further inquiries.

自 20 世纪 80 年代初以来，摄影一直是记录艾滋病在人体上的明显症状的一种特殊手段。一方面，大众媒体和医学界利用这一点来传播艾滋病毒/艾滋病危机的总体化和道德化叙事。另一方面，酷儿症状身体的照片为艺术家、活动家和艺术史批评提供了一种关于损失、死亡和疾病的具有威胁性的视觉语言，以倡导医疗保健和政治抵抗，反对美国政府忽视一场持续的健康危机。尽管最近关于艾滋病毒/艾滋病的著作——考虑到降低艾滋病毒相关死亡率和传播的药物进步——已经开始将酷儿艾滋病经历与死亡和疾病脱钩，以结束对血清反应呈阳性者的污名化，并将其对酷儿心理健康的影响置于背景中，但摄影作为处理艾滋病毒/艾滋病的酷儿艺术家的一种心理社会治疗形式的意义却很少被关注。 该项目考虑了五位摄影师的生活和作品——尽管他们的生活和作品充满了因艾滋病毒感染而产生的悲伤、创伤和焦虑——但他们被排除在艾滋病视觉历史之外，以便分析将人体从艾滋病危机的照片表现中去中心化所带来的社会不稳定和治疗潜力。吉米·德萨纳 (Jimmy DeSana) 拍摄的笨拙的无机假肢照片；史蒂文·阿诺德上演的原始梦境；大卫·拉切贝尔 (David LaChapelle) 的坎普天使形象；瑞安·麦克金利 (Ryan McGinley) 描绘的年轻人融入环境的肖像；保罗·塞普亚（Paul Sepuya）的照片拼贴将工作室空间和支离破碎的黑人身体融合在一起——所有这些作品都使用超现实主义图像来避免通过有症状的身体来表现艾滋病的酷儿经历，并表明可能的应对机制来安慰他们的心理健康。 20 世纪初的超现实主义摄影在 20 世纪 80 年代初在美国的多个展览中被重新发现，它不仅放弃了摄影作为现实记录的观念，转而提出了描绘心理状态的可能方式，而且还为这些艺术家提供了一种可能的方式来解决艾滋病和社会贫困对其心理健康造成的负面影响。 无机物、动物和宇宙人物——这些作品与人类生物学保持距离，试图在艾滋病毒传染、艾滋病疾病和随之而来的污名化等人类中心主义、死亡束缚的术语之外重新定义酷儿经历。这些艺术家“用光感动人”（LaChapelle，2018）和创造“生命隐喻”（Arnold，1990）的共同意图支撑着他们对疾病的负面表征的否认以及他们作品的心理抚慰目的。分析治疗与这些艺术家脱离人类体现之间的关系至关重要的是巴塔耶（Bataille，1949）和德勒兹的反人文主义著作和 Guattari (1972)，它为视觉文化设想超越人类生产系统的社会舒适度的能力提供了一个关键框架。我的研究还与 Muñoz (2020)、Barad (2015)、Love (2016) 和 Haritaworn (2015) 的最新理论进行了探讨，这些理论与残疾和假肢理论（Kim，2015；Lorenz，2012）相交叉，通过将酷儿主观性置于人类认知结构之外，将酷儿对艾滋病耻辱和恐同症的反应置于背景中。这些与科尔曼（Coleman，1979）将照片作为客观文献的问题化结合起来，特别是在艾滋病毒/艾滋病的背景下（克里姆普，2002）。将这些著作与相对较少使用的档案材料相结合，这个项目揭示了超现实主义和非文献记录在当前艾滋病毒/艾滋病流行的视觉历史中的相关性，并作为进一步调查的起点。