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

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可见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宣传艾滋病毒/艾滋病危机的总体化和道德化叙述。另一方面，有症状的酷儿尸体的照片给艺术家、活动家和艺术史批评提供了一种威胁性的视觉语言，即损失、死亡和疾病，以倡导医疗保健和政治抵抗，反对美国政府对持续的健康危机的忽视。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-已经开始将艾滋病的酷儿经历与死亡和疾病脱钩，以结束对血清阳性者的污名化，并将其对酷儿心理健康的影响置于背景中，摄影作为一种心理社会治疗形式对同性恋艺术家处理艾滋病毒的重要性/艾滋病很少被认识到。这个项目考虑了五个摄影师的生活和工作，尽管有悲伤，创伤，和艾滋病毒感染引起的焦虑-已被排除在艾滋病视觉历史，以分析社会不稳定和治疗潜力的分散人体从照片-艾滋病危机的表现。吉米·德萨纳拍摄的笨拙的无机假肢;史蒂文·阿诺德的舞台原始梦境;大卫·拉夏贝尔的营地天使形象;瑞安·麦金利的青年融入环境的肖像;保罗·塞普亚（Paul Sepuya）的照片拼贴融合了工作室空间和支离破碎的黑色身体-所有这些作品都使用了超现实主义的意象，以避免通过有症状的身体来表现艾滋病的奇怪经历，并指出可能的应对机制，以安慰他们的心理健康20世纪世纪初的超现实主义摄影，在20世纪80年代初的美国多个展览中重新发现，不仅摒弃了摄影作为现实记录的想法，而是提出了描绘心理状态的可能方法，而且还为这些艺术家提供了一种可能的方式，通过艾滋病和社会贫困对他们的心理健康产生的负面影响。这些作品远离人类生物学，试图重新定义艾滋病毒感染，艾滋病疾病和随之而来的污名化的非人类中心，死亡的条款之外的酷儿体验。这些艺术家的共同意图是“用光感动人”（LaChapelle，2018）和创造“生活的隐喻”（阿诺德，1990年），支持他们否认疾病的负面表现和他们的作品的心理抚慰的目的。至关重要的是分析治疗和这些艺术家离开人类的体现是巴塔耶（1949年）的反人文主义的著作之间的关系。德勒兹和瓜塔里（1972），提供了一个关键的框架，视觉文化的能力，设想超越人类生产系统的社会舒适。我的研究还与Muñoz（2020），Barad（2015），Love（2016）和Haritaworn（2015）的最新理论进行了交谈，这些理论与残疾和假肢理论（Kim，2015; Lorenz，2012）交叉，通过将酷儿主体性定位在人类识别结构之外，将酷儿对艾滋病污名和同性恋恐惧症的反应置于情境中。这些都结合到科尔曼（1979）的问题的照片作为客观的文件，特别是在艾滋病毒/艾滋病的背景下（克里姆普，2002年）。配对这些著作与相对较少使用的档案材料，这个项目闪耀的超现实主义和非文件的相关性在视觉历史的艾滋病毒/艾滋病流行病和最近的酷儿治疗作为进一步调查的起点光。

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.