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

1993年，利奥·贝尔萨尼写道：“一旦我们同意被看到，我们也同意接受监管。”这一声明表明，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，以要求有意义的承认。这种“政治能见度”的表述对身份政治的发展及其与当代艺术实践的交叉产生了重大影响。但这又是如何影响怪癖的呢？事实上，现有的学术著作已经开始处理偶发事件以及艺术家活动家对流行病做出反应的未开发的可能性。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远见、知识和主体性的关系，以及它的术语如何陷入僵局的批评。被看到意味着什么，是谁在看，展示的风险是什么？在思考这些问题时，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(内)的美学和(不)外表的政治。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)和《终点站酒吧》(1982)，德里克·贾曼的最后一部故事片《蓝色》(1993)，以及Terre Thaemlitz的数字音频作品，特别是专辑《爱在我们的骄傲中盘点》(1999)和《空隙》(2000)。这些立场不是试图设计一种适当或更好的(同性恋)性表现，而是将同性恋的特殊性作为一种无法交流的存在和否认的实践。在米切尔的小说中，酷儿解放被想象为隐退、隐藏和拒绝。他的革命包含了“不动，高隐形能量”。这一立场是如何应对艾滋病引发的灭绝的？对于贾曼来说，问题在于语言的不可能性和形象的失败。“盲目地思考，变得盲目……如果我们真的要被感知，我们将如何被感知？”在很大程度上，我们是看不见的，“他反思道，暗示着一种打破传统的练习，将感官调谐到(在)可见的地方。快进到危机的“后果”，塞姆利茨的工作将焦点从可见转移到可听，“为那些‘知情人士’秘密编码信号。”她的立场是采样、扭曲和干扰纽约地下家庭音乐的“失落”声音，解决同性恋“解放模式”令人眼花缭乱的积极因素及其对性身份的大规模商品化。这些位置在时间上分布不均，在空间上局部化，在形式上也随媒介而变化。我认为，它们的共同之处是一个无法展示或表现的主题。因此，他们每个人都用透明、清晰和曝光的方式，超越了传统的模棱两可的说法，重新解释了“政治可见性”。在方法论上，为了检验这一反叙事，有必要围绕每个立场建立更广泛的文化-政治领域。这将使我能够追踪地点、人、思想和现象之间的联系网络，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合成，因为它的许多代理人仍然活着。这个项目的结果有两个：(1)论述地重新构建在酷儿历史边缘部署的激进概念，以及(2)将这些概念组装成一个框架，用于颠覆晚期自由主义对主权、中介和视角的纠缠。我自始至终的问题是：一个使消失复杂化的艺术立场如何改变人们对政治表象的理解，为表达差异的可见持久性提供另一种方式？

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?