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可见症状的一种特权手段。一方面，大众传播媒介和医学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，有症状的酷儿身体的照片给艺术家、活动家和艺术历史评论家提供了一种关于失去、死亡和疾病的威胁性视觉语言，以倡导医疗保健和反对美国政府对持续健康危机的忽视的政治抵抗。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，以结束对血清阳性人群的污名化，并将其对酷儿心理健康的影响置于背景下，但摄影作为一种心理社会治疗形式对酷儿艺术家处理艾滋病毒/艾滋病的重要性却很少得到承认。该项目考虑了五位摄影师，他们的生活和作品——尽管被HIV感染所引起的悲伤、创伤和焦虑所标记——被排除在艾滋病视觉历史之外，以分析将人体从艾滋病危机的照片表现中分离出来的社会不稳定和治疗潜力。吉米·迪萨纳（Jimmy DeSana）拍摄的笨拙的无机假肢；史蒂文·阿诺德的原始梦境；大卫·拉查佩尔的营地天使意象；瑞安·麦克金利（Ryan McGinley）描绘年轻人融入环境的肖像；Paul Sepuya的照片拼贴画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的意象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，超现实主义摄影在20世纪80年代初的美国多次展览中被重新发现，它不仅抛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式，而且为这些艺术家提供了一种可能的方式来应对艾滋病和社会落差对他们心理健康的负面影响。这些作品超越了非人类形象（天使、环境、无机、动物和宇宙形象）所构成的幻想（超现实）现实，将自己与人类生物学划清界限，试图在人类中心主义、艾滋病毒感染、艾滋病疾病和随之而来的污名化等死亡术语之外重新定义酷儿体验。这些艺术家“用光感动人”（LaChapelle, 2018）和创造“生活隐喻”（Arnold, 1990）的共同意图，既支持了他们对疾病的负面表征的否认，也支持了他们作品的心理抚慰目的。巴塔耶（Bataille, 1949）、德勒兹和加塔里（Deleuze and Guattari, 1972）的反人道主义著作是分析治疗与这些艺术家脱离人类体现之间关系的关键，它们为视觉文化想象超越人类生产系统的社会舒适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）的最新理论进行了交流，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认知结构之外，将酷儿对艾滋病污名和同性恋恐惧症的反应置于语境中。这些都与Coleman（1979）将照片作为客观文件的问题化相结合，特别是在艾滋病毒/艾滋病的背景下（Crimp, 2002）。将这些作品与相对较少使用的档案材料相结合，该项目揭示了超现实主义和非文件化在正在进行的艾滋病毒/艾滋病流行的视觉历史中的相关性，并将最近的酷儿治疗作为进一步研究的起点。

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.