i wrote this essay for a class last semester re: life stage psychology. i find much of the art created during the terminal apex of the aids pandemic to be both fascinating and strikingly overlooked. a piece by the nytimes wrote that a lot of the art during this period was bad. WRONG!!! although this essay focuses on (and kind of fails) at integrating life stage psychology into the aids crisis, it does capture a lot of my thoughts on the art during this time. it is primarily about david wojnarowicz and derek jarman, although i really wanted to write about herve guibert who is one of my top 10 writers. truthfully, i hate wojnarowicz's paintings - his writing is so much better. but that's besides the point. this essay may end up becoming part of a different project, but this is how i got started:

****

Love is Life That Lasts Forever:

Art, Dying, Grief, and Humanity in the Shadow of the AIDS Crisis

Peter

Keith Haring, Unfinished Painting, 1989.

Do you believe that art can change the world?

The outline of a man with a hollow center clings with outstretched arms to the corner of the painting, never quite touching the surface. To his right and below him, two figures anchor their feet to the edges. Their heads unravel into the rest of the painting, weaving into one another like a tapestry greater than themselves - or would, if not for the fact that the rest of it was left unfinished. The muted purple of the world they inhabit is severed like a torn page, cut off mid-sentence as wet paint is dragged down by gravity to the bottom of the canvas.

The viewer is expected to understand that this choice was artistic, even theatrical. Although Keith Haring had a year left before he succumbed to his illness, he would leave this painting intentionally incomplete to represent the body of work that he and many others like him would never have the chance to complete.

Haring was only 30 when he died, a year younger than myself. In terms of legacy, his paintings have now surpassed his lifetime. And with him would go the loss of his peers, his taste, his thinking, and everything that came along with it. There were certainly problems with his work. Was his style truly his own or an act of appropriation? He would never stand to answer any questions or be held accountable, and I have always felt that this is part of the great loss that the AIDS pandemic brought onto our community: that for all the people who died, not only were their triumphs lost but their mistakes, their inconsistencies, their foibles, all glossed away underneath their commercial value held at Sotheby’s auctions.

When you look at a Haring, you don’t have to think about these questions most of the time. You can simply enjoy the image. For all that a work of art is accessible, it also shows its weakness: its capacity to be exploited towards the whims of others.

At the same age Haring completed this painting, I sat on the couch in my living room pretending to do my job. The executives at my marketing agency had become intoxicated by the idea of generative AI - we were encouraged to explore and discover any and all ways it could enhance our work. I was a content strategist. My role was to create informative assets that would encourage executives to purchase expensive products that would deliver value to their organizations. Much like I don’t believe that the preceding sentence holds any meaning, I truly did not believe in my job. But I asked the right questions at the right time, presented well in front of clients, and created meaningless documentation to fabricate my billable hours. I was a “creative” in a world where art was becoming content. I knew my marketing career was in twilight.

Every all-hands meeting held the pallor of a wake. Our CEO would log on to the video chat, pontificating bold proclamations of our company’s future. After the second of three rounds of layoffs I would outmaneuver, he and the chief technology officer cheerfully demonstrated the power of artificial intelligence. Haring’s art filled our screens, and thanks to the power of technology, his legacy and painting were now complete. This was a fact that we were encouraged to celebrate and utilize during our working hours.

“Unfinished art completed by AI”, 2023.

Squint long enough, and the painting looks good enough: purple paint covers the canvas from end to end. But there was no canvas, and there was no paint - only pixels on a monitor filled in by an inhuman hand. Where once lines met each other, they now end abruptly in space. The shapes of bodies attach like a lazily assembled chimera, torso upon torso, heads collapsing beneath extraneous limbs. The image is not an abstraction of a lived reality, but a technical demonstration of a tool designed to benefit executives. Critique offered online doesn’t question the intention, but the execution: Start a manual image, but guide the AI to procedurally fill patterns where and how specified. Control nets in stable diffusion.

I am writing about a history and a generation of gay artists lost twice to the AIDS crisis and a history that left them behind, what they fought for, and what they left behind. Their demographic was not the only victim to the ignorance of politicians, religious organizations, and healthcare systems willfully ignorant to their plight, but through their actions and their allies, they were arguably the loudest and have left behind a legacy that deserves to withstand data corrosion.

On July 3, 1981, the New York Times published the first article on what was soon to be called Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID). Evidenced by the rapid emergence of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, the symptoms were unusual in that rather than appearing on the legs, purple blotches would appear anywhere on the body. Spread primarily through anal intercourse, the illness had already infected tens of thousands of gay men by the time the first article had been published.

Given its prevalence primarily among homosexuals, the illness was ignored by the Reagan administration in critical years when public health interventions could have significantly altered the course of the disease, and was touted by Christian fundamentalists as the “gay plague” - an illness of righteous retribution against sodomy. Three years later, this narrative quickly changed when Ryan White, a hemophiliac 13-year old, was diagnosed with the illness after a blood transfusion. Stigma quickly evolved into panic: a lack of education and understanding of the disease resulted in many parents protesting White’s return to the school after his diagnosis. It became clear that GRID wasn’t exclusive to homosexual behavior, and that the problem was getting much, much worse. It soon took on its more clinically accurate name: Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), eventually progressing into Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Until the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first protease inhibitor in June of 1995, no effective treatments for the disease were available.

HIV/AIDS most significantly impacted the queer community, yet they were not alone in their plight. Racial minorities, sex workers, and injection drug users were also disproportionately impacted by the disease, followed by children born to infected mothers and hemophiliacs receiving contaminated blood transfusions. It affected and continues to affect people of every age, race, gender, and creed. This essay documents the late works of painter and writer David Wojnarowicz, and director and filmmaker Derek Jarman, as they stood at the precipice of death and continued to create in spite of their illlness. Using their perspective, this essay will analyze their perspective of the illness from young and middle adulthood and how they sought to extend their life stories beyond the trauma of their abbreviated lives toward an uncertain future that could not contain them.

Although Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ work no longer bears the credibility it once had on studies of dying, she remains highly influential in the field thanks to her remarkable empathy towards those at the end of life. Notably, she reminds us that the dying are still alive, and often have unfinished business that they need to express. In creating their final works, these artists express rawness and beauty, offering works that celebrate their relationships in a world that sought to stigmatize and isolate them.

****

"“In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like. I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue or through my lips or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that’s like a cyclone, or something that’s like a flood, or something that’s like a weather system that’s out of control, that’s dangerous, that’s alarming. I hate language in this moment because it seems like so much bullshit.”

Cross Country Tape Journals, David Wojnarowicz, 1989.

David Wojnarowicz drove alone across the country with a tape recorder. He was beginning to die. A year earlier, his partner, the photographer Peter Hujar had passed away from complications of AIDS - the following spring, at the age of 33, Wojnarowicz was diagnosed with HIV. Now, at what should have been the height of his career, he saw himself at the end of the road. Unable to sit still in his New York apartment, he got into his car and took off west. As he drove, he spoke to himself in a monotone stream of thought.

“There’s gonna be a sun eclipse next Tuesday. They tell you you shouldn’t look into the sun or you’ll damage your eyes.” Marking the time with this statement, he pauses for a moment, seemingly disinterested by what he has just spoken. “When I think about it, talking into this machine, as usual I get incredibly self-conscious, but all I can think of to talk about is my anxieties. Maybe if I can talk through my anxieties, I can break through to something else, and if I don’t break through to something else it doesn’t matter. At least that’s the mood I’m in.”

Spanning mediums including acrylic, spray paint, photography, sound, and text, Wojnarowicz’s work is best marked by his use of collage. Everything serves as a conduit for meaning in his work, and nothing exists in isolation. Many of his visual works superimpose images on top of others: St. Sebastian lying prostrate over dollar bills, pornography against images of war, medical diagrams floating above plants. Compositionally, they are often not beautiful to look at - they reflect a busy, preoccupied mind, forming a network of connections that aren’t always apparent. Through his recorded journals and writings, these threads become more coherent. Even grieving the loss of his lover, his own diagnosis, and the scale of death facing his community, Wojnarowicz’s mind crosses back to nature.

“All this emptiness, all this desolation sometimes feels like one great mirror held up to my own heart, my own mind, my own soul if you will. But I just feel very desolate, very sad, very anxious, a little bit scared. And the thing I keep thinking about is my own death, of not wanting to die, this incredible fear of dying, if I really think about it, if I think of sentences like, “Are you going to David’s funeral? Are you going to Wojnarowicz’s funeral?” I just freeze, because I think of myself lying inside of some plain box, or whatever form of burial I’ll one day have. It just makes me freeze. But right now I’m riding through all this beautiful landscape: it’s just scrub, brush, landscape, plains, and these brown, dark mountains in the distances covered in smog or smoke from the fireplaces this time of year. And big explosions of trees just suddently uttering out of the earth, uttering out of crevices in the earth. It's a feeling of winter, yet the sun is so warm.”

These reflections serve as a reminder that while he is beginning to die at the time of this recording, Wojnarowicz is still very much alive. For him, art, life, and politics were inextricable from one another. Even as he reflects on his tumultuous emotional state, his thoughts remain connected with the natural world around him and the people who inhabit it. This is further explored through recordings of cars passing by, bugs chirping at midnight, and observations of the people he meets and encounters. The incorporation of ambient sounds differentiate these logs from written, diaristic entries - the world is exposed behind his meandering thoughts without editing, rather than remaining isolated from reality on a page.

Wind (for Peter Hujar), David Wojnarowicz, 1987.

Street Kid, David Wojnarowicz, 1987.

His diagnosis offered a renewed sense of meaning to the work that he was producing - nearly all of his later work was oriented around the AIDS crisis. While he would spend several months travelling during 1989, he would also become increasingly active in art-activism activities on behalf of ACT-UP New York.

The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT-UP, was a grassroots campaign to raise awareness of AIDS in a media environment that had essentially silenced any mention of the illness. Rather than having a traditional power structure and hierarchy, activities were split into affinity groups that pursued activities including the direct action Wojnarowicz participated in. Alongside the artist Zoe Leonard, he formed an affinity group called the Candelabras which staged actions at demonstrations designed to raise awareness.

From this period, Wojnarowicz would produce one of his most visible contributions to mainstream queer culture: a jacket with appliqued letters on the back reading “If I die of AIDS, forget burial - just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.” Yet perhaps his most striking example of protest art came in his performance in “Silence = Death” in which his lips were sewn shut as he stares intently at the camera. “I think what I really fear about death is the silencing of my voice,” he commented later. “I feel this incredible pressure to leave something of myself behind.”

In the Handbook of Thanatology, care is taken to define the kind of work produced at the end of life. Many end-of-life theorists, including holocaust survivor and psychologist Viktor Frankl, attribute the meaning of life as linked to one’s work in addition to their loving relationships. Although the handbook connects this work to spiritual projects rather than artistic ones, both subjects are centered upon meaning-making, and there is little doubt that Wojnarowicz was intently focused on leaving behind a body of work that pushed beyond the visual realm of art to create work with utility. Symbolic immortality, posited as a means of overcoming the finality of death through contribution, here seems like the right definition and the wrong choice of words. Wojnarowicz’s later work abandons ego for purpose - there is no desire in his work to achieve fame or merit that outlives him. As he reveals in his tape journals, longevity was never a priority: “I don’t know how to take care of myself. I never learned how to take care of myself in the most obvious ways, and I’ve always gone on a level day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month survival.”

David Wojnarowitz passed away in 1992 at the age of 37. While his art remains a potent symbol of his generation and served to raise awareness, he spent his final years in self-doubt, anxiety, and grief. Renewed interest in his work comes from its power as legacy work, or as the handbook defines it, “a tool for clarifying the dimensions of the life that has been lived, and of discovering the aspects of the self that is left for others.” The two defining features of these projects are communicating meaning and valued connections, which are shared with spirituality but without the metaphysical underpinnings lying beneath it. This distinction is important insomuch as by creating a saint out of Wojnarowicz, we fail to recognize the humanity and imagination that guided his life.

The Jacket, David Wojnarowicz, 1988.

Silence = Death, David Wojnarowicz, 1989.

Hanya Yanagihara, writing for the Whitney’s 2018 exhibition of Wojnarowicz’s work, cautions: “When we make artists into martyrs, we stop their movement and affix them to a sheet of paper, rendering them immobile.” Across his art, Wojnarowicz never pretends to be anything more than human. While his mind wandered restlessly across mediums and formed unpredictable points of connection, it was his final works that narrowed his lens towards a definite point: direct action. Yet even in this work, he lays raw his humanity.

David fretted over the idea of his funeral, envisioning his body silently encased in a plain box and imagining what others might think. His funeral was anything but quiet. After his death, members of ACT-UP paced the streets of the East Village carrying a banner: “DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, 1954-1992, DIED OF AIDS DUE TO GOVERNMENT NEGLECT.” Four years later, his ashes were spread on the lawn of the White House.

****

With the advent of antiretroviral therapy, the legalization of gay marriage, and large-scale acceptance of homosexuality, it can be easy to forget just how different the social landscape was three decades ago. I consider myself blessed to live in a city and a time where I am barely marginalized, and also to have befriended older queer people who experienced and survived this earlier period. Even as the world erodes around me, I think how lucky I am to have been born precisely in 1993. Late enough to prosper during COVID-19, young enough to benefit from the work done before me. Lucky, even when it doesn’t feel like it. Lucky in a doomed world.

In 1990, an article titled “Experiencing Multiple Loss of Persons With AIDS: Grief and Bereavement Issues” was published in Health & Social Work. While many of the ideas around loss, owing much to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, now come across as dated, it is filled with useful historical context that is worth acknowledging even at the moments in which it is questionable.

The researchers used a case study approach to analyze seven individuals experiencing multiple loss of persons with AIDS, attempting to catalogue the grief experience for the queer community. Not only did the queer community have to navigate the reality of an illness that primarily targeted them, but also had to do so in a society in which family, friends, and other loved ones might abandon them for their sexual orientation. “For members of the gay and lesbian community experiencing multiple loss of people with AIDS, the issue of resolving grief is complicated by two factors. The first relates to society's inability and unwillingness to accept the gay identity, the importance of the loss of a gay significant other, and the consequent legitimate sense of loss the individual feels when a significant other dies from AIDS. The second factor relates to the exacerbation of grief induced by repetitive loss over a brief time period.”

While the first factor has been widely acknowledged, it is this second factor that I feel history has chosen to overlook. My personal relationships mean as much to me as my family - how could I stay sane in a world in which everyone I loved was dying around me? The term “bereavement overload” was originally used to refer to an experience among the elderly where many friends’ deaths occur within a short time span. To experience this as a young adult in a specific community adds a layer of context that I feel has been overlooked by history at large. Compounded by the first factor, that queer individuals were often rejected by traditional support systems, people dying from AIDS often found themselves alone. Survivors were rejected the process of grieving - the love of two people might not be acknowledged as legitimate. This took on a very material reality when lovers were barred from funerals by direct family, were dismissed from intensive care units as their partners were dying, and were denied the financial benefits of marriage.

For young adults, intimate relationships are crucial for their stage of life-cycle development. Shunned by society at large, an HIV diagnosis could act as a forced “coming out” at a time when support is needed most, threatening familial bonds, friendships, and career prospects. For Wojnarowicz, the loss of his partner and his own HIV diagnosis caused him to re-evaluate his position in life and the art world, ultimately ushering him into his most recognized artistic period. Through the broader community and organizations like ACT-UP, he was able to establish new close relationships while embarking on a process of meaning-making.

This path was not available for everyone. Reid, an HIV-positive individual included in the case study, said that he had known at least 50 people who had died from AIDS, with eight of them being in his immediate support system. He could only say goodbye to three of them. He spent most of his time caring for others and had little time to grieve, for as soon as one died he moved to take care of another.

While Reid was involved in activist work, he did not gain a sense of community from it. “Reid felt that his support system had disintegrated because all his friends had died. He had worked in an AIDS organization that helps patients learn to empower themselves. Many patients looked to him for guidance, yet he refused to get close to them. He did not feel free to lean on any of them for support, because he knew that they too would be dying soon.”

Close relationships are one of the most important assets for young adults at the end of life. While grassroots organizations were able to provide queer individuals with a sense of purpose and legacy throughout the AIDS crisis, the experience of mass death in a community placed them in a situation that many do not experience until they reach old age. The experience of loss of community, especially close friends, is reflected in much of the work produced by queer individuals during this period.

Wojnarowicz’s legacy work was impressed with the immediacy of his youth, a life cut short in its prime. For older gay men diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, the focus of relationships remains a priority, yet also centers around generativity and legacy. This is apparent in the later work of filmmaker, artist, and author Derek Jarman, whose late work emphasizes not only the historicity of gay life, but his place within it.

****

I’m walking along the beach in a howling gale. Another year is passing. In the roaring waters, I hear the voices of dead friends. Love is life that lasts forever. My heart’s memory turns to you:

David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul.

But what if this present were the world’s last night? In the setting sun, your love fades, dies in the moonlight, fails to rise, thrice denied by cock crow in the dawn’s first light.

Look left

Look down

Look up

Look right

The camera flash, atomic bright, photos the CMV: a green moon, then the world turns magenta. My retina is a distant planet, Red Mars from a Boy’s Own comic with yellow infection bubbling at the corner. I said, “This looks like a planet.” The doctor says, “Oh, I think it looks like a pizza.”

Blue, Derek Jarman, 1993.

By the time Derek Jarman was finishing his final film, Blue, he had already gone blind. “If I lose half my sight, will my vision be halved?” This did not stop him from creating - the movie, a continuous shot of a blue field, consists entirely of a monologue on his reflections at the end of life. Stippled with his trademark bravado, it is a message from an older generation of gay men to those who would outlive him.

Born in 1942, Jarman was part of a generation of queer artists creating radical work in the post-war years including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, David Hockney, and Andy Warhol. Like his contemporaries, he shared a fascination with history inflected by pop sensibilities. In Jubilee, Queen Elizabeth I is transported to a postmodern, punk rock dystopia by an occult ritual. Sebastiane and Caravaggio present two gay biopic dramas set hundreds of years back. Wittgenstein, another late film, chronicles the life of the eponymous philosopher of logic and language as he attempts to make sense of a world that cannot make sense of him. But if these films trace the issues that interested him, Blue presents his most comprehensive and autobiographical statement on the disease that would kill him.

“I shall not win the battle against the virus,” Jarman says, “In spite of the slogans like ‘Living with AIDS’. The virus was appropriated by the well, so we have to live with AIDS while they spread the quilt for the moths of Ithaca across the wine-dark sea.” Touching on everything from illness, medication, memory, history, and love, we are brought into his field of vision that has been distilled into a single color: Yves Klein Blue.

Like Wojnarowicz, Jarman’s work is focused on legacy. He stylized himself as an artist preoccupied with the fancier things in life, the classics, and beauty - aspects that lie contrary to the work of Wojnarowicz. However, he wasn’t merely creating art for art’s sake, even if the work he created was more flamboyant - he was one of the few openly public figures living with the disease, and actively opposed Section 28, a Thatcher-era piece of legislation that is not unlike today’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida. Modern Nature, a collection of diaries written soon after Jarman’s diagnosis, helps illustrate some of the differences between his and Wojnarowicz’s generations.

At the age of 44, having received his HIV diagnosis, Derek Jarman purchased a cottage off the shores of Dungeness, Kent. The location was desolate - flat, arid, and whipped by harsh winds, the home was adjacent to a nuclear power plant. He saw no issue. It was here that he would plant a magnificent garden, the primary subject of his diaries. Reading it, it is hardly apparent that he is ill at all until well after he presents several dozen pages of observations on rosemaries, poppies, daffodils, and nasturtium.

In the second half, his disease can no longer be idled away by distractions. His focus turns from the present to the past. He examines early loves, the art world (which Wojnarowicz was much more averse to), and the work he is creating in his final years. Reading Modern Nature is less a manifesto or treatise and more a review of his life and the world as he sees it. And while a calmness radiates throughout the book and his observations, the disease gradually comes to dominate his waking thoughts, keeping him confined to the bed.

As much of his later work serves as a document to his declining health, Jarman exhibits a high degree of generativity - both public and private. Five of his eleven films were created throughout six-year span of his illness, in addition to four short films, five music videos, and four novels. Throughout all of this, he continued to tend his garden.

Blue was released four months before Jarman’s death in 1994 at the age of 52. Supplemented by inheritance and success in his career, he had many of the resources to “die well” even as many of his friends, colleagues, and lovers succumbed to AIDS. But it is challenging to call any death good when it was preventable. Like Reagan, Thatcher’s administration worked actively to suppress messaging around AIDS. In his later work and with nothing to lose, Jarman worked tirelessly to push against this agenda, creating beautiful and meaningful work that is as powerful as it is uplifting.

Having passed later in life than Wojnarowicz and with more material support, Jarman’s work takes a lighter tone even as it delves into the same territory of death. We tend to attribute deaths in the middle of life as less tragic than those who die young - even as we see their passing as premature, we do not see them as unjust. While at greater peace than Wojnarowicz, Jarman felt the injustice of his death acutely. Not only does this account for his prolific art-making in his final years, but his acute focus on queer issues. Death is pervasive in his final films, with the deathbed a potent symbol in many of them. That he is able to combine this finality with humor is astonishing - and another factor that separates his work from younger artists navigating the end-of-life.

****

During the AIDS epidemic, art acted as more than just an expression of aesthetics or beauty - it was a tool that carried political influence, something that those who bore witness could derive a sense of meaning, empowerment, and education. Herve Guibert’s photography and his public mourning of his friend and lover Michel Foucault. Gran Fury, a collective of commercial artists who designed the pink triangle. The video artists who helped publicize the initiatives of ACT-UP New York and drew attention to the plight of millions who would have otherwise gone ignored. I wanted to write more about Jarman. This is a rough draft. I could go on.

I began this essay reflecting on a painting by Keith Haring and the urge to complete it. We want happy endings - to indulge in the fantasy rather than to look at the man behind the curtain. Haring’s work indulges in maximalism: filling murals or spaces with his patterns to the brim to the visual delight of onlookers. Yet it is the negative space of his painting that makes it so enthralling and disturbing. It is incomplete.

In 2021, my favorite musician, SOPHIE, fell to her death during an entirely separate pandemic while climbing the roof to gaze at the full moon. I remember the first time I heard her in 2013 and thinking, “this is the future of music.” I remember when Grimes said that it was “fucked up” that a man was using a woman’s name in 2015, and when she had to apologize publicly when SOPHIE came out as a trans woman two years later. I will never forget the morning I woke up at 3 AM to see a push notification that she had passed away.

I mention this to say that I believe that the best art is that which not only adds color to the edges of our lives, but wounds us when it is taken away too soon. I am skeptical of the notion that “representation matters.” Of course it does. But art is so much more than that. To cast artists like Wojnarowicz or Jarman as saints or martyrs denies them their humanity, their flaws, their mistakes. These were real humans with insurmountable problems creating work against systems that denied them life. They did not succumb to despair - they triumphed in the face of it, never knowing how their work would be received in their absence. Their work wasn’t just content but context. It remains alive long after they have died.

As companies seek to consolidate corporate interests through generative AI, creative autonomy is denied in favor of smooth, frictionless surfaces. Although I am not a fan of his work, completing Haring’s intentionally unfinished painting is a denial of history. If art has the potential to evoke, content is a desperate wallpaper furnishing blemishes with smiles. The queer artists I love never aimed at perfection, satisfaction, or commercial viability. They made strange things, sometimes ugly, sometimes pretty, always surprising. Their work did things: creating new visibility, building new histories, creating new noises, or making new images.

I am writing this two days after Donald Trump has been re-elected as president. I am disturbed and alarmed, but I am not surprised. Our voices matter, but our vision and our commitment to it is equally if not more important. I hate Donna Haraway’s credo that we must “imagine alternative futures.” Imagination leads to hopelessness without execution. The queer artists creating work in the wake of their diagnosis during the AIDS crisis present an example of how people of any age can work in the face of despair to create meaning and purpose. Maybe it can’t change the world, but in the sliver of life that is our world, making a difference is possible. It wouldn’t be the first time.