Matt Wolf, stills from Smalltown Boys, 2003; image source
Join Visual AIDS on World AIDS Day for an exciting new video program of shorts and night of camaraderie with other artists and conversation with some of the videomakers:
Screening HIV: New(ish) Film/Video Considering HIV and the AIDS Pandemic
Curated by Visual AIDS
World AIDS Day (December 1, 2005) 7:00-9:00 PM
Artists Space
38 Greene Street (Between Broome and Grand) 3rd Floor
Snacks and drinks.
FREE
What is the efficacy of art as activism? How is AIDS activism transformed by art and vice versa? What happens as we romanticize, historicize, and realize the response of organized queer activism to the pandemic and the effects of AIDS on the arts communities? An intergenerational group of artists present a jumping off point for conversations in the territory between art and AIDS.
SCREENINGS:
Charles Lum
Overdue Conversation, 2004, 10:00
Derek Jackson
Cruiser (3rd draft), 2004, work-in-progress, 10:59
Jim Hubbard
United in Anger: A History of Act UP. "Stop The Church Action", 2005, Trailer, 11:30
----intermission----
John Greyson
Motet for Zackie and Pils Slip, 2004, 10:00
Matt Wolf
Smalltown Boys, 2003, 21:00
Charles Lum
black (n, adj.), 2004, 3:30
A confrontational work that addresses AIDS with a new tactic Overdue Conversation attempts to de-objectify the documentary interview by triangulating the audience between two individual video perspectives. By eliminating both camera crew and cross cutting, each subject and every viewer become split-screen equals as participants, witness, and editor in this candid video confrontation over sexual truthfulness. Placed between the players, the camcorder/audience observes both deceptions and decisions made on issues concerning personal vs. public freedoms, privacy, HIV disclosure, legal accountability and sexual dynamics. Adapted from a video installation, this short suggests a new paradigm for reality TV. As HIV mutates and proliferates like so many video cam accoutrements, new, still overdue dialogues will look much more like this.
Cruiser (3rd Draft) is a single-channel version of a multiyear work-in-progress. Built as a visual and sound collage of parsed, furtive, and consensual encounters between the artist and other men cruising Brooklyn's Prospect Park, the experimental piece nonetheless reveals a pointed narrative about anonymous sex, disclosure, and love among brothers.
United in Anger: A History of ACT UP will present a comprehensive history of ACT UP, showing the great range of its successes transforming the medical, social and political environments around AIDS. The trailer centers on the Stop the Church action, ACT UP's most infamous demonstration. On December 10, 1989, at least 7,000 people allied with ACT UP and WHAM (Women's Health Action Mobilization) demonstrated at and inside St. Patrick's Cathedral against the AIDS and anti-abortion policies of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church used its political power to prevent safe-sex education in the public schools and, through its system of hospitals and hospices, profited from the AIDS crisis. The demonstration drew international press attention and significantly increased the membership of ACT UP. ACT UP's creative political strategy emerged, in part, from the mass illness and death in the lives of its members. This intimate aspect is exemplified in the trailer in the discussion around the role of and the deep emotions felt about Ray Navarro, the late videomaker and activist.
John Greyson's collaboration with composer David Wall is the result of their interest in "video-izing opera." Two of the seven pieces that make up the opera installation Fig Trees are presented in tonight's program. Motet for Zackie consists of twenty, simultaneous vocal lines. The story revolves around Zackie Achmat, a leading AIDS activist and current Chair of Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa who undertook a treatment strike, refusing to take his AIDS medications until they are made widely available to all South Africans. Libretto to "Staircase Motet" reads: In which Zackie is courted on a staircase by an alphabet of composers who wish to render his story in song. Pils Slip is a perfect musical palindrome, which reads the same way (musically, lyrically, visually) backwards and forwards: "No devil is as selfless as I lived on." Libretto reads: In which Zackie Achmat and Nathan Cameron illegally import the generic drug Biozole from Thailand, and suffer private doubts about their pills [Greyson's Authors Libretto Notes: Nathan Cameron is an amalgam of Nathan Geffen, National coordinator for Treatment Action Coalition, and Judge Edwin Cameron, gay/AIDS activist and sitting judge on the Appeal Court. Being adventurous souls, I trust they won't mind occupying each other's bodies…]
The historical relationship between AIDS activist artist David Wojnarowicz and Sarah Rosenberg, a fictional teenage lesbian from New York's Upper West Side are imagined in the experimental documentary, Smalltown Boys. The year is 1994 and as Sarah fights to save the television show My So-Called Life from cancellation, David has died amid the fury of culture wars and an aggressive AIDS activist movement. These overlapping biographies consider generational politics and the relevance of activism in contemporary America.
black (n, adj.) places Microsoft Word's Dictionary definitions of the word "black" over dance floor footage and a two-camera conversation with performance artist EggMan at the infamous Black ('circuit') Party in New York. A video about sub-cultures, behavior and the flexibility of definition, black (n, adj.) weaves through a verbal dialogue of unsafe sexual activities from a context where such behavior is normative. The definitions invite the superimposition of an AIDS fearing political climate of viral hysteria over the opposite context of uninhibited sexual license.
Matt Wolf, stills from Smalltown Boys, 2003; image source
Join Visual AIDS on World AIDS Day for an exciting new video program of shorts and night of camaraderie with other artists and conversation with some of the videomakers:
Screening HIV: New(ish) Film/Video Considering HIV and the AIDS Pandemic
Curated by Visual AIDS
World AIDS Day (December 1, 2005) 7:00-9:00 PM
Artists Space
38 Greene Street (Between Broome and Grand) 3rd Floor
Snacks and drinks.
FREE
What is the efficacy of art as activism? How is AIDS activism transformed by art and vice versa? What happens as we romanticize, historicize, and realize the response of organized queer activism to the pandemic and the effects of AIDS on the arts communities? An intergenerational group of artists present a jumping off point for conversations in the territory between art and AIDS.
SCREENINGS:
Charles Lum
Overdue Conversation, 2004, 10:00
Derek Jackson
Cruiser (3rd draft), 2004, work-in-progress, 10:59
Jim Hubbard
United in Anger: A History of Act UP. "Stop The Church Action", 2005, Trailer, 11:30
----intermission----
John Greyson
Motet for Zackie and Pils Slip, 2004, 10:00
Matt Wolf
Smalltown Boys, 2003, 21:00
Charles Lum
black (n, adj.), 2004, 3:30
A confrontational work that addresses AIDS with a new tactic Overdue Conversation attempts to de-objectify the documentary interview by triangulating the audience between two individual video perspectives. By eliminating both camera crew and cross cutting, each subject and every viewer become split-screen equals as participants, witness, and editor in this candid video confrontation over sexual truthfulness. Placed between the players, the camcorder/audience observes both deceptions and decisions made on issues concerning personal vs. public freedoms, privacy, HIV disclosure, legal accountability and sexual dynamics. Adapted from a video installation, this short suggests a new paradigm for reality TV. As HIV mutates and proliferates like so many video cam accoutrements, new, still overdue dialogues will look much more like this.
Cruiser (3rd Draft) is a single-channel version of a multiyear work-in-progress. Built as a visual and sound collage of parsed, furtive, and consensual encounters between the artist and other men cruising Brooklyn's Prospect Park, the experimental piece nonetheless reveals a pointed narrative about anonymous sex, disclosure, and love among brothers.
United in Anger: A History of ACT UP will present a comprehensive history of ACT UP, showing the great range of its successes transforming the medical, social and political environments around AIDS. The trailer centers on the Stop the Church action, ACT UP's most infamous demonstration. On December 10, 1989, at least 7,000 people allied with ACT UP and WHAM (Women's Health Action Mobilization) demonstrated at and inside St. Patrick's Cathedral against the AIDS and anti-abortion policies of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church used its political power to prevent safe-sex education in the public schools and, through its system of hospitals and hospices, profited from the AIDS crisis. The demonstration drew international press attention and significantly increased the membership of ACT UP. ACT UP's creative political strategy emerged, in part, from the mass illness and death in the lives of its members. This intimate aspect is exemplified in the trailer in the discussion around the role of and the deep emotions felt about Ray Navarro, the late videomaker and activist.
John Greyson's collaboration with composer David Wall is the result of their interest in "video-izing opera." Two of the seven pieces that make up the opera installation Fig Trees are presented in tonight's program. Motet for Zackie consists of twenty, simultaneous vocal lines. The story revolves around Zackie Achmat, a leading AIDS activist and current Chair of Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa who undertook a treatment strike, refusing to take his AIDS medications until they are made widely available to all South Africans. Libretto to "Staircase Motet" reads: In which Zackie is courted on a staircase by an alphabet of composers who wish to render his story in song. Pils Slip is a perfect musical palindrome, which reads the same way (musically, lyrically, visually) backwards and forwards: "No devil is as selfless as I lived on." Libretto reads: In which Zackie Achmat and Nathan Cameron illegally import the generic drug Biozole from Thailand, and suffer private doubts about their pills [Greyson's Authors Libretto Notes: Nathan Cameron is an amalgam of Nathan Geffen, National coordinator for Treatment Action Coalition, and Judge Edwin Cameron, gay/AIDS activist and sitting judge on the Appeal Court. Being adventurous souls, I trust they won't mind occupying each other's bodies…]
The historical relationship between AIDS activist artist David Wojnarowicz and Sarah Rosenberg, a fictional teenage lesbian from New York's Upper West Side are imagined in the experimental documentary, Smalltown Boys. The year is 1994 and as Sarah fights to save the television show My So-Called Life from cancellation, David has died amid the fury of culture wars and an aggressive AIDS activist movement. These overlapping biographies consider generational politics and the relevance of activism in contemporary America.
black (n, adj.) places Microsoft Word's Dictionary definitions of the word "black" over dance floor footage and a two-camera conversation with performance artist EggMan at the infamous Black ('circuit') Party in New York. A video about sub-cultures, behavior and the flexibility of definition, black (n, adj.) weaves through a verbal dialogue of unsafe sexual activities from a context where such behavior is normative. The definitions invite the superimposition of an AIDS fearing political climate of viral hysteria over the opposite context of uninhibited sexual license.