Muses From Chaos and Ash

In a collection of interviews, individuals from the worlds of literature, film, theater, dance, music, and the visual arts--including Robert Mapplethorpe--discuss the effects of AIDS on their own artistic evolution and on the creative process. 15,000 first printing.

In a mosaic of interviews with 24 artistically creative people who are HIV-positive, have AIDS or have subsequently died from the disease, freelance journalist Vaucher maps uncharted emotional territory. Interviewees include painters Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz, writers Larry Kramer and Paul Monette, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, novelists Edmund White and Bo Huston and filmmaker Marlon Riggs, along with other poets, playwrights, performers, designers and choreographers. For many, HIV infection served to heighten their anger and despair, unlock their spirituality and fuel their creativity, and often push them to greater artistic experimentation and freedom. Vaucher maintains that the recent explosion of visceral, content-driven art can be attributed to the AIDS crisis, which has shaken the art world's collective psyche. These intensely personal interviews bear eloquent testimony to that process.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the wake of the AIDS crisis, the American arts community arguably has been the most devastated segment of our population. AIDS has killed scores of painters, writers, dancers, and actors, taking them in their prime and robbing our culture of their legacy. Journalist Vaucher interviewed two dozen HIV-positive artists (Paul Monette, Larry Kramer, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, among others) most of whom have just hit their stride and are now being faced with issues most of us have a lifetime, or at least old age, to consider. These men and women talk about how the disease has affected their life and work. Not surprisingly they speak of a sense of creative urgency, concentrating on an aesthetic emphasizing content and the subject of AIDS. Most describe an isolation from conventional American culture made even more intense by their HIV status, although some have found a more artistically liberating sense of openness and creative freedom with the sword of Damocles hanging above their heads. Luckily for us, these artists are confronting their situation with their work, leaving a record of our history, our life in the time of AIDS. Recommended for larger public and academic arts collections.
- Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.