The Art of AIDS: From Stigma to Conscience

The world of the arts has been devastated by AIDS. Few performing or visual artists have escaped the epidemic's impingement upon either their own lives or those of close friends and mentors. But beyond this obvious impact, AIDS has had - and is having - an ultimately more far-reaching effect: it has changed the very form and content of contemporary art. As artists struggle to understand, interpret, and express the complex emotions and politics arising from the epidemic, a new art, perhaps even a new aesthetic, is now emerging.
Over the past ten years, AIDS has become an increasingly prevalent theme in drama, dance, music, film, television, painting, photography, and theater. Many artists have encapsulated their rage, grief, and resistance - and even, occasionally, a kind of transformational acceptance of fate - by channeling that experience into their art. Together, they have produced a remarkably rich body of work. The panoply of the art of AIDS is as rich as the range of the artists who are responding to the epidemic.
In The Art of AIDS, Rob Baker examines this new aesthetic, revealing not just the expected themes of death and dying, disease and disability, but also the issues of spirituality and healing, political and social action, sexuality and responsibility, isolation and community, racism and heterosexism. AIDS increasingly affects everyone, but the response of the gay community, which was devastated first and which rallied so valiantly, is central to this study.
Perhaps it is only through the risks taken by AIDS-affected artists that stigma can be turned into conscience, denial into consciousness, and grief into renewal.

Performing arts critic and journalist Baker has written a catalog of sorts documenting gay artists' response to the AIDS crisis from early denial to a cultural call to arms, showing how gay painters, musicians, dancers, and playwrights have challenged the way we have responded to the crisis over the years. Baker describes some of the leaders in the arts and their creative responses to the epidemic, from Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America, to John Corigliano's AIDS-inspired First Symphony. His critical information is interspersed with personal interludes that chronicle Baker's and his partner Peter's own struggle with AIDS. Unfortunately, Baker has chosen to restrict his coverage to the visual and performing arts and discusses only those works done by gay artists. Thus, while he decries the stigma of AIDS as a "gay disease," Baker is in many ways guilty of the same narrow view. As a result, he limits both the audience and the subject of his study-a pitfall avoided by Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet, a classic treatment of gays in the arts. For libraries with strong gay and lesbian or arts collections and for academic collections.
Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.