Art in times of AIDS

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When Tony Kushner wrote Angels in America –one of the key plays of the late 20th century, a diptych that won the Pulitzer in George Bush Sr.'s United States–, he already knew that the production and its raw treatment of AIDS and homosexuality would ignite the most conservative sectors. In fact, that's what happened in Catalonia when the first part of the diptych inaugurated the oversized TNC in 1996, during the golden age of Pujolism: the fuss made by the top brass of the Govern was notorious, with numerous bigwigs scandalized by so much depravity.

What Kushner surely didn't expect was that, twenty years later, in the second production of the play in Catalonia, it would be race and its representation that would cause an even greater cataclysm as a result of the controversial portrayal of a black character by a white actor, which we explained a few days ago in the article on blackface in Catalonia.

Be that as it may, the subtitle of Angels in America is "a gay fantasia on national themes," and the approaches to AIDS that are represented are multiple and complex. On the stage of the Sala Fabià Puigserver –the founder of the Lliure died of AIDS in 1991– the reaction of rejection by one of the characters, the young Louis Ironson, when he discovers that his partner has the disease, was impactful. That denialism and the inability to accompany him throughout the fall –at that time, antiretroviral treatments did not exist– were devastating. But Angels in America is just one of many creations that placed AIDS at the center of cultural production in the nineties, especially when the disease began to affect the –white– elites of the country. Among them is the film Philadelphia (1993), which, besides selling a lot of Bruce Springsteen records, put the disease on the map for a large part of a global audience and destigmatized the pandemic –until then, the "gay cancer"– with a charismatic actor and an unusual interracial cast.

In the visual arts, there were approaches to AIDS from opposing trends: some creators approached it from provocation, such as Barton Lidice Benes's Lethal Weapons series, which exhibited water guns and small perfume bottles filled with infected blood, or Ron Athey's performances, full of blood splashes. At the other extreme of these very direct approaches, we find more poetic and metaphorical views, such as the installations that the Cuban Félix González-Torres (who died of AIDS in 1996) dedicated to his partner Ross, a victim of the disease a few years earlier. The Portraits of Ross made from piles of candies show the decline of the body and seeing how someone "was disappearing before your eyes" as the candies disappear because the public takes them. Avoiding direct references to AIDS, González-Torres managed to disarm homophobic criticism and transformed his pieces into universal cries about love and loss, as in the light bulb installation Last light from the Macba collection, where two more works by the artist are on deposit.

Precisely at Macba, the Anarxiu SIDA has just opened, a research project by the Re team on the cultural and social dimension of AIDS in Spain and Chile during the nineties, which can be seen until April at the Centre d'Estudis i Documentació, next to the much-photographed mural Todos juntos podemos parar el SIDA by Keith Haring, recovered by the museum four years ago and originally painted in Salvador Seguí square in 1989, when that corner of the Raval was a cemetery of syringes.