AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous And Other Writings

by Bordowitz, Gregg

• ISBN13: 9780262025706
• ISBN10: 0262025701
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-12-01
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

The HIV epidemic animates this collection of essays by a noted artist, writer, and activist. "So total was the burden of illness -- mine and others' -- that the only viable response, other than to cease making art entirely, was to adjust to the gravity of the predicament by using the crisis as a lens," writes Gregg Bordowitz, a film- and video-maker whose best-known works, Fast Trip Long Drop(1993) and Habit(2001), address AIDS globally and personally. In The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous-- the title essay is inspired by Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theater Company -- Bordowitz follows in the tradition of artist-writers Robert Smithson and Yvonne Rainer by making writing an integral part of an artistic practice. Bordowitz has left his earliest writings for the most part unchanged -- to preserve, he says, "both the youthful exuberance and the palpable sense of fear" created by the early days of the AIDS crisis. After these early essays, the writing becomes more experimental, sometimes mixing fiction and fact; included here is a selection of Bordowitz's columns from the journal Documents, "New York Was Yesterday." Finally, in his newest essays he reformulates early themes, and, in "My Postmodernism" (written for Artforum's fortieth anniversary issue) and "More Operative Assumptions" (written especially for this book), he reexamines the underlying ideas of his practice and sums up his theoretical concerns. In his mature work, Bordowitz seeks to join the subjective -- the experience of having a disease -- and the objective -- the fact of the disease as a global problem. He believes that this conjunction is necessary for understanding and fighting the crisis. "If it can be written," he says, "then it can be realized."

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	viii
Foreword by Douglas Crimp	xiii
Editor's Note	xxii
Author's Note	xxvi
1 Geography Notes: A Survey	1	(18)
2 Picture a Coalition	19	(24)
3 The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous	43	(26)
4 Operative Assumptions	69	(26)
5 Boat Trip	95	(18)
6 Dense Moments	113	(28)
7 Present Tense	141	(6)
8 New York Was Yesterday	147	(42)
Lonely Is the City	149	(8)
A Conversation with Delmore Schwartz	157	(8)
Renew Our Days	165	(7)
A Solemn Assembly	172	(5)
Hurry Down Sunshine	177	(12)
9 Which Is More Powerful: The Word or the Idea?	189	(12)
10 What the World Needs Now: South African HIVers Counter Doomsday Images with Profiles in Radical Courage	201	(12)
11 The Effort to Survive AIDS Considered from the Point of View of a Race-Car Driver	213	(8)
12 My Postmodernism	221	(20)
13 More Operative Assumptions	241	(54)
Video/Filmography	295	(3)
Selected Writings of Gregg Bordowitz	298	(5)
Index	303