Forget Foucault

Remember Félix González-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres was a Cuban born, American visual artist who is best known for his minimalist and relational installations that deal with issues of depletion and regeneration, loss and inertia. Utilizing mundane materials such as strings of light bulbs, cellophane wrapped candy and stacks of paper, González-Torres has created some of his most memorable exhibits such as Untitled (Memorial Day Weekend) or Untitled (Placebo). González-Torres was considered within his time to be a process artist due to the nature of his ‘removable’ installations. Many of his artworks invite the viewer to take a piece of the work with them such as a packaged candy from a pile in the corner of an exhibition space and, in so doing, contribute to the slow disappearance of the sculpture over the course of the exhibition. His work combines an almost classical sense of restraint and beauty with a critical sensibility.

His work is often discussed in the context of his struggle with HIV and AIDS. In 1987 he joined Group Material, a New York-based group of artists whose intention was to work collaboratively, adhering to principles of cultural activism and community education. Along with the other members of the group — Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Karen Ramspacher, and Tim Rollins — in 1989 González-Torres was invited by the MATRIX Gallery at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive to explore the subject of AIDS. His struggle became especially public when his lover Ross Laycock died of AIDS and González-Torres memorialized him with Untitled (1991), twenty four billboards installed throughout New York City that show a monochrome photograph of an unoccupied bed. A 1996 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was his last solo exhibition while he was still living but his career and fame has continued to grow since his death. In 2007 he represented the United States at the 52^nd International Art Exhibition, la Biennale de Venezia [the Venice Biennale], only the second artist in the 100+ year history of the event to represent the United States after his death.

Felix Gonzales-Torres was 38 when he died of AIDS in 1996.

Forget Carlos Almaraz

Carlos Almaraz was 48 when he died from AIDS in 1989.

Almaraz was a Mexican-American artist who helped pioneer the Chicano street aesthetic. In 1973, Almaraz was one of four organizers of Los Four, a group of artists that with works such as “Murals of Aztlan” managed to bring attention from mainstream art critics and painters to the Chicano street arts movement . Their 1974 exhibition at the County Museum of Art was the first to bring a barrio aesthetic uptown. His works “Echo Park” and “Boycott Gallo” are passionate representations of his style and his best-known works to demonstrate his relationship with LA and its Chicano street art movement.

In the 1970’s he was politicized and traveled to Cuba and China to glean truths about Marxism. He became an active advocate for migrant farm labor and made work for famed Arizonan and fellow Chicano, Cesar Chavez. His paintings, murals and banners became well known visuals at the forefront of United Farm Workers protests and rallies.

His work continues to enjoy popularity and was featured in the landmark “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions, including “MEX/LA: Mexican Modernism(s) in Los Angeles 1930-1985” at the Museum of Latin American Art and “Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement” at the Fowler Museum.

Forget a parentless child

Of the 1.8 million people who died of AIDS during 2009, one in seven were children.

At the end of 2009, there were 2.5 million children living with HIV around the world. Another estimated 390,000 children became newly infected with HIV in 2010. About half of all new adult HIV infections occur among 15-24 year olds.

Remember a parentless child

Every 15 seconds, an African child loses a parent to AIDS.

There are more than 16 million children under the age of 18 who have lost one or both parents to AIDS -12 million in Sub-Saharan Africa alone.

Remember an anonymous woman

The percentage of women living with HIV and AIDS varies significantly between different regions of the world. In 2009, in sub-Saharan Africa, there were around 12 million women living with HIV and AIDS, compared to about 8.2 million men. In the US, African American and Hispanic women account for 80 percent of AIDS cases, even though they represent less than one-quarter of the population. As in other industrialized countries, the epidemic in the U.S. has disproportionately affected women in marginalized sections of the population including ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees.

Forget an anonymous woman

Globally, HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death among women of reproductive age.

At the end of 2009 it was estimated that out of the 34 million adults worldwide living with HIV and AIDS, slightly more than half are women. Women are at a greater risk of heterosexual transmission of HIV and are twice as likely to become infected with HIV through unprotected heterosexual intercourse than men. In many countries women are less likely to be able to negotiate condom use and are more likely to be subjected to non-consensual sex.

Only 20 percent of young women aged 15 to 24 can correctly identify ways of preventing HIV transmission and reject major misconceptions about HIV transmission. In low- and middle-income countries, only one-third of pregnant women are currently offered services to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

DATE: December 1, 2011

LOCATIONS: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles CA and 3rd Street Promenade, Santa Monica, CA

HOURS: 11 am – 4 pm

PARKING: Metered street and paid garage parking at both venues

In conjunction with World AIDS Day, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) is pleased to present Forget Foucault, a tactical event aimed at AIDS awareness and remembrance.

Soon after it was recognized as a disease process in the early 1980s, the struggle to identify, test, and prevent AIDS was brought to public notice by a wide range of AIDS activists—groups such as ACT UP and community projects such as the Names Project AIDS quilt. By 2000, as the numbers of new infections and deaths within the US dropped, so too did the public’s involvement in AIDS awareness. And yet, on the global front the pandemic continues to ravage whole populations. In 2010, the UN AIDS committee recorded 1.8 million AIDS-related deaths, mostly in third world countries, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Even in North America, where the infection rate has remained stable over the last five years, over 1.5 million people are HIV positive, a conservative statistic since, according to CNN, 1 in 5 sexually active adults do not know their HIV status. The public cry of the AIDS activists from the 1990s is well-worn but still true: the AIDS crisis is not over. The ICI seeks to bring this topic back to the forefront by enlisting the public in a simple act of AIDS activism.

Forget Foucault utilizes button badges emblazoned with the names of notable people who have died as a result of AIDS coupled with the either “forget” or “remember.” In addition, two button pairs reflect the global progression of HIV over the last three decades. ‘Forget/Remember an anonymous woman’ and ‘Forget/Remember a parentless child’ reflect the spread of the disease in the last 15 years to non-western populations. On December 1, 2011, World AIDS Day, the public will have the opportunity to take up to two of these buttons from roving ICI representatives at two Los Angeles sites—one button to keep and one to pass on—in a combination of their choice (forget or remember; black or white). Through the simple act of selecting and wearing ICI buttons, individuals will have the opportunity to engage friends and strangers in a discussion about AIDS and the individual’s role in cultural awareness and action.

Forget Foucault builds on the tradition of disseminating political, commercial and/or artistic ideas through a wearable object. Since the button badge was invented in the late 1800’s, these seemingly innocuous objects have been used for everything from supporting political campaigns to advertising products to helping to fuel artistic projects. As economic, portable and wearable signposts, buttons have helped to spread the ideas that fueled the hippie movement of the 1960’s and the punk movement of the 1970’s and 80’s, and many of the major election campaigns of the twentieth century. Thus in this way, buttons have served as a form of social catalyst, a means for the spread of both suppressed and idealized notions. Further, Forget Foucault also draws on related artistic precedents such as the work of Yoko Ono, Keith Haring, and most notably, that of Daniel J. Martinez’s, who’s Whitney Biennial buttons sought to interrogate the hierarchies of our linguistic, socio-political and socio-physical interactions by giving visitors buttons that contained portions of a sentence that together formed the charged sentiment “I can’t ever imagine wanting to be white.”

Over the last 20 years, ICI has remained steadfast in its efforts to raise awareness for AIDS, and has orchestrated numerous projects in order to interrogate the visual culture surrounding the epidemic. Forget Foucault marks a convergence of the ICI’s previousAIDS-related endeavors. The AIDS Bottle Project, started in 1990, utilizes a simple, etched glass jar to memorialize those who have died from AIDS and HIV-related illnesses. A separate project, the AIDS Chronicles, which began in1994, is a more activist project that records the (lack of) day-to-day discourse on AIDS in the New York Times. With a strategy outlined in Douglas Crimp’s landmark 1989 essay “Mourning and Militancy,” Forget Foucault combines the mourning aspect of the AIDS Bottle Project with the militancy of the AIDS Chronicles. By choosing individuals who are not known solely for their AIDS-related deaths or anonymous descriptions that are not solely linked to HIV (an anonymous woman, a parentless child), Forget Foucault furthers the ambiguity of its own guerilla semiotics. The buttons call to question both who and how we remember (or consequently choose not to remember). Can we remember everyone? Should we remember everyone? Can we forget some and not others? And, borrowing one of the ICI’s most famous maxims, ‘who decides’ how and who and what we remember?

Forget Foucault also interrogates the organization’s own historical trajectory. Formed urgently for urgent times, the ICI incorporated in 1994 at the request of institutions that were hosting AIDS-related ICI projects. Forget Foucault not only revisits sites of previous AIDS activism (the AIDS Bottle Project at LACMA in 1991 and the AIDS Chronicles at 3^rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica in 1994) but it forefronts the organization’s own indebtedness to the AIDS pandemic. The ICI has received public notice in the last decade for its publishing and exhibition programs but it was born 20 years ago in a lacuna created by a virus that ‘disappeared’ some of art’s most powerful voices. The ICI was formed with the conviction that, as Diamanda Galás so vividly etched into our collective consciousness, ‘we are all HIV+.’ AIDS is not only a biological disease but a cultural one as well.

The Individuals featured in the button badges include: Michel Foucault, Fela, Freddie Mercury, Liberace, Easy-E, Arthur Ashe, Isaac Asimov, Alvin Ailey, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Mapplethorpe, Carlos Almaraz, a parentless child, and an anonymous woman. Participants will have the opportunity to share their interpretations both in person through impromptu, live webcast interviews, and online at the project’s website. All feedback will later be archived as part of the ICI’s Ephemera Kabinett, and will be available to view permanently via the Ephemera Kabinett blog.

The website for the project will provide updated information and a live feed on the day of the event: www.culturalinquiry.org/blog/forget-foucault. For more information about the ICI and our projects, please visit www.culturalinquiry.org

ICI Bylaws and AIDS

Seventeen years ago, the ICI drew up the legal papers required for Federal incorporation as a non profit arts and cultural organization. Recently we were reviewing these papers for an internal audit and were reminded that our strong commitment to AIDS awareness was actually written into our bylaws. Here is an excerpt from the section titled PURPOSES:

2. To sponsor an annual event focusing attention on HIV disease for as long as AIDS continues to be a national and international crisis. This public event will educate the general public as to how the disease is culturally described and discussed and will allow an open forum for ideas and opinions about these methods.

3. To create, maintain, and made available to the public, a database containing the names of people who have died from AIDS and AIDS-related illness.

Overall, we have met our goals through an array of events on December 1. This year we’ll take to the streets with Forget Foucault.

Our database of AIDS deaths is relegated to binder notebooks containing page after page of NYT obituaries. Although the names are not available to our virtual supporters there is something poignant and memorable about the aging newspaper clippings. While their scumbled surfaces point to the duration of time since their passing, they also embody a palpable feeling of loss that might elude a strictly digital database.