Radical Distribution - burk-2015-radical-distribution-aids-cultural-activism-in-new-york-city-1986-1992.pdf

Tags

Top Highlights

• SILENCE = DEATH appropriates and inverts the pink triangle used by Nazis to designate homosexual men in concentration camps during the Holocaust. The symbol had been used in the 1970s as a collective rallying cry for gay liberation, and in the context of the AIDS crisis, the his- torical parallel between the Holocaust and the federal government’s mismanagement of the AIDS crisis was devastatingly acute. The canniness of the graphic design as a work of political art is that it combines this historical charge with the sleek visual language of advertising, soliciting the atten- tion of those who encounter it before relaying its message.

• Updating protest tactics for the headline-driven televisuality of late 20th-century American society

• nexpensive to reproduce.

• unleashed the prejudice and moral judgment of reactionary conservatives toward the minority demographics who were initially hit hardest by AIDS, including gay men, intravenous drug users, and people of color.

• ntailed the transformation of AIDS representations and discourses

• ACT UP, a self-described “diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis”

• People were dying left and right, horrible deaths, and nobody knew why. The shock was incredible. People were trying to figure out so hard how to take care of the people they cared about, how to take care of themselves, how not to get sick, how to prevent people from dying, how to get services to people in every way, shape, form. The idea of doing anything else was overwhelming. ACT UP took that leadership role. (p. 410

• Many posters successfully adopted this formula, combining the visual pleasure of advertising with instructions for direct action.

• SILENCE = DEATH was soon adapted for use by ACT UP

• SILENCE = DEATH and the subsequent aesthetics of AIDS activism largely drew on the visual tropes of advertising such as stark photo-and-text combinations rather than the typically grass- roots aesthetic of the 1960s New Left movements, which often featured hand-drawn lettering and stenciling.

• “Ephemeral intervention” locates meaning in the production and distribution of such materials along with, rather than exclusively in, aesthetic reception. New York- based activists of the 1980s and early 1990s have described the creation and dissemination (often illegally, at night by wheat-pasting to city walls) of visual ephemera as central to their affective experience of collective political activism, since it is nearly impossible to gauge the impressions of multiple and anonymous public audiences of posters and stickers

• Activist graphics are not stable cultural objects; they are transient, functional instruments often conceived for a specific event or, at least, in terms of topicality.

• The canniness of the graphic design as a work of political art is that it combines this historical charge with the sleek visual language of advertising, soliciting the atten- tion of those who encounter it before relaying its message. D

• The canniness of the graphic design as a work of political art is that it combines this historical charge with the sleek visual language of advertising, soliciting the atten- tion of those who encounter it before relaying its message. D

• The canniness of the graphic design as a work of political art is that it combines this historical charge with the sleek visual language of advertising, soliciting the atten- tion of those who encounter it before relaying its message

• The canniness of the graphic design as a work of political art is that it combines this historical charge with the sleek visual language of advertising, soliciting the atten- tion of those who encounter it before relaying its message.