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eBook details
- Title: Misplacing the Work of Mathew Jones in the Discourse of AIDS Activism (Art History) (Silence = Death and Call Now) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Traffic (Parkville)
- Release Date : January 01, 2005
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 368 KB
Description
AIDS activists produced an array of campaigning imagery that was designed to educate and politicise in response to the homophobic representations of AIDS. In so doing, a very specific identity of the male homosexual was created. This paper explores the way in which the more metaphoric contemplations of the Melbourne artist Mathew Jones were judged on the basis of their contribution to this project and found wanting. I argue that the reception of Jones's artistic work was inevitably mediated through a discourse of activism and, as a result, the representational possibilities for this gay artist were severely narrowed. When Mathew Jones exhibited the work silence = death (1991) at Gertrude Street Gallery in Melbourne, one reviewer proposed that the government support that the exhibition had received would have been better spent on medical research. This response was indicative of a more general tendency to judge the work according to the effectiveness of its contribution to the activist and education campaigns around HIV/AIDS. Jones's work, Call Now (1993), displayed in the Access Gallery at the National Gallery of Victoria, had the opposite problem. This work was considered too effective. The gallery and the artist both sought legal advice as to whether the text in the work could constitute an offence: one of inciting its audience to act in a manner contrary to the law. These responses refused both works a place within the metaphoric realm that art in the space of the gallery is more usually permitted to inhabit. This outcome demands a close examination of the events that surrounded the exhibition of these two works. In seeking an explanation for such reductive responses to the works, I argue that this reaction is indicative of a fundamental dilemma faced by those whose artistic output engages with a dominant pre-existing symbolic field. The difficulty for Mathew Jones was that his work was not only a response to, but also an attempt to enlarge on, that symbolic field. His work engaged with the forms of identity being constructed in the course of the radical activism that emerged in the gay community in the late 1980s and 1990s. That activism was in turn an inevitable and necessary response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.