The Body, the Host: HIV/AIDS and Christianity, at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin
“We want to turn this country back to [the way it was in] 1954.” Paul Weyrich, Co-Founder of the Heritage Foundation and the Christian Right’s Moral Majority, c. 1982
“I have swallowed a monstrous dose of poison…the violence of the venom twists my limbs, deforms…prostrates me, I die of thirst, I suffocate, and cannot scream. It is hell, eternal punishment.” Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, 1945
The Allen Memorial Museum’s exhibition, The Body, the Host: HIV/AIDS and Christianity, closes on December 15, leaving time to take in this important snapshot of the intersection of art, sexuality, medicine, politics, and religion in the American artworld of the 1980s and 1990s. During these decades, the HIV/AIDS pandemic was sickening and killing people at an accelerated rate from 1981 through the year 2000, while federal funding for research and development of effective and affordable drugs paled in relation to the crisis, and politicians at every level of government, from city to federal, failed to take the then fatal disease seriously.
The first mainstream news coverage of HIV/AIDS came in 1981 when The New York Times published Lawrence K. Altman’s, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” where he reported HIV/AIDS as a “rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer…the cause of [which] is unknown… [and] there is as yet no evidence of contagion.”
In 1982, as queer community members in New York watched friends, lovers, and relatives die at an alarming rate—with 1,100 known deaths from HIV/AIDS in less than two years, activists developed their own health resource and education programs, starting with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. The following year, French researchers at Institut Pasteur in Paris identified the pathogen: human immunodeficiency virus, and the CDC linked the disease to the blood. It wasn’t until 1985 that the U.S. blood supply and all future blood donations would be tested for the virus, which found its way in, infecting people like hemophiliac Ryan White, who contracted HIV in 1984 and died within six years at age 19, one month before his high school graduation. Reagan chose not to publicly speak the name of the disease— “HIV/AIDS” —until 1986.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic is an instance in contemporary history where ordinary people pulled together to radically compel the U.S. government, city and state officials and agencies, medical researchers, to wake up to what they knew to be a major health crisis. In this context, human lives (bodies) were being sacrificed over the Christian “morality” and political apathy. In the earliest years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, the disease infected people who were deemed as disposable by politicians and powerful religious figures. With the COVID-19 pandemic in our recent past, the explicit disregard for human lives deemed as “other” is palpably relatable.
There are sources of critical analysis supplementing The Body, the Host, including a copy of the 2002 exhibition catalogue, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in 20th Century American Art, which charts televangelist Falwell and Weyrich’s (now both deceased) plot to not only censor, but de-fund NEA granted projects, due to “immoral, perverse, homosexual acts or imagery.”
This radical bigotry of the “Moral Majority” was blatant and cruel; Falwell stated on television that “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.” The tension between the religious right and artists, who were seeing their own bodies, the bodies of friends and lovers became casualties of Culture Wars, is the most compelling and complicated aspect of The Body, the Host. Viewers witness suffering, resilience, creative brilliance, and even ironic humor amid the unspeakable human tragedy of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
The show aptly opens with Audrey Flack’s color lithograph with gold leaf depiction of the Virgin Mary, which is the artist’s interpretation of a Baroque sculpture in Seville, Spain. The image emphasizes Mary’s despair, her hollow, unfocused eyes framed by diamond-like tears; even her mouth seems wet with them. This rendering illustrates the spectacle of the Crucifixion, complete with a mother’s human tears, gold leaf, and Baroque architectural details above her. Flack’s piece reminds us of the kitschy aspects of the era. This Virgin evokes pathos and spectacle, as Flack’s rendering could just as easily transfer to a prayer candle and sold as everyday décor.
Andy Warhol’s 1983 screenprint, Ingrid Bergman (The Nun) is a still from the black-and-white film, The Bells of St. Mary’s of 1945. Where Flack takes a Baroque sculpture as her source material, in typical form, Warhol’s source is from popular culture. His nun is pious—Bergman clasps hands in prayer at her chest and stares past the viewer in religious revelry. The artist counters this act of piety by emphasizing her lips, ideally plump, colored orange red, creating a stark contrast between the dour purple hues of her religious vestments; they are lips of a beautiful actor, after all. Warhol was himself a devout Catholic and was known to look to his religion for solace, but this work underscores falsehood. Bergman acts as nun, just as Falwell and religious extremists perform an un-Christ-like “Christianity,” which has catastrophic consequences for HIV/AIDS victims from the 1980s on.
Keith Haring shows up as Warhol’s subject, in a portrait of him and his dog, and as creator of several works in the show, including a white chalk on black board drawing of a figure from the waist up pulling their head up and off of their body. The piece is one of his quickly rendered subway installations, which were affixed to the tunnel walls. Haring was a master at conveying meaning with simple figural forms, and the drawing in The Body, the Host effectively captures the chaos of the moment, evoking a break between body and mind. Haring’s head is full of dreams and ideas, his body fails him. Haring lived with HIV/AIDS for three years, dying at age 31 in 1990.
Haring’s talent was in drawing with speed in mind. Subway riders only had seconds to take in his message. He worked fast, as he was a “vandal” graffiti artist. His work may be most associated with the aesthetic of HIV/AIDS, which is rooted in clear communication as a means of survival. In the earliest days of the pandemic, Men’s Health Crisis produced educational materials on safe sex practices while keeping it sexy, even titillating with drawings of men with hard-ons putting on condoms. ACT UP was established in New York in 1987, taking safe sex measures to the streets, cutting to the core of the issue around HIV/AIDS with their cogent slogan: “Silence=Death,” which was paired with the pink triangle, a symbol originally used in Nazi concentration camps to identify gay prisoners.
Queer people came to understand how deeply despised and disposable they were to America at large. ACT UP responded by taking performance and succinctly designed signs, banners, t-shirts, and buttons to the streets. Artist David Wojnarowicz’s last performance was also ACT UP’s first political funeral. Following his death on July 29, 1992, Political Funeral was held in New York’s East Village, where a procession was led by loved ones carrying a banner reading: “David Wojnarowicz 1954-1992 DIED OF AIDS DUE TO GOVERNMENT NEGLECT.” The procession did not include his literal body, but his body of work, as mourners carried reproductions of his artworks as they marched.
Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Burning Man) of 1983 is a collage map on masonite board. His cartoon figure, on fire in yellow and red spray paint, precisely applied, floats through a field of maps blended into an innocuous field of blue, borders muddled. “No more governments. No more borders,” he wrote of the collage.
Warhol’s portraits of Jon Gould, the Hollywood producer who is consider as the love of his life, died of HIV/AIDS in 1986 at age 33, are forthright portrayals of the artist’s personal loss. Jon Gould and Skiers, not dated, and John Gould, 1982, are gelatin silver prints showing the handsome young man looking healthy and free. In the latter work, Gould is on the beach, a white feather tucked behind his left ear, angel-like. The gelatin silver prints capture Warhol’s partner in the prime of health, exuberant. Within four years of the image of Gould on the beach, he would be gone; blind and weighing just 70 pounds at the time of his death, Gould denied his diagnosis.
Andres Serrano’s notorious, enormous photos canonize the very sources of potential HIV/AIDS transmission. In the late 1980s-early 1990s, his work was extremely controversial, as his own personal history with Catholicism compelled him to create Piss Christ in 1987. The photograph of a crucifix submerged in a jar of Serrano’s urine, made headlines over the blasphemous subject matter, fueling public attention and outrage over art with “vile…graphic depictions” of “homosexual acts” and disgraceful “anti-Christian” themes. One of Serrano’s photographs in the show, Untitled VII (Ejaculate in Trajectory) of 1989, is an abstract cibachrome print depicting semen spurting, arch-like out of the artist’s penis. While not queer, nor afflicted with HIV/AIDS, Serrano freeze-frames the “object” of fear and concern for everyone—free-flowing bodily fluid. Yet he captures the semen in abstract, making it beautiful and innocuous against a black background.
Robert Mapplethorpe’s Untitled (Phillip on a Pedestal) of 1980 depicts his lover, muscled and naked, his back facing us. Mapplethorpe captures Phillip balancing atop a pedestal while contorting his body into a sculptural, idealized form. The object of Mapplethorpe’s desire and our gazes is now also laden with the art historical lore and sensationalism surrounding this body of work. Mapplethorpe may be the most controversial artist of the culture wars, as his queer, erotic photographs drew so much ire that in 1990 Executive director Dennis Barrie and the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati were indicted on obscenity charges stemming from exhibition of his photographs in The Perfect Moment. While a Cincinnati jury acquitted Barrie and the Center, Mapplethorpe became the unwitting “poster boy” for publicly funded artworks deemed as obscene by the radical Right.
The Body, the Host includes a wide range of artist-stars from the last decades of the 20th century. While this makes for an excitingly comprehensive overview of the range of responses to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 90s, it muddles the theme. For instance, Sister Corita Kent was an educator, activist, and member of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, where she taught art for three decades. Her screenprint, Some sunshine of 1970, is comprised of a quote—“Life is a complicated business fraught with mystery and some sunshine” against swaths of blue and yellow offers levity to an emotionally fraught theme, however, it feels forced into The Body, the Host.
Likewise, the global history of HIV/AIDS is an afterthought in The Body, the Host. Today, 67 percent of people with HIV live on the African continent and the spread of the disease continues to affect every dimension of African nations and cultures. Reverand Albert Wagner’s Ethiopia, a stunning painting of five or six disembodied figures wearing a diverse array of cultural headdresses, feels out of place. Like Sister Kent’s piece, the painting makes for a bright pause in the exhibition. The Reverend did paint spiritual subjects, often Biblical figures. However, Ethiopia fits the theme through title alone.
Critiques aside, The Body, the Host: HIV/AIDS and Christianity, is well worth the visit to Oberlin’s Allen Memorial Museum. It provides an opportunity for us to look to the past to better understand—and perhaps navigate, the culture wars of 2024.
“The Body, the Host: HIV/AIDS and Christianity
Through December 15, 2024
Allen Memorial Art Museum
87 North Main Street
Oberlin, OH 44074
- HIV/AIDS deaths drop from 14,499 in 2000 to 8,998 in 2001, and then spike up again to 16,371 in 2002 (see https://www.factlv.org/timeline.htm, accessed November 22, 2024).
- https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1981/07/03/issue.html (accessed November 22, 2024).
- It is important to note that we may never know the total number of people who contracted and died of HIV/AIDS in the earliest years of the pandemic, as so little was known about it among medical professionals, that there were un- or misdiagnosed cases. The stigma of being gay, now ostensibly coupled with a “gay cancer,” meant that the reported cause of death was often cancer, pneumonia, or another symptom of HIV/AIDS.
- “Ryan White,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_White (accessed November 23, 2024).
- Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (London: Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Timothy Noah, “Jerry Falwell’s Hit Parade: The Right’s Holy Fool,” https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/05/jerry-falwell-s-hit-parade.html (accessed November 24, 2024).
- Meyer, 2.
- Ibid.
- UN AIDS, “African Leaders Pledge New Commitments to End AIDS,” https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/pressreleaseandstatementarchive/2023/february/20230220_african-leaders-pledge-new-commitments-to-end-
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