Toward its goal of ending the AIDS crisis, ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) used ephemeral media to stage demonstrations. Slogans such as "SILENCE = DEATH" and "ALL PEOPLE WITH AIDS ARE INNOCENT" galvanized collective action and took control of the unjust representation of gay men and other minorities with AIDS. Updating protest tactics for the headline-driven televisuality of late 20th-century American society, ACT UP relied on ephemera as a mode of distribution for activist slogans and images. Ephemeral materials provided activists with a powerful mode of representation that was inexpensive to reproduce. This essay examines the means by which ACT UP and its associated collectives deployed visual ephemera to create a ubiquitous presence in New York City, when AIDS cases there were among the highest in the United States. Against histories of ACT UP that acknowledge the importance of agitprop but neglect to fully account for its status as ephemera, I argue that the ephemeral properties of activist materials are central to the meaning of these cultural artifacts, and meaningful because they enabled the discursive and spatial representations of collectivity that defined and sustained the most active period of ACT UP, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.
Recent curatorial attention to AIDS cultural activism and its attendant queer and feminist public art practices has highlighted issues surrounding the display of visual ephemera generating questions such as how can materials made for the street be displayed in a gallery setting? What, if any, contextualization is required? How are activist practices transformed when they become materials in an archive? Different curatorial strategies have included the presentation of original posters from the personal archives of activists (ACT UP New York: Activism, Art and the AIDS Crisis 1987Crisis -1993Crisis , 2009Crisis and 2010 to the reprinting and enlargement of graphic designs originally utilized as posters, billboards and demonstration placards (Gran Fury: Read My Lips, 2012). Each of these exhibitions relied upon an archival aesthetic, but towards different ends: ACT UP New York organized its archive in affective terms, while Gran Fury: Read My Lips created a sociocultural presentation. This article compares these two exhibitions, and the curatorial strategies each devised in order to represent and animate the ephemera of AIDS cultural activism.How can protest graphics made for the street be displayed in a gallery setting? What, if any, contextualization is required? These questions were at play in recent exhibitions of AIDS activist ephemera made by artists and art collectives in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, namely ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis
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