Curated by François Piron with Elisabeth Lebovici
“GARBAGE COVERS every inch of the streets.” Kathy Acker’s 1978 description of trash abandoned in a New York riddled with debt opens queer and feminist writer Elisabeth Lebovici’s essay about her move in 1979 from Paris to New York, where she began her doctorate in aesthetics and lived through the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Acker’s salvo could just as easily have described Paris this past March, when the city’s striking sanitation workers left trash to pile up in the posher neighborhoods and “Exposé·es”&#—an exhibition inspired by Lebovici’s scintillating 2017 book of criticism and interviews, Ce que le sida m’a fait. Art et activisme à la fin du XXe siècle&#—opened at the Palais de Tokyo. While we wait for a publisher to sign on for an English-language edition, the exhibition translated the book’s title as What AIDS Did to Me, although it might also be called How AIDS Unmade Me.
“Exposé·es” retained a primarily New York–Paris axis, an itinerary that parochialized these two major sites of AIDS activism to position creativity along interpersonal lines (rather than, for example, looting art from elsewhere in the name of universalism). It included work by more than thirty artists, collectives, and collaborators and was curated by François Piron with Lebovici as “scientific adviser.” Ce que le sida m’a fait (published by Maison Rouge/JRP Editions) is an autobiography au pluriel, art criticism told from inside the circle, and it inexorably links the process of self-making to the virus’s effects on all artistic relations, scattering its titular “me” into a social mass. The book is not about Lebovici’s activism as a member of ACT UP–Paris, or the Pink Bloc of queers who would later protest Macron’s neoliberal overhaul of the French pension system. Nor is the book about the many influences of Lebovici’s contributions to public discourse as an art critic for the left-leaning French daily Libération, where she worked for fifteen years, or her up-to-date blog and social-media handle, le-beau-vice (“the beautiful vice,” a play on her last name). The show was not about any of these things. In fact, neither the book nor the show was about AIDS.
Rather, the exhibition took on the way the epidemic blurred temporality, installing work via citation, association, and call-and-response. Moyra Davey’s selection of Hervé Guibert photographs from the 1980s, for example, were paired with her recently made letters that feature photographs of her son Barney in a US hospital. The single-named artist Bastille’s ’80s drawings of nearly twenty-foot-long anal toys pointed in the direction of Henrik Olesen’s urine-yellow 2020 sculptures cast from milk cartons. One thing that queer social life and museums share is an affinity for kindred objects that don’t belong together in grand historical narratives but that touch one another in time. “Exposé·es” (dis)organized artists working across the past forty years into eight thematic proposals, including “Raw Memory,” “Elliptical Presence,” and “What Do We Do Now?” Accounting for the virus’s effect on traditional forms of historiography, the show proposed a living history of the recent past that privileged the vitality of the everyday. As Lebovici writes in the introduction to her book, “In the time of AIDS, we live ‘in AIDS.’”
Consider, for example, a work installed in the venue’s lobby, Gregg Bordowitz’s The AIDS Crisis Is Still Beginning, 2001–, a red-on-yellow banner that deploys the visual language of a political slogan. On one side, its title is printed sans serif in English, and on the other, it’s repeated in French (LA CRISE DU SIDA NE FAIT QUE COMMENCER). The words stutter and ironically juxtapose the inaugural “beginning” with the continual “still”; the crisis is one of repetitions. As Bordowitz says in a new video on view elsewhere in the show, the practice of freedom might exist in going about things differently when faced with this suspended sense of duration.
The exhibition offered another beginning with fierce pussy’s For the Record, 2013–. The windows were carefully covered with fragmented speculative texts on newsprint: “If she were alive . . . She’d be going down on you tonight . . . You’d probably still be arguing about that . . . Do you think he would’ve gotten sober.” The work was first shown in Helen Molesworth and Claire Grace’s 2010 exhibition “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993”; it has been partially translated into French by writer Catherine Facerias and with some of the pronouns changed to “iel”&#—an ungendered third-person equivalent of they in English. The advantage of conditional anecdotes is that they invite continual rewriting, adjusting to meet the needs of a changing present.
Yet a third beginning brimmed with the possibilities of transmission and intergenerational relays. Past the ticket agent, a recording of Lili Reynaud-Dewar and a group of her students could be heard: “We make love unprotected. We will survive unprotected.” These lyrics are based on an infamous late-’90s debate between Guillaume Dustan and Didier Lestrade over the controversial proposition that unprotected sex could be a form of solidarity with the dead and dying. In an essay included in the catalogue, the artist describes her interest in barebacking as a “temporal ellipsis” between an idealization of a pre-AIDS past, an embrace of a spontaneous present without concern for risk, and an insistence on an imagined future after the epidemic. As I listened, I fantasized about those sexual practices that have continued this queer tradition of family planning in the wake of Truvada, Ipergay, and other, generic brands.
The collaborations continued in Lionel Soukaz and Stéphane Gérard’s Artistes en zone troubles, 1991–2023, an edit of the two thousand hours of video that make up Soukaz’s Journal Annales, 1991–2013. The edit takes as its subject Soukaz’s friend Hervé Couergou, who died in 1994. Couergou describes Soukaz’s obsessive video-making gambit as “a new form of happening” and imagines an organization that would “share the energy of young artists living their seropositivity to allow each of them to become a recreational user of art.” Various possibilities whose initials spell AZT are considered as a name for this organization: Association de Zoulous Tentés (Association of the Tempted Zulus), Artistes Zombies Totaux (Total Zombie Artists), Artistes Zarbis Tangents (Freak Tangent Artists). Much like the exhibition, these fabulated groups embrace and then exceed the bounds of those grassroots organizations that successfully used iconography to militate against state abandonment.
This rangy mode of assembly also characterized the exhibition’s public programs, performances, and workshops. At the Palais de Tokyo, five conversations were organized to prioritize oral history, those who care for the work of the dead, and personal archiving. The archiving discussion featured the five people living with AIDS who expanded Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1991 portrait of Julie Ault, adding notations to Gonzalez-Torres’s “likeness” of Ault composed of words and dates&#—a process facilitated by arts-based therapy practitioner and Sister of Perpetual Indulgence Isabelle Sentis. Rather than recording these conversations, curatorial assistant Rose Vidal worked with artists Yolaine Roux and Loris Duchalet on a maplike visual record of the proceedings with chalk on a blackboard so that it could be continually added to and written over. At a distance in the suburb of Pantin, a two-month-long festival at the Centre National de la Danse featured re-creations of performances by artists also living in the time of AIDS, including the choreographer Alain Buffard’s 2003 Mauvais genre (Bad Type), a sequel to his 1998 solo in which he spasmed and maintained his balance under the glow of handheld flashlights. Reconstructed by Matthieu Doze and Christopher Ives, Buffard’s original work was transposed onto an ensemble of fourteen. And from across the country, former member of ACT UP–Paris Paul-Emmanuel Odin brought a group of art students together to explore his long-engaged idea of “backwards time” in a workshop with Benoît Piéron.
Accounting for the virus&
8217;s effect on traditional forms of historiography, the show proposed a living history of the recent past that privileged the vitality of the everyday.#
Contagion, proliferation, and fungibility functioned as strategies within the exhibition, too. Piéron made exhibition seating by upholstering chairs with hospital bedsheets resold as rags in hardware stores; his concept of “diseases of companionship” was one of several links the exhibition charted between crip time and the time of AIDS, underscoring the haptic, erotic dimensions all care work requires. Across “Exposé·es,” Zoe Leonard showed the life-size black-and-white photographs of vulvas she had made some thirty years ago with her friends and lovers, an intervention that reconstructed her 1992 installation for Documenta, which replaced portraits of the men in Kassel’s Neue Galerie with these images. And Jesse Darling reused the beads, lightbulbs, and candles from recent Gonzalez-Torres exhibitions to fill light boxes the size of the artist’s 1991 “Untitled” (Orpheus, Twice), evoking vitrines filled with butterflies in a natural-history museum. By presenting the remains of the deceased artist’s works as relics, Darling pointed to the irony of reifying Gonzalez-Torres’s attraction to the giveaway, as recent presentations of his work have done.
Such savvy evasions were on full display in Philippe Thomas’s Proprieté privée, 1991, in which the wooden floor of the CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux&#—where it was first shown with a sign that read PLOT FOR SALE&#—was displaced to the Palais de Tokyo with a sign indicating its updated status: PRIVATE PROPERTY. The artist’s critique of the way the museum’s attempts at heroization and historicization can in fact quicken disappearance and leave the dead behind was quietly echoed by the homology in the show’s title: In French, exposé signifies being exposed to precarity as well as being put on display. The lure of hypervisibility can pave the road to invisibilization.
But to expose can also be a way of sharing what typically remains unseen, including the day-to-day work of making art alongside others. The assembly of works by fierce pussy’s four founding members&#—organized by Jo-ey Tang as the seventh chapter of “arms ache avid aeon: fierce pussy amplified,” an iterative exhibition and publication project&#—underscored the relationships between people and things. Behind the precise mise-en-scène, fierce pussy member Joy Episalla projected her 2023 As long as there’s you, As long as there’s me, a video of performances made with little or no audience: cabaret icon Justin Vivian Bond rehearsing, the artist’s mother moving to the music on a car radio, a performer singing in a transit tunnel. All you need is one person who will listen.
Thomas (T.) Jean Lax is curator of the department of media and performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
