Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Placebo), 1991, candies in silver wrappers, endless supply. Installation view in “Measure Your Existence,” 2020, at Rubin Museum of Art, New York.

“What I find so interesting in what I’ll call the ‘viral approach’ in art of the AIDS era is that these are works that attempt to degrade the notion of a substantive distinction between two populations, between those who are at risk and those who are presumed to be not at risk. And it was calculated to bear this political message in such a way as to be undetected by the authoritative institutions like museums which were rigorously refusing to show any AIDS-related or politicized art at the time. But, like viruses, through invading the museum’s immune system, it could set up shop and propagate its own counter-discourse from within.”

—Jonathan Katz

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Placebo), 1991, candies in silver wrappers, endless supply. Installation view in “Measure Your Existence,” 2020, at Rubin Museum of Art, New York.

“When Felix Gonzales Torres asks you to pick up a candy and eat it, he is quite consciously implicating you in the disappearance of his partner, while seducing you to abrogate the automatic othering of people with AIDS, in the sense that you were literally putting it into your mouth. But he’s also creating an act of deep Catholic resonance. And I think this is important: also working to alleviate any kind of substantive difference between the well and the sick. One population and another. Gay and straight—however you want to phrase it.”

—Jonathan Katz

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled”, 1991, billboard, dimensions vary with installation. Installed at Shinchon Yonsei University Tunnel, Seoul, in the exhibition “Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Double,” 2012.

“In a highly politicized environment all you’re going to do if you seek to refute the victim bashing of the Republican Party is reinforce the barricades, and what certain artists instead wanted to do was to find a way to sort of dig under the barricade. I misread this billboard piece when it first went up. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I thought it was a Bed Bath & Beyond ad. I thought they were being cute and I was going to get the, you know, 10 percent off sale in the next round of advertisements. It took a while for me, as I think it did for most people, to figure out what that work was about.”

–Jonathan Katz

Jack Pierson, ANYONE, 1994, metal and neon glass.

“For me, Pierson’s work, like Gonzalez-Torres’s, seeks in some sense to find a way to unite people rather than divide them, to explain how this feels to people and to put forth a deep, empathetic response.”

–Jonathan Katz

Jack Pierson, HELPLESS, HOPELESS, 1991, metal and painted plastic.

“Jack’s work is made of decommissioned sign letters—these were used for advertising—so he takes something that was universally recognizable, used to broadcast without discrimination across the entire population, and brings it in to speak to a certain kind of AIDS reality while at the same time working against the idea that AIDS is a disease of a specific population. I saw this exhibition when it first opened. What was so powerful—because what I saw here was the same thing I saw in Felix’s work—was this attempt to refuse the very terms of a specific population or a specific politic and to work to generalize to all of humanity.”

–Jonathan Katz

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Patte Loper, Architecture Review 1978 (After The Shoot), 2006, oil and acrylic on paper.

“You have this pristine high modernist architectural space, and then this wild deer has broken the window and jumped into the space, and everything is off its axis. And that becomes this perfect image of AIDS in the art world. But it could easily be coronavirus.

“Loper actually says that what she had in mind was all forms of wild abandonment that disrupt our modernist purity. The way in which modernism presumes to control the environment, but the whole Gesamtkunstwerke idea keeps getting wrecked on the shores of things we come to understand we cannot control.”

–Jonathan Katz

Jim Hodges, On We Go, 1996, silver-plated chain with pins.

“This piece is generally hung up at the corner where two walls meet. It’s beautifully constructed to look like nothing except a spider’s web. And the thing about a spider’s web is that it is nondiscriminatory. Everything gets caught—food and non-food. This idea that there is something that is working to catch us all—something that we may not see or be attentive to—seems to me very much in keeping the forms of virology that I’m looking at. I’m using that term—virology—as a direct and self-conscious borrowing from none other than Felix Gonzales-Torres, who said that in some sense the virus had become his instructor in how to make a political artwork: if it betrayed its politics right off the bat, as it were, antibodies would kill it. So what it had to do was learn how to camouflage. And this is a perfect instance of that.”

–Jonathan Katz

Martin Wong, I.C.U., 1988, acrylic on canvas.

“As you can see, there is a pun here: I.C.U., ‘I see you.’ What we have in evidence is a very typical class-marked notion of New York. This is not the gleaming modern look, but rather an impoverished, marginal urban complex that nonetheless in a very complicated way brings a whole lot of references together. The idea of the eye and the god’s eye and the relationship between that image and our currency, and the way money functions within this equation. All of that, I think, is very much intentional.”

–Jonathan Katz

Jimmy DeSana, Gooseberries, 1987, dye-bleach photograph.

“You have these Chinese lantern-like shapes that both light up and obscure the word ‘deathlessness.’ The striking thing about a Chinese lantern is that when the candle burns out, it goes dark. There is this attempt to hold onto this deathlessness with a recognition that it is fated to expire. ”

–Jonathan Katz

Donald Moffett, Safe Journey to Some Safe Place, 1989, light box.

“With this Donald Moffett, we’re moving on to what I would call an elegiac approach, something that specifies not just the fact of mourning or the fact of death, but also speaks in a much more familiar and directed way about mourning. When I first saw this piece, I just completely lost it in the gallery. This very much speaks to the current moment.”

–Jonathan Katz

Patrick Webb, The Lamentation/By Punchinello’s Bed, 1990–92, oil on canvas. 

“I distinctly remember a friend of mine who had AIDS was in the hospital with neuropathy, incredible pain in his feet. When we went to visit him, it took about a week to finally negotiate visiting him. When we finally did visit him, we were told that he had not been touched, that the doctors—and this was early on and people didn’t know about the mode of transmission—were in a hazmat suit. I remember my then partner and I rubbing his feet and the doctor and nurses screaming at us ‘don’t touch him, don’t touch him, don’t touch him.’ What we’re talking about here is that people in the greatest need are being stripped of the most basic human right: comfort. And in fact, the longstanding social and cultural elevation of doctors was in part, it seemed to me, rooted in an understanding that they are on the frontline. putting their own lives at risk to take care of others. We are seeing that today.

“Patrick uses the Punchinello mask to both locate this within our cultural history—because so often age is completely othered—and to generalize the face of a person with AIDS so that it can be quite literally anybody. And he also, of course, he uses the iconography of Christian martyrology in order to root these emotions in a familiar narrative that in fact [when you consider the Christian right] worked very hard to close its eyes to what was going on all around during the AIDS crisis.”

–Jonathan Katz

Karen Finley, Untitled (Sandbox), 1992, sand in found chest.

“In Buffalo, New York, in 1990, at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Karen did a performance where she dumped tons and tons—literally—of sand onto the gallery floor. And people were encouraged to write in the sand the names of their loved ones whom they’d lost, and over time these names in the sand would disappear. It becomes a ritual of acknowledging and moving through the pain. When I proposed to Karen that we use this piece in ‘Art AIDS America’ she obviously couldn’t dump all that sand in the museum, so she told me she had done a piece called Sandbox, and people would write the name of their beloved in the sand in the box and subsequent people would write over it and obscure it. During the run of ‘Art AIDS America,’ I watched this box closely and it was constantly being written in and over.”

–Jonathan Katz

Shimon Attie, Untitled Memory (projection of Armand V.), 1998, Ektacolor photograph.

“Shimon took images of people who had died and inserted them into places where they once lived. These are photographic projections, and they pick up on the whole notion of the relationship between photographic presence and absence. Shimon said that initially they were not necessarily conceived with AIDS in mind. Some of the people were clearly not people who died of AIDS. But over time, he said the resonances associated with AIDS accumulated around them and they became in some sense deeper as the plague progressed.”

–Jonathan Katz

Daniel Goldstein, Icarian II Incline, 1993, leather, sweat, wood, copper, felt, and Plexiglas.

“These are the leather covers of workout benches of the most predominant gay gym in San Francisco. In fact, I was a member of that gym. When the gym remodeled, Daniel asked for and received these covers, which he did nothing more than frame.”

—Jonathan Katz

Daniel Goldstein, Icarian Angel, 1993, leather, sweat, wood, copper, felt, and Plexiglas.

“You can see an angel form in the sweat and it is the sweat of hundreds of people who are no longer with us. They become these dense signifiers. And what’s striking is that they are dense signifiers in a very orthodox Christian iconography. They connect to the Shroud of Turin, which is also connected to ritual use. All of these dense metaphors hover over the surface of these works. They are called ‘Icarian’ because that’s actually the name of the workout machine that he took these from, and that was fortuitous, because it also connects with the idea of Icarus.”

—Jonathan Katz

Frank Moore, Niagara, 1994, oil on canvas over wood panel with copper frame with attachments.

“There are also pieces that took a political approach to AIDS. In thinking about how pieces in that mode that might resonate with today, I wasn’t thinking of the strident work of someone like David Wojnarowicz referencing Reagan and so forth, but instead of those that function on a more metaphorical level. What Frank was all about in this painting was that these are various pollutants, many of them oil-based, that are befouling our waterways. The idea here was that as AIDS was to the human body, the human was to the body of nature—that we were destroying nature’s immune system, and in turn, it was destroying our immune system.”

–Jonathan Katz

Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I’m Turning Into a Specter Before Your Very Eyes and I’m Going to Haunt You), 1992, oil stick, gesso, and graphite on wood.

“Glenn is sufficiently slippery about the density of reference to both African American and queer issues. Both are present in the work to varying percentages, but I think he will never articulate what animates one or another work. But this work seems to me to relate to the idea of AIDS. What I find compelling about it is that it shifts between I and you quite self-consciously. And that makes it a political statement to me: forcing the viewer to confront their relationship to all that is happening around them. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work also plays with the idea of I and you, but his is a much lighter touch: You can walk past those candy spills unmolested and ignorant to anything they may signify. Whereas with Glenn’s work, you can’t really do that.”

–Jonathan Katz

Carrie Yamaoka, Steal This Book #2, 1990–91, chemically altered gelatin silver print.

“Carrie is a member of fierce pussy, the activist group that did a number of specific interventions. These are women who watched their male friends die and, as so many women did, cared for these dying gay men. This is a page from Abbie Hoffman’s famous Yippie Handbook, which talks about resistance and dissidence and of course, in the title, in some sense advocates for the destruction of a capitalist system. Carrie photographed that book, obscuring all the words except slaughter and history. It cuts me to the quick. It is as current a work as it could be.”

–Jonathan Katz