Gregg Bordowitz is a writer, AIDS activist, and film and videomaker. His work, including Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) and Habit (2001), documents his personal experiences of testing positive and living with HIV within the context of a personal and global crisis. His writings are collected in The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings:1986-2003.
This interview depicts American writer, activist, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman (b. 1958), discussing becoming a writer, her novels, and her long-term collaboration with filmmaker James Hubbard on projects devoted to gay liberation and AIDS activism. Born in New York to a Holocaust-surviving family, Schulman grew up in an era where women were not considered important.
The first of the series includes:
What Does Away Mean? by Jem Cohen advertises the need to recycle through reconsideration of landfills and garbage disposal.
Pro-Choice is Pro-Life by Jane Pratt makes its point with the simple logic that every child should be cared for and wanted.
Historic Preservation by Jim McKay counsels for the preservation of historic buildings endangered by urban decay.
Originally commissioned by the Harvard Art Museums in response to the life and work of David Wojnarowicz, Survivor’s Remorse looks at how both art and bodies are maintained and the socio-economic influences that create a chasm between the value of things and people. This work examines the resources dedicated to the maintenance and care of artworks versus (artists) lives, especially those marginalized by illness or identity.
A voice for which an event impossible to internalize remains distant. An event that in its distance does not cease to make the narration of something that should not take place anywhere foreign. The military massacre against unarmed students in 1968.
In The Lost Art of the Future, Cuthand talks about artists he has known who have passed while living with HIV/AIDS, and the art he wishes he had been able to see them make if their lifetimes had been longer.
A Gay Men’s Health Crisis sex re-education PSA in which an interracial gay male couple hooks up at a bath house, having steamy sex safely.
This video collects public service announcements created by a number of independent producers, including Jem Cohen and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. Powerful and provocative, these PSAs address issues such as organic farming, abortion rights, street harassment, and the environment. Included are:
They Have Dreams by Natalie Merchant and Abigail Simon which focuses on the plight of homeless children.
Commissioned by Visual AIDS for STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art
In the spring of 1988, video-maker/activist Gregg Bordowitz tested HIV-antibody positive. He then quit drinking and taking drugs and came out to his parents as a gay man. This imaginative autobiographical documentary began as an inquiry into these events and the cultural climate surrounding them. While writing the film, a close friend was diagnosed with breast cancer and his grandparents were killed in a car accident. The cumulative impact of these events challenged his sense of identity, the way he understood his own diagnosis, and the relationships between Illness and history.
“We lose good artists to the past all the time because their work was ephemeral, or difficult, or fashion wasn’t on their side. The performance artist Stuart Sherman, who died of AIDS in 2001, was a candidate for disappearance on all three counts.”
— New York Times, 2009
The third compilation in this series of progressive, creative public service announcements for under-reported issues. Featuring various styles and formats, from street photography to optical printing, from edgy black and white film to hand-drawn animation, the seven spots in this latest installment are:
The Breathing Tree by Eric Darnell and Doug Loveid, an animated easy-to-understand explanation of how forests contribute to life by producing oxygen.
Tom Kalin is a screenwriter, film director, producer, and educator. As a key figure in New Queer Cinema, his work focuses on the portrayal of gay sexuality both in the age of AIDS and historically. Informed by his work with two AIDS activist collectives, ACT UP and Gran Fury, Kalin’s video work is characterized by appropriated images, original portraits, and performances.
Fighting Chance is a continuation of Richard Fung’s previous documentary Orientations, which told of the personal challenges and struggles of Asian-Canadian gays and lesbians to express their sexual identities. When Fung produced Orientations in 1984, AIDS had not yet fully manifested itself (particularly among Asians), but by 1991, as we see in Fighting Chance, the epidemic has become threateningly widespread. Individuals and couples candidly discuss the various hurdles and challenges that AIDS has presented.
Focusing on early media reportage of the AIDS epidemic and the struggle for gay rights, some aspect of a shared lifestyle begins with the outraged response of the gay community to the 1982 Supreme Court ruling upholding a sodomy law in the State of Georgia, effectively banning gay sex. Reframing the debate from one of moral calumny to a matter of the Constitutional right to privacy, Bordowitz successfully portrays the complexity of issues surrounding the AIDS epidemic as it emerged in the early 1980s in this country, forceful
Produced in collaboration with MICA-TV, Summer of Love is a public service announcement produced for the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Featuring The B-52’s, David Byrne, Allen Ginsburg, Quentin Crisp, John Kelly, and others.
This title is only available on Tom Rubnitz Videoworks: Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty.
The performance artist Stephen Varble spent the last five years of his life working on an epic, unfinished performance-turned-video titled Journey to the Sun (1978-1983). Only partially complete and under constant revision, this complex work combined Varble’s history of making costumes for performances with his fantastic stories involving metamorphosis and martyrdom. In 1982, Varble decided to make a “prelude” to Journey to the Sun, combining existing footage with new video taken in Riverside Park in New York City.
A detective is hired to find the original copy of a lost ancient book. The book recounts the tale of a plague. A form of radiation, unknown at the present time, activates a virus. The virus affects the sexual and fear centers in the brain and nervous system; fear is converted into sexual frenzies which are reconverted back into fear, the feedback leading in many cases to a fatal conclusion.
I arranged a visit to poet/novelist Kevin Killian’s South of Market apartment in San Francisco to shoot a portrait of him, and when I arrived he had a guest, poet Cedar Sigo. They had corresponded earlier, but were meeting for the first time, and Cedar agreed to participate in our video shoot. This is perhaps the least planned, most verité and documentary of the videos about writers so far. Our immediate plan was for Kevin to read one of Cedar’s poems and for Cedar to read one by Kevin.
Made for Madrid Pride 2017, Wonders Wander is a location based mobi-web-serial with four fictional episodes set in Madrid.
Stephen Varble began Journey to the Sun as a series of performances with projected slides in 1978. After becoming notorious for unauthorized costume performances on Soho streets in the mid 1970s, Varble receded from his public persona at this time. Deriving from his identification with his idol, the reclusive actress Greta Garbo, and informed by the spiritual practice of Subud, Varble began writing an allegorical epic about a musician, the Grey Crowned Warbler, who undergoes tribulation and metamorphosis on a journey to transcendence.
Listen To This is a fragment of collective memory that finds critical relevance in contemporary Queer discourse. Tom Rubnitz weaves narration, image, and a form of temporality, dislocated from ‘real time’, into a video where artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s loss and anger is palpable.
By focusing on the blindfold, kore explores the eye as purveyor of desire, sexual fear, and the fantasy of blindness. An alternative sexuality is founded in touch-based (feminine?) pleasure as opposed to a vision-based (masculine?) pleasure. An examination of institutional blindspots towards women, and people of color, concerning AIDS expands on the issue of vision, visibility and the disease.
This title is also available on Tran, T. Kim-Trang: The Blindness Series.
The comings and goings of the late underground filmmaker, Curt McDowell—and the people and activities that came and went along with him—are the themes that run through this existential diary of daily life. McDowell was dying from AIDS-related illnesses during the production of the diary.
“An elegy for McDowell, the videowork captures Kuchar’s mournful remembrances of his long-lasting friendship with the young filmmaker. But it also has the inquisitive charm, perverse humor, and quirky candor that places Kuchar’s visual expressions in a gritty niche all their own.”
A conversation with Canadian artist Stephen Andrews returns us to a pre-cocktail moment, when being HIV+ afforded us the consolation of certainty.
