The AIDS crisis can be seen with a large amount of queer art. Whether it is a direct response to human tragedy and political careless moment, the AIDS crisis has forced us to rethink the way we might understand the work that any queer artist had worked in the 1980s and 1990s; a black hole that could swallow other understanding work. Peter Hujar’s enormous photography exercises may not have been designed to be a reaction to sweeping the floor especially to his friends and contemporaries’ communities, but with it, Hujar’s own death was so much of his work that has become a record of what has been lost due to AIDS-related pneumonia. Some of them are in portraits of contemporaries, like David Wojnarowicz and Candy Dear, while some are in images of his Christopher Street Pier, or the devastating buildings in Soho, New York. Whether we want to or not, we may find ourselves studying Hujar’s shabby landscape and exhaustion, prone to occurring themes and sadness.
The gesture to death is what opens up the content of “Performance and Portraits/Travel in Italy”, a review of Hujar’s work at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art. One of the first images is Palermo Tomb #1 (1963), which immediately puts Hojar’s work in the shadow of death. But not only that, the works in “Performance and Portraits” reveal how Hujar’s photography often shows past moments, while the current photography bleeds each other. His portrait of David Brintzenhofe was applied with makeup before he went on stage, which showed that a person was between states of existence. Just as the bodies of his subjects may invite us to think about how thin the gap between students and death is, Gary Indiana, Mongolia, seems to embody this vulnerability perfectly – and Wojnarowicz’s series Limbo of New YorkAlso exhibited in part of the exhibition, it is also possible to take a number from the past and put him (the tramp) into the present, Hojar’s work has become an archive of people and places over time. These photos give us something to mourn, not only in the lost artist or in the ruins of the docks and New York buildings, but also in capturing the beauty of these places. The image of the young man in Hohare in Italy, sunbathing on the rocks, or the casual porn of the residents who cruised Christopher Street Pier not only showed us the idea of the lost things—in the way his image of his devastating buildings or the Italian disaster, but also showed us something.
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No wonder “The Eyes Open in the Dark”, another Hujar retrospective from Raven Row in London, shows images of Hujar’s work with artists made by his contemporaries, including an almost Cubist grid portrait by Paul Thek and an image of Wojnarowicz in his death Hujar. Through this art communion, Hojar and the people in his inner circle can provide us with a kind of bloodline, a way to place ourselves in the timeline of queer art and artists who have broken the AIDS crisis. Hamad Butt, on the contrary, is the subject of “worry,,,,,“In a retrospective exhibition of Imma in Dublin, we get rid of solid and recognizable images of the past. The AIDS crisis and his diagnosis in 1987 have a more explicit understanding of Bart’s work; in a video interview with his younger brother Jamal [he] I really want to talk about the limitations of painting. “While Butt’s work is likewise a document of the time and community that the AIDS crisis has destroyed, his work provides us with less material worlds that make us sad, instead trying to capture the unstable landscape through more abstract forms or those pre-butts themselves approaching death.
Butt’s work is about language, or a failure. Hujar provides a place with an understanding visual representation of people and places, and Bart seems to be saying there is no literal, symbolic way to deal with the AIDS crisis. Instead, he uses abstraction and metaphor as a way of grief. exist Frisbee (1990), open the IMMA retrospective device, which is a colony of flies – some lives, some dead – involving the movement of life behind the glass door. In each of the three sections of the board, statements about the intersection of faith, violence and sex and death are provided, and without hesitation: “We have a series of texts, “We have triffid covering up sexual behavior with death,” a line of text. Triffid, freed from John Wyndham’s novel, relapses in Butt’s work, is a shorthand for his way of introducing the AIDS crisis in practice: as the end of the world.
Even outside of his device, Triffid lingers in the background. In pastel and pencil drawing Untitled – Transmission (intention line and intent line)a piece of paper is booked by Triffids’ drawings; at the end of the page, there are five in the upper left corner and two in the upper right corner. Everything between them is Line of intentiona series of blue dashes moved from one end of the page to the other. The line could be a gap in the bed post, a count of a dead person, something as simple as one another. Butt keeps returning to the alien body of Wyndham’s novels, and teenage sex images from his 1990 video Triffidspart spread Installation – Think of bugs as metaphor for the sick body and the result of AIDS diagnosis. Butt’s work after diagnosis clearly states the possibility of death. his familiar Installation, combining dangerous chemicals that are out of reach for each other and even bring the audience close to death. if cradlewhere chlorine is the Newtonian cradle, from right angles it looks like a glass blowing chemical container is in contact, with minimal force likely to crush them.
Ironically, given Butt’s formally slanted art, it makes death directly referenced, and even if Hujar’s work is more aesthetically direct, he rarely directly addressed death itself. Even his image of Palermo’s tomb felt the lost thought more than the thoughts of death itself. Of course, one of the most famous photos of Huahar, Candy Dear, she is dying (1973), introducing the Candy Nearly Death, but this is another image, in the Ravens Review, provides a different view of the way Hojar shoots the end. exist Jackie Curtis is dead (1985), Hujar filmed Curtis’ last eyes closed in a coffin, with a flower on his suit and a disco record next to him. Although there is often a hypothesis of mortality in Hohar’s work—the posture of his subjects and the background of the AIDS crisis, we are forced to not ignore his work—the way he proposes death itself is different; here is a finality that conflicts with the world he captures. Hojar captured a living world. Even subjects who are susceptible to or deep in their minds like John Waters and Susan Sontag (the former is shown as part of “performance and portraiture” and the latter is “open in the dark”), are at any time possible to be alive, possessed by certain thoughts or possibilities. Inevitably, this becomes part of the grief of our lost communities through Hujar’s work. We bring us the possibility of taking away from us. Instead of capturing the behavior of losing something, Hujar shows us what is missing.
Not only do these artists bring these artists together, in a very different visual language, they show a world that is undoing under the shadow of death and plague, but the question of memory: How can we remember what is missing? Intentional or not, there is a moment in “worry” that echoes Hohar’s practice. When Hamad was interviewed by his brother, he lay on the couch as if he was posing for a portrait of Chahar, providing us with a part of himself as if it was the easiest thing in the world. Butt’s work understands how fragile and unstable things are, showing them in real time through ambitious, disturbing installations. These are these moments, and any space that may exist between life and death is so thin that if we try hard enough we may glimpse it and Hujar seems to freeze in time. Much of his work is dedicated to living in life moments in between. This can be seen from the image of his performers – Huja’s images from Italy, capturing the ever-changing and changing of live performances, just like elsewhere – and the scenery; in one of the last rooms of The Crows, is a series of photographs of Hujar’s Hudson River, whose portraits and faces we often associate with his work have disappeared, and we are asked to do with the reality of absence and everything we can with the blank space left behind.
