New York city residents and visitors can see the exhibition Hunter Reynolds: Survival AIDS, a new series of work that incorporates elements spanning 25 years of image making, and constructed around Reynolds' experience as a gay man living in the age of AIDS. Survival AIDS will combine three modalities that the artist has used in various ways in his work over the years: the Blood Spot series, Mummification Performance Skins, and Photo Weavings. At Participant Inc., 253 East Houston, NYC, May 1 - June 5, 2011. Opening reception May 1, 7:00-9:00PM.
Also, on Saturday May 7, 2011, Partipant and Visual AIDS will host a Symposium 7:00-9:30 PM with a Mummification Performance to follow (gallery hours extended until midnight). The symposium, Witnessing "Survival AIDS", examines how HIV/AIDS reconfigures queer identify formation and contemporary visual and performance art. Presentations will be given by Julia Bryan-Wilson, David Deitcher, Nathan Lee, and Anthony Viti. The symposium will precede a mummification performance by Hunter Reynolds.
Prologue: The Myth of the Cure
The myth of the modern medical cure both inspires and deludes us. It inspires for the obvious reason that the healing image of the end of disease and the guarantee of long life remain within our genetic imperative and moral code for survival. But the myth of the cure deludes us in promoting the misleading expectation that our medicinal arsenals and knowledge of the body can and should deliver us from every infliction. It's an expectation that no generation prior to 1950 could have held. In fact, the likelihood of succumbing to disease and to a great degree an early death to disease were things everyone in society understood to be among the tribulations they could at any time face. But with the quick succession of advances in medicine of the twentieth century accumulating, the myth of the modern medical cure came to be perceived as a moral and political entitlement endowed by modern civilization. School children in the 1960s were instilled with the expectation of living lives virtually disease free. And it's this expectation that also came to account for the widespread disillusionment overtaking our generation in the last quarter of the last century as we learned that the mythical cure we'd been promised seemingly all at once became deflated and overrun by the shocking onslaught of a new disease that modern medicine not only failed to anticipate and stave off, but from which even these three decades later science still cannot fully deliver us.
It's within this overlapping zone of hope and uncertainty that arose with AIDS that I see the art of Hunter Reynolds fulfilling a unique need. His art has been conceived entirely in response to the shocking mortality, disillusionment and prejudice that came flooding in on the AIDS generation. Reynolds was from the beginning of the AIDS crisis part of the generation of queer artist-activists that included painters Ross Bleckner and David Wojnarowicz; conceptualists and sculptors Robert Gober, Nayland Blake, Greg Bordowitz, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres; the photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and Nan Goldin; and the artist coalitions General Idea and Gran Fury. Together they disseminated excruciating commentary, documentation and healing efforts during the emergence and spread of what was being mediated as "the gay plague." The range of their work mirrored the shocking newness of a disease no one recognized nor could have been prepared for in an epoch that nurtured the widespread misconception that the march of human progress ensured that medicine would conquer the world's diseases one by one. In composing the signage of a disease that just a few years earlier seemed impossibly medieval for our hyper-clinical and antiseptic world, the artists of the new and mysterious scourge of the 1980s documented and eulogized the youthfulness of the newly felled victims and the speed with which their bodies were ravaged from within.
As the plague came to be identified with what we today recognize as the HIV retrovirus, and the geopolitical climate became remembered as the Age of AIDS, the new generation of artists made the cruel reality shockingly clear. Cures can, do, and may always elude us, especially given that the world of microorganisms is forever mutating new disease. The inevitability of disease makes it even more imperative that people make disease meaningful. It at first sounds self-negating to make disease meaningful, but to leave it meaninglessness is to remain silent, apathetic, and noncommunicable. If the artists and activists of the AIDS generation taught us anything, it's that "silence equals death." Making disease meaningful is what makes people communicative about disease; what makes us adaptable to it; puts us ahead of its reproduction; enables us to prevent it. And though it wasn't always obvious to the mainstream media and it's audience, the art made about and around AIDS played a strategic role in articulating the nature and spread of HIV/AIDS, making the art audiences among the best informed and adaptable in the defense against it.
Today with the world death toll for AIDS reaching well into the tens of millions, we children of modernism have been forced to reacquaint ourselves with the existentialist notion of the meaningless absurd--the utter disregard and inhospitality with which the world greets our will--in this case our will to remain healthy. The myth of the cure is still prevalent, but it is now tempered by an alertness for human conceits that make us blind to human fragilities and a healthy skepticism holding there to be no amount of human desire, action or ingenuity, even when equipped with the sciences and technology of modernity, to secure idealistic assurances over the uncertainties and afflictions of life. By the time we were impacted with the terror of 9/11, we found ourselves awkwardly reaching for the comfort of an ancient prayer (some might call it the mitigating superstition) acknowledging the absurdity of life and asking that humanity again find the grace "to accept that which cannot be changed, the courage to change the things that can, and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other."
The Healing Art of Hunter Reynolds
This Sunday, May 1, the New York public art space Participant, Inc. presents recent work by Hunter Reynolds in a show called Survival AIDS. A good portion of the work is only weeks old, but it is comprised from photographic grid-collages reproducing newspaper articles published between 1989 and 1993 that chronicle the evolution of queer and transgender culture and the activism then springing up from it to combat the spread of AIDS. To expand on and counter the negative tenor and misinformation of these early articles in hindsight, while seemingly warding off the traumatic memories of prejudice, indifference, and religious superstition that greeted the ostracized and dying HIV positives of those years, Reynolds superimposes documentation of a range of art that he made in the three decades he's lived with HIV. Although Reynolds has never purposely made art of an ironic nature, his work now takes on the overarching irony that confronts our understanding of the myth of the medical cure today, tempered as it is by skepticism and loss. Yet, riddled as the work is with the signage and iconography of death and disease, Reynolds keeps the message clear of becoming an elegy of surrender to the forces that could bury our hopes.
Reynolds manages this by wielding a kind of night vision in the space of existential uncertainty that dims hope. For uncertainty by its very nature keeps any one potential fate from tyrannically restraining any other potentiality that might inform reality--including the potentiality, uncertain as it remains, that keeps alive the hope that science and medicine can come through for us even if it must be shorn of such modernist and positivist conceits that human progress will inevitably triumph over nature. Of course Reynolds, like hundreds of thousands of HIV survivors, are living because we all continue to depend on science. Despite being flawed and riddled by physiological complications, reactions and setbacks, science enables our bodies to resist overwhelming inhabitation by the HIV retrovirus. The effect is that Reynolds' use of media documentation, which in large part mediated the social reality and history of AIDS as we know it, meshes almost seamlessly with a mythopoetic iconography and series of shamanistic performances despite their stark contrasts--a matter of the rigor of science vs. the aesthetics of acting out. And that's because both science and art are being made to reconcile for the duration that Reynolds is compelled to keep vigilant over the battle waged within him, while at the same time reinforcing Reynolds' will to keep alive and hope-filled.
The mythopoetic urge--that is the impulse to make self-conscious myth (as distinct from myth which we confuse with reality)--has enjoyed something of a renaissance in contemporary art thanks to such artists as Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Marina Abamovic, Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, Kiki Smith and Mariko Mori--all of whom have identified the body in various ways as a mytho-theatrical site. But Reynolds is unique in mining the mythopoetic force of the body in that in the mid-1980s, when he found out he was HIV positive, and before the known treatments could guarantee even a few months of his survival, Reynolds had little choice but to shift his entire cognitive focus away from the passive anticipation of a cure and onto the altogether more active artistic embodiment of engineering his own willful healing and survival. The idea of "healing" in the sense that Reynolds cites it, is distinct from the cure not just in the degree of wellness attained. Healing is extant wherever cellular regeneration is achieved and sustained in coexistence with the marauding, if now constrained, invading organism. By contrast, the cure is no more nor less than the total annihilation of the marauder. And while it can be said that no one knows how much of healing is a state of mind and how much is the effect of exterior physical stimulation (by medicines, surgeries, machines), no one can deny that healing from within is often within our power to an extent that finding a cure in the world is not.
In this context Reynolds sees there being no restraint on our power to make art a healing factor in the fashion that premodern societies (and some tribal communities extant today) convert the myths of magical and miraculous cures into healing ceremonies of faith. I don't mean that Reynolds resorts to quackery or superstition. I mean that in despair of doing nothing, turning to the generative impulse of art making, Reynolds resorts to performance and iconography as a means of taking up the challenge of survival. Art is, after all, an intuitive and heuristic molding of an initially private reality the artist can enter and exit at will and exercise his godliness. For the materialists and positivists among us who dismiss the mythopoetic idea of mind over matter as so much psychosis, I counter with the defense that facing the horizon of death, the individual ravaged by disease doesn't merely have the choice of reaching for the psychological defense and sustenance that in art making can conceivably prolong life. She has the self-responsibility of reaching for art and mythopoetics (even when she doesn't realize that's what she's reaching for) to keep the self and others alive even for the smallest intervals longer. It is, after all, why medical universities have for decades maintained whole departments to art therapy, parapsychological research, and the bio-chemical basis of tribal and folk cures.
Art as the last (or, for many, the first) resort to life has informed the newly reflexive, mythopoetic shamanism that laces much current art. I say "reflexive" because unlike the shamanism of ancient cultures, contemporary shamanism, like mythopoetics, admits of the imaginary component and cathartic release provided by myth and the adrenaline rush of real action replacing the magical alchemy that suspends disbelief. And yet, there is no mistake that the new shamanism in art reaches beyond mere aesthetics to effect the sustainability of life in sync with nature and science. Since art was an essential part of ritual and religion, and as it for many secular people today fills the void of spirituality in a materialist age, art has long been thought to provide a spiritual sustenance. It's the reason why artists in the West since German artists Joseph Beuys and Sigmar Polk, and to a lesser extent Dennis Oppenheim in the US, came to regard themselves as shamans, and why since Jean-Hubert Martin's historical and globally-inclusive exhibition Magciens de la Terre in 1989, held at the Centre Pompidou and the Grande Halle at the Parc de la Villette in Paris, reached out to the indigenous peoples of the world who developed their art as a traditional healing and empowering practice. With the persistence of AIDS diminishing the power of science in the minds of many artists, the impulse to call one's art shamanistic has become particularly attractive to queer artists despairing of waiting for the arrival of the Cure. If even for only a time, the mythopoetics of shamanism, as distinct from the naive belief in magic, seems increasingly tenable as a salve for the brooding consciousness and community of the infected.
The new aesthetic and performative reclamation of mythopoetics is reason enough for us to argue confidently against Susan Sontag's celebrated opinion in Illness As Metaphor when she argues, "the remedy to the negative morality of disease lies in its 'demythification,' that diseases (or for that matter, reality) can be described without metaphors, and that the healthiest way of being ill is one purified of metaphoric thinking." The problem with Sontag's proclamation is that, besides there being no reality that isn't composed in the mind of metaphor and myth, the mythification of disease is distinct from the mystification of disease. Sontag would be right were she to devalue demystification--the belief in things that have no rational anchorage in human experience. But mythification is entirely based in experience; it is the mindful extrapolation of experience. And as long as there is human cognition, which to a large extent operates as a mediation of myth, the valuation of the experiences we assimilate into the construct we call "reality" will always to some degree, and by necessity, include mythopoetic contents--that is myths we don't just imagine, but that we admit to being in part imaginary, yet having the real function of bridging over the voids of uncertainty in our lives.
Herein lies the ingenuity of Hunter Reynold's mythopoetic adaptation of the shamanistic world view. Just as Reynold's various mummification performances left behind mummy skins upon the artist's "resurrection" from bondage (see the videos and description below), Reynolds sheds personas, formal strategies, objects and images, that function variously as cathartic therapies and existential memento mori. Readiness for art, Reynolds indicates, is a readiness for healing. Art is the myth that admits its will for power over reality is at best tentative; it is the cure that acknowledges it emanates from dreaming rather than from the hard, abrasive and resistant world thought (also mythically) to be awaiting science as its premiere representation--a delusion of too many scientists insufficiently versed in critical, epistemological skepticism.
This shamanistic and mythopoetic development takes root in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Reynolds publicly assumed the persona of Patina du Prey, an avatar of questioning and questionable gender. Literally living in the role of Patina, Reynolds didn't merely crossdress or become a drag queen. Through Patina he assimilated and inhabited numerous myths beside the shaman--i.e., the two-spirit berdache; the dancing deity of creation and destruction; the priest who dresses as a woman to attain power; the hero who must dress as a woman to learn humility; the silent diva in the role of Florence Nightingale; Glenda the good witch of transport sending us home. Reynolds as Patina, performed in silence, alternately gazing through us and averting our acknowledgement as s/he silently appeared like an apparition on the country path, in the garden of the villa, along the crowded city promenade, on an underground subway car, in the center of the piazza, or rotating in the rotunda of some public building, church nave, or gallery as unprepared and prepared audiences alike found themselves drawn to Patina's outstretched arms summoning us to her healing presence by invoking, in the words of Reynolds and his longtime collaborator and photo-documentor, Maxine Henryson, "the goddess within."
Patina wasn't the act of some fakir, though there certainly is a hypnotic aspect to Patina's rotations and dances. Patina's magic consists of no more than her unremitting gaze out at the audience which, in feminist fashion, reverts the deadly gaze at the Medusa that the bronze-age patriarchies signified as obliterating men. Reverts, that is, back to its prehistoric, empowering gaze of the life-sustaining goddess. Dressed in a ball gown significantly custom-designed with a male bodice, Patina performed ritualistic dances of healing while silently transiting through public spaces. In other performances, especially those with a confined space, Patina rotated on a dais in a "music box dance" mimicking the celestial revolution of planets and stars long mythified as the home to which souls return in death. Throughout the Patina oeuvre, Reynolds referenced past and even present cultures that still conflate gender (like the Hindu hijiras). Patina's dances borrowed from cultures like the sufi dancers who wear dresses for spiritual purpose and which inform the performances Patina did in public spaces in which s/he turned in a bell dress. Like the sufi dancers, Patina's rotations churn a conceptualized energy of the site, but also offered a vortex drawing to her the public projection of emotions and wishes of the audience. Initiating others into her ceremony of healing, Patina became galvanized by a collection of human tension that Reynolds claimed was unlike any he felt before or since. Filled with a transformative energy, Patina's public visitations reprised the role of the Angel of Bethesda, whose footprint upon the square of Jerusalem unleashed an ambulatory spring of healing waters available to all who sought its waters.