Sex, or the Illegible: AIDS Video Art and the Erotics of Abstraction

IF 0.2 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY Discourse-Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI:10.1353/dis.2023.a907673
Robert J. Mills
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Here, that is to say, the video’s fluid movement between discordant representative registers functions less to determine concrete figurations than to facilitate interpretive slippages. As the orange “A” gradually fades away, repositioning the graphic background as an abstracted foreground, a whole host of ordinarily guiding hierarchies, or means of orientation, are upturned. When narrative strands are elsewhere teased—more often than not through disembodied voices, echoes from an immaterial offscreen—they are similarly redoubled and refracted, set against one another and quickly dissipated. From the outset, then, A’s operative philosophy is introduced forthrightly: signification—be it linguistic, pictorial, or cinematic—is porous, insubstantial. 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Abstract

Sex, or the Illegible: AIDS Video Art and the Erotics of Abstraction Robert J. Mills (bio) A typeface “A” emerges from an empty black screen, its faded orange hues casting an extended glow across the otherwise impervious background. After a moment’s pause, this background is slowly eclipsed. A textured image of whites and purples fades in and takes its place; it might be marble, liquid captured in stasis (figure 1). Stasis is, however, shortly met by motion; a shadowed overlay of two men performing anal intercourse begins to play, at times taking on a glitch-like repetition, at times tending toward a rhythmic sensuality. As if responding to this newfound corruption, the once-prominent “A” fades out, absolving its engagement in the video’s graphic hedonism and resigning itself to a plane of total obscurity. For the remainder of the sequence, an aesthetics of the in-between endures; we watch a screen disorganized and afloat, left entirely uncoordinated amid these impressionistic layers competing restlessly for our attention. So begins André Burke’s A, a video experiment produced and first screened in 1986 that grapples foremost with the AIDS crisis as an epidemic of erratic miscommunication. Throughout this eight-minute work, an array of such hastily networked colors, textures, bodies, and voices converge in various constellations, staging a response to the ongoing plight that is replete with a number of embedded confusions. In the outlined opening, we watch a screen [End Page 223] rife with both visual accumulation and a respondent abstraction; although the image’s surface transforms insistently, unfolding across various planes and sites of action, meaning does not necessarily follow suit. Here, that is to say, the video’s fluid movement between discordant representative registers functions less to determine concrete figurations than to facilitate interpretive slippages. As the orange “A” gradually fades away, repositioning the graphic background as an abstracted foreground, a whole host of ordinarily guiding hierarchies, or means of orientation, are upturned. When narrative strands are elsewhere teased—more often than not through disembodied voices, echoes from an immaterial offscreen—they are similarly redoubled and refracted, set against one another and quickly dissipated. From the outset, then, A’s operative philosophy is introduced forthrightly: signification—be it linguistic, pictorial, or cinematic—is porous, insubstantial. The sanctified legibility of an ordinarily functioning symbolic system is frustrated and disturbed throughout, recasting our attention from the represented singular to the alien process of representation itself.1 Foregrounded in this way, A’s discursive surface emerges consistently as an explicit site of rhetorical constitution: an active, potent sphere of politicized negotiation. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. In the opening moments of A (André Burke, 1986), standard hierarchies of signification are called into question. In one of the earliest (and only) scholarly texts attending to A, Roger Hallas argues that Burke’s video works to stage the powerlessness experienced by many queer communities living under the AIDS epidemic’s heavily mediatized first decade. Paying close [End Page 224] attention to the video’s aestheticized invocation of discourse as process, Hallas writes evocatively of the way that A uses “the dense conjunction of sound and image to express the psychological effects of internalising the epidemic of signification.”2 Throughout his writing, Burke’s experimental video is said to be significant primarily due to its representational function, for the way that it strategically channels its medium’s composite foundations into an erratic exposé of the period’s debilitating media economy. “The cumulative intensity of sound and image” at work across A, he continues, “forces us to recognise that in the context of AIDS, we do not speak its discourse: it speaks us.”3 Such analysis forms part of Hallas’s wider project of tracking the myriad ways that alternative AIDS media came to challenge “the idea of experimental film and video as primarily personal and artisanal forms of expression” during the late 1980s.4 To this end, the article’s critical intervention lies in the way it frames A as initiating a movement away from an earlier avant-garde’s insular offerings to a more collectively embodied representation, with the latter said to acquire, through this shift, a generative...
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性,还是难以辨认:艾滋病视频艺术和抽象的情色
罗伯特·米尔斯(Robert J. Mills)(作者简介)一个字母“A”出现在空白的黑色屏幕上,它褪了色的橙色在原本不透光的背景上投射出一种延伸的光芒。在片刻的停顿之后,这个背景慢慢地黯然失色。白色和紫色的纹理图像逐渐消失,取而代之;它可能是大理石,静止状态下捕获的液体(图1)。然而,静止状态很快就会被运动所满足;两个男人进行肛交的阴影覆盖开始播放,有时呈现出类似故障的重复,有时倾向于有节奏的性感。似乎是对这种新发现的腐败的回应,曾经显赫的“A”渐渐淡出,使它不再参与视频中的图形享乐主义,让自己置身于完全默默无闻的境地。对于序列的其余部分,中间的美学存在;我们看着一个杂乱无章、飘浮不定的屏幕,在这些令人印象深刻的层次中,完全不协调地竞争着我们的注意力。安德烈•伯克的《A》就是这样开始的。1986年,这是一部制作并首次放映的视频实验,主要是把艾滋病危机作为一种不稳定的传播错误的流行病来解决。在这八分钟的作品中,一系列如此匆忙地网络的颜色、纹理、身体和声音汇聚在不同的星座中,对充满了许多嵌入式困惑的持续困境做出了回应。在概述的开头,我们看到一个屏幕充斥着视觉积累和回答抽象;尽管图像的表面不断变换,在不同的平面和活动地点展开,但意义并不一定随之变化。在这里,也就是说,视频在不协调的代表性音域之间的流畅运动,与其说是为了确定具体的形象,不如说是为了促进解释的滑动。随着橙色的“A”逐渐消失,将图形背景重新定位为抽象的前景,整个通常的引导层次结构或方向方式都被翻转。当叙事线索在其他地方被调戏时——通常是通过虚幻的声音,来自非物质的屏幕外的回声——它们同样被放大和折射,彼此对立,迅速消散。从一开始,A的操作哲学就被直截了当地介绍了:意义——无论是语言的、图像的还是电影的——是多孔的、非实质性的。一个正常运作的符号系统的神圣的易读性在整个过程中受到挫折和干扰,将我们的注意力从被表征的单一转移到表征本身的陌生过程在这种前景下,A的话语表面始终作为修辞构成的明确场所出现:一个积极的、强有力的政治化谈判领域。单击查看大图查看全分辨率图1。在A (andr Burke, 1986)的开篇,意义的标准等级受到质疑。在最早的(也是唯一的)关于A的学术文献中,罗杰·哈拉斯(Roger Hallas)认为,伯克的视频作品展现了许多同性恋群体在艾滋病流行的头十年中所经历的无力感。Hallas密切关注视频中作为过程的话语的审美化调用,他令人回味地写道,A使用“声音和图像的密集结合来表达内化意义流行病的心理影响”。在他的整个写作中,伯克的实验视频被认为是重要的,主要是因为它的代表性功能,因为它策略性地将其媒介的复合基础引导到一个不稳定的暴露时期衰弱的媒体经济的方式。“声音和图像的累积强度”在《A》中发挥作用,他继续说,“迫使我们认识到,在艾滋病的背景下,我们不是在说它的话语,而是它在说我们。”这样的分析构成了哈拉斯更广泛的项目的一部分,该项目追踪了在20世纪80年代末,艾滋病媒体以各种方式挑战“实验电影和录像作为主要个人和手工表达形式的想法”为此,这篇文章的关键干预在于,它将A定义为一种从早期先锋派的孤立提供到更集体具体化的表现的运动,后者据说通过这种转变获得了一种生成性的……
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Embalmed Air: The Case of the Cinematic Bubble Contributors Cultivating History: Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line and the Cinema of Agrarian Transition Spectatorship’s Scenes beside the Screen Sex, or the Illegible: AIDS Video Art and the Erotics of Abstraction
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