Viral ecologies: Refiguring ‘psychic immunology’, in the art of Helen Chadwick

Abstract

This article examines the artist Helen Chadwick’s 1989 digital montage series Viral Landscapes as an intervention in discourses of immunity circulating around the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the UK. The Viral Landscapes are unusual for art of this period in working closely with medical concepts and technologies, if only to problematise the ways in which these were mobilised. Strategically appropriating ideas of ‘psychic immunology’ emergent at the time, the work, I argue, formulates an affective ground for the extension of immunological responsibility beyond the confines of human bodies and societies. Through a close examination of the artist’s methods and the work’s aesthetics, I identify therein an alternative model of the subject from the closed bodily system and fixed identity presupposed by contemporary biomedicine. Influenced in particular by Deleuzo-Guattarian theories of machinic desire, as well as queer-theoretical constructions of the sexual subject as polymorphous, Chadwick’s model of the psychically immune subject seems to be grounded in a vital sexual energy, constructed through interpenetration by multiple, diffuse entities in ecological relation.