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

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...