Archives in Endemic Time

The various archives of the art and activism produced in New York City in response to HIV/AIDS are remarkably extensive and robust. This claim does not negate some of the foundational and structural biases in these archives, nor the ongoing daily struggle to maintain and keep archives open in the neoliberal economy, especially for those grassroots and community ventures forced continually to renew their bids for scant funding and resources. Students of the ongoing historical cataclysm of HIV are often quick to suspect that mass death and the resultant temporal distortions produced by pervasive racism, homophobia, and economic inequality—lives and artistic careers dramatically curtailed, possessions and works junked by uninterested relatives—necessarily imply a precarious and partial record of the extraordinary cultural response to the epidemic. My point is not to deny the many thousands of artists whose work has been lost as a result of such destruction, but to emphasize the historical fact that since the height of the epidemic in the United States, many activists and artists have been acutely aware of their materials’ precarity, and as such have made particular, inevitably partial, yet impressive efforts at preservation. In New York, the activist group the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), active since March 1987, had cabinets dedicated to archiving in their early 1990s workspace on West 29th Street, in which xeroxed copies of posters and pamphlets would be filed; the collection was partially accessioned to the New York Public Library (NYPL) in 1995. In 1994, Frank Moore (1953–2002) and David Hirsh (dates unknown) launched the archive committee, an artist-led endeavor to create a slide repository of works by those who had died of or had HIV/AIDS; the committee soon merged with the already established organization Visual AIDS to become the Archive Project. Also in 1994, New York University (NYU) established the Downtown Collection at Fales Library, whose acquisition policy for records of Lower Manhattan’s artistic cultures was directly informed by the ongoing losses of the epidemic. The assumption of a general archival devastation wrought by the social and political crisis of AIDS must, then, be tempered by recognition of the painstaking work of such projects, the materials of which shape the stories we are able to tell of HIV/AIDS today. Marika Cifor’s Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS is the first extended study of the archival configurations of HIV/AIDS in New York, charting the history of their formation, how ideologies—“temporal, political, technological, cultural, and biomedical”—have shaped them, and the ways that people —“activists, artists, curators, and archivists”—continue to engage them (4). Focusing chiefly on these three collections, Cifor firmly establishes the history of “activist archiving,” which began during what Jules Gill-Petersen calls the “epidemic time” of HIV, the period ca.1981–96 when the death toll from AIDS rose unabated. Cifor is equally concerned with practices of “archiving activism” in “endemic time,” our present period, inaugurated by the introduction of highly active antiretroviral treatment in 1996 and the resultant improved quality of life for those more affluent, often white, communities with access to health insurance, and the continued, invisibilized spread of HIV and deaths from AIDS in economically and socially marginalized, often BIPOC, communities (4; 11).1 Cifor’s book is set against aspects of a prevailing North American cultural tendency to look back on the art and activism of the earlier period of “epidemic time” and celebrate it as a completed project. New York–based activists Alexandra Juhasz (b. 1964) and Theodore Kerr (b. 1979) call this broad tendency the “AIDS Crisis Revisitation,” arguing that it began in ca. 2008; a paradigmatic expression of the celebration of past heroism is David France’s Oscar-nominated 2012 film, How to Survive a Plague.2 Such a retrospective gaze on the victories of AIDS activism in the past— its successful pressurizing of the government and associated institutions for the development of drugs to make HIV a manageable chronic condition—can erase the contemporary circumstances of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the injustices that perpetuate it. As Cifor explains, “lifesaving antiretroviral medications” are “inaccessible to many,” and