6 6 • V I D E O A R T , A G U I D E D T O U R
prompted by AIDS explore the experiences of individuals while revealing
the ways in which entrenched cultural, theological and medical attitudes
to homosexuality affect medical treatment and influence the way gay men
experience their illnesses. This battleground of representation has produced
much-needed educational and campaign tapes, and artists have also attempted
to express their fractured experience of the illness in a hostile society. In Positiv
(1997),
the
Canadian artist Mike Hoolboom divides the screen into a grid-like
montage of medical imagery – representations of what is going on inside his body
– and found footage of movies and TV programmes that were instrumental in
fashioning his identity as a gay man. The artist speaks of an ‘identity clinging to
numbers that continue to betray you’ as well as the contrast between the unity
of his body before the onset of the disease and the subsequent split of body and
self that gives him a sense that his ‘real body is somewhere else having a good
time’. In the UK, Derek Jarman echoed the dislocation of mind and body in his
video Blue (1993). His mind, he said, was as ‘bright as a button, but my body
is
falling
apart – a naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room’. Also in the UK,
Stuart Marshall observed that, even before AIDS, this experience of a ruptured
identity seemed to come with the sexual territory. A man is an individual with
full civic rights until he is recognised as a homosexual, a dangerous ‘other’
to manly norms. Once he is ill with the ‘gay plague’, he is quickly reduced to
‘a case history of a pathological illness’.
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Marshall dedicated much of his later
work to promoting the civic and medical rights of homosexuals with AIDS and
was one of the first artists to make television programmes about the disease in
the UK. Through works like A Journal of the Plague Years (1984) and Over Our
Dead Bodies (1991), Marshall celebrated the activism of AIDS support groups
and decried the homophobia conflating ‘deviance’ with an illness that was, in
some quarters, welcomed as divine retribution. Towards the end of his life, he
abandoned television and returned to the artistic context of video with a final
work, Robert Marshall (1991). The tape records a nostalgic journey Marshall
made to the place in Ireland where his father had died when he was himself
only a child. Marshall makes peace with the shadowy figure of his father
reanimated by the memories of family members who declare the artist to be
the spitting image of the dead man. The picture slowly sharpens of a paternal
presence that played its part in shaping Marshall’s identity even from beyond
the grave. The artist struggles to come to terms with the early loss of his father
as well as his own tenuous hold on life. The progressively desperate treatments
to which he submits fail to save him from the disease that already had claimed
so many of his friends.
In both North America and Europe, there was a defiant reaction to the
puritanical backlash that the gay community suffered in the wake of the
AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Much public broadcasting emphasised preventative
measures, with an emphasis on abstention from gay sex which was, by