Yearly Archives: 2012

Presidential Handshake

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1983

Signed and dated, l.r.

Offset print of photomontage

11 x 8.5 inches

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The 1980s saw unprecedented attacks on the civil liberties of homosexuals and PWA’s from the religious right. Calls to quarantine PWA’s, Reagan’s silence on AIDS, and the Helms-led offensive of the NEA all escalated under a propaganda machine of intolerance and disinformation. In contrast, queer nightclubs, activists, and artists united in an effort to raise awareness of the absurdity of the claims being leveled against them. This clash of lifestyles offered rich material for the art of the period.

Reagan was always an easy target for ridicule due to his administration’s profoundly inhumane policies. This piece by Anita Steckel is overtly political on many levels. Framed in the era by a backlash to years of civil rights protests on one end and AIDS on the other, it addresses fascism, homosexuality, and militarism. Both Reagan and Hitler were proponents of extreme conservatism, both spent heavily on the military industrial complex, and each in their own way were architects in the mass death of sexual minorities.

G.E.

52,435 Dead

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1989

Offset lithograph

17 x 11 inches

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In 2015 Kozik, creator of the Smorkin’ Labbit, confirmed this was an early graphic design he made in the fight against government indifference to AIDS. Kozik went on to become “one of the rock world’s top poster artists”, according to Rolling Stone, honing his skills in AIDS activism.

G.E.

Scenapse (Trees Fields Waves)

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Using digital technologies to break down straightforward camera-based imagery, Aziz + Cucher re-build their scenes to create a deliberate tension between the photographic and the graphic. In these works, the pixel is highly pronounced not only to highlight the technological aspect of the process, but also to point to the fact that the world, like the body, is constructed of tiny particles and elements. The essence of everything can ultimately be reduced to nothing more than the proton, neutron, and electron, and we, as human beings, are part of that synchronicity of nature.