How Can Art Stop Aids?

The global art project Make Art/Stop Aids came to Durban last week, along with the exhibition Not Alone. Peter Machen spoke to David Gere from LA's Fowler Museum who co-curated the show

At the close of one of the most humid days in a summer full of humid days, I am taking refuge on the veranda of one of Durban's grand old colonial houses. I am talking to Professor David Gere who is in town for the installation and opening of Not Alone: an international project of Make Art/Stop Aids at the Durban Art Gallery. The exhibition, which has previously been shown at the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles, was co-curated with former DAG director Carol, and showcases artworks from around the world produced in response to the HIV pandemic. From Durban to LA, from Brazil  to India, the remarkable collection of work is both powerful in its scope and moving in its intimacy, chronicling the many human responses to the world's most famous virus, a virus that has changed the very nature of our skin.

At the opening of the exhibition, Gere spoke about what a remarkable institution the Durban Art Gallery is. Under the auspices of Make Art/Stop Aids, he has worked closely with museums around the world for the last five years, and his experience with the gallery has lead him to view it as a unique and dynamic institution, particularly in relation to programming around HIV.

He talks about the  photograph in the show of the Durban City Hall wrapped in a red Aids ribbon being an amazing expression of the gallery's commitment. “It was the year 2000, the time of the World Aids Conference. You know, I've been to other World Aids Conferences where there have been art exhibitions that I've liked, but I have never seen a city hall wrapped in community art projects.” And even more amazing than the sheer volume of the  community work developed for the project was the fact, says Gere, that the work was so strong. “The creative involvement of so many people –  it just doesn't happen in other places. So it has to be recognised that something extraordinary has been happening and continues to happen in Durban.”

“It's fairly rare that a civic building – a city hall, a symbol of another era – gets taken over in some respect by an art institution, sharing it with the ongoing bureaucracy that's just down the stairs. Messing with it, enlivening it, goading it, pinching it, poking it. And I see that happening in this institution in a way that seems to be both creative and acceptable – in a surprising way – to the bureaucracy. Because the gallery hasn't been forced to leave, hasn't been pushed out the door.”

Los Angeles may never have had a city hall wrapped in an Aids ribbon but as the epicentre of the HIV virus in the late 80s and early 90s, when Aids literally devastated its gay community, it was, like Durban in the late 90s and 21st century, home to a great deal of work  produced in response to the virus. 'Not Alone' acts as a bridge between these two global epicentres – at different points in time – exploring the nature and consequences of a virus which has had a profound impact on life on earth. The resulting continuum of experience is a testament both to the infinite human responses to the virus and to the common human experiences of disease and prejudice.

At the opening of the show, the American Consul General spoke about all the good work that America has been doing in the arena of HIV and Aids. I laughed a little bitterly to myself, thinking of the ludicrous preconditions which George Bush had imposed on all US-based Aids funding and which Obama recently rescinded. I ask Gere about the extent to which this rescinding will have an  impact on the way that American artists work, both at home and abroad.

“It's going to have a huge impact on our relations with the rest of the world”, he responds. “So of course it will affect how artists do their work and how public health people do their work. No question.” He continues. “First of all, if I could take back so much of what my government has done in the last 25 years I would do it. Ronald Reagan was an embarrassment. George W Bush was an embarrassment. And I am proud that I live in a country that now has Barack Obama as its president. It's been a complete and utter transformation – in my experience.”

But Gere does point out that one good thing that came out of the Bush administration (perhaps the only good thing) was a programme called PEPFAR (President's Programme for Aids Relief) in which huge amounts of money are used for prevention and treatment in Sub-Saharan Africa. But there were controls on how that money could be spent. A certain percentage of it had to be spent on abstinence-only programmes. Condoms could be bought but only in limited numbers. And countries had to take a pledge that was against sex work.” Those preconditions were removed almost immediately by Obama on his taking office. “So now”, says Gere, we have the money without those controls. And much more good work could and should be happening over these next few years.”

About a year ago Gere's son said to him, “But daddy, how does making art stops Aids?” The question stopped Gere in his  tracks. “My response was to gulp and to feel the strength of what it was he had just posed to me, but then also to begin a project that I'm still in the midst of – listing and theorising the ways in which that is possible. There have been those who think that art might function as a magic pill but I'm not one of those people. I have seen amazing art projects – in the Unites States for example in the 1980s – that did bring tremendous solace to the people who participated in them. But they still died. So it didn't keep people alive. It perhaps changed the quality of their lives and the quality of their deaths but it didn't sustain them physically.”

On the other hand, Gere believes that the arts can indeed function in several very profound ways to save lives. Perhaps the most obvious is the sharing of basic information that we need to protect ourselves. “I think it's really easy to not hear those messages when we're given that information, because it's a little bit like tuning out our ears when we're teenagers. So how to overcome that? Artists are master communicators. Artists are the people who know how to entrance an audience. They know how to create communities and enact transformation.” “When others might be complacent or quiet or thinking, 'I can't do anything in response to my government's inaction', artists have so often been the people who raised the placard, organised the march, printed the t-shirt, made their art become part of their activism in a very direct response towards governmental bureaucracy and inaction.”

So while it's perfectly clear to Gere that making art cannot stop Aids in the absolute sense – he knows only too well that the only thing that can stop Aids is a vaccine – art can slow the spread of the disease. It can help to stop individual people from acquiring the virus by forcing consciousness onto their behaviour in ways that more formal communications often fail to do. And, vitally, it can help to remove the stigmatisation of HIV.

And there are many other things it can do. Gere will no doubt be cataloguing the list in his head for the rest of his life. But even if art can do nothing at all, the collection of works in the Durban Art Gallery offer a profoundly moving expression of the joys, pleasures and pains of being human, something the virus knows nothing about and cares even less. And very simply, the exhibition shows us – and perhaps this is the point of nearly all art – that we are not alone.

This story was first published in The Sunday Tribune