Gregg Bordowitz Drive ─ The AIDS Crisis Is Still Beginning

Gregg Bordowitz: Drive presents a series of essays and texts surrounding Gregg Bordowitz’s films Fast Trip, Long Drop and Habit. Images from Bordowitz’s installation Drive, exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago April 6–July 7, 2002, are also featured.
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Bordowitz made a big splash in 1993 with Fast Trip, Long Drop. It featured a blend of documentary footage and fictional narrative to focus on his HIV?positive diagnosis, the diagnosis of a friend’s breast cancer, and the recent deaths of his grandparents. Instead of creating a somber ode to mortality, Bordowitz offered a darkly humorous essay on history, illness, AIDS activism, and representational strategies.
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Habit (2002) is the sequel to Fast Trip, Long Drop. It follows the regimens, routines, and thoughts that result from Bordowitz’s decade of life as a person with AIDS. Coupled with this are new interviews with some of the same faces featured in Fast Trip, Long Drop, the introduction of new friends and confidants, and extensive footage of AIDS activists in South Africa fighting and organizing to gain access to the same drugs that are keeping Bordowitz and many of his friends alive. The tone of this film is slower from the earlier one, reflecting a change in the tenor of AIDS activism, the fact that South Africa 2001 is not New York 1992, and the new domesticity and responsibility that governs Bordowitz’s life today.
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For the book, Brodowitz assembled a collection of authors whose views on AIDS and/or aesthetics he greatly respects. Topics range from critical assessments of his films, to the moralizing tenor found in popular images of homosexuality and AIDS, the current state of the aesthetic avant-garde, political activism, race and its complicated relation to sexuality and public policy, living with illness, and a short fiction work on the mental space of illness.

Gregg Bordowitz is a writer and filmmaker. He currently is on the faculty of the film department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a faculty adviser of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. His writings have appeared in anthologies such as AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism; Queer Looks; Uncontrollable Bodies; Resolutions; and in the publications The Village Voice, Frieze, Artforum, October, and Documents. A collection of his writings, titled The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous will be will be released by MIT Press in Fall 2004.
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