The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous And Other Writings, 1986?003

The HIV epidemic animates this collection of essays by a noted artist, writer, andactivist. "So total was the burden of illness -- mine and others' -- that the only viable response,other than to cease making art entirely, was to adjust to the gravity of the predicament by usingthe crisis as a lens," writes Gregg Bordowitz, a film- and video-maker whose best-known works, FastTrip Long Drop (1993) and Habit (2001), address AIDS globally and personally. In The AIDS Crisis IsRidiculous -- the title essay is inspired by Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous TheaterCompany -- Bordowitz follows in the tradition of artist-writers Robert Smithson and Yvonne Rainer bymaking writing an integral part of an artistic practice.Bordowitz has left his earliest writings forthe most part unchanged -- to preserve, he says, "both the youthful exuberance and the palpablesense of fear" created by the early days of the AIDS crisis. After these early essays, the writingbecomes more experimental, sometimes mixing fiction and fact; included here is a selection ofBordowitz's columns from the journal Documents, "New York Was Yesterday." Finally, in his newestessays he reformulates early themes, and, in "My Postmodernism" (written for Artforum's fortiethanniversary issue) and "More Operative Assumptions" (written especially for this book), hereexamines the underlying ideas of his practice and sums up his theoretical concerns.In his maturework, Bordowitz seeks to join the subjective -- the experience of having a disease -- and theobjective -- the fact of the disease as a global problem. He believes that this conjunction isnecessary for understanding and fighting the crisis. "If it can be written," he says, "then it canbe realized."

James Meyer is Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University. He is the author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties and the editor of The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003 by Gregg Bordowitz (MIT Press, 2004).