ART REVIEWS : Two Views of AIDS: One a Triumph, the Other a Failure

Art exhibitions that approach the subject of AIDS enter a mine field. This difficult territory is studded with medical, social, ethical and political issues that claim a prominent position among the most important of our time. The stakes are high, the ramifications far-reaching. It’s no place for good intentions unredeemed by piercing insight.

On Tuesday, the Municipal Art Gallery opened two exhibitions whose contradictory approaches demonstrate the thorniness of the matter. “Raging at the Visible: AIDS in the City of Angels” overflows with the awful failure of good intentions. By sharp contrast, “The Indomitable Spirit: Photographers and Artists Respond to the Time of AIDS” is an achievement of unusual note.

“The Indomitable Spirit” was organized by Photographers + Friends United Against AIDS, a Manhattan-based organization that raises substantial funds for AIDS research, education and care. The exhibition has generated a book and a limited edition portfolio featuring new work by 10 of the participating artists; both are for sale. (The portfolio may be seen at BlumHelman Gallery, Saturday through June 9.) The 94 works in the Municipal Art Gallery show, which had its debut last February at New York’s International Center of Photography, will be auctioned at a Sotheby’s benefit in October.

In addition to fund-raising, the group also seeks to utilize the talents of artists to stimulate action and awareness of AIDS issues. Forsaking lip service, they have here produced an important model.

The fight against AIDS has been cruelly hampered by those who, in the name of religion, politics or profits, cynically manipulate human lives for self-serving ends. “The Indomitable Spirit” manages a remarkable end-run, by offering nothing less than a convincing image of collective healing.

What it heals is the horrific social divisiveness that so far characterizes general response to the disease. Curator Marvin Heiferman invited photographers of all kinds to participate in the show; commercial, art, sports, fashion, medical and journalistic photographers contributed. They were asked simply to submit an image that, from their own perspective, would serve as “a celebration of human strength, compassion, and courage in the face of challenge and adversity.”

The subject of the show is not the ravages of disease, but hope in the time of AIDS. If that sounds sentimental--or difficult, liberating, mysterious, desperate, uplifting, contradictory or beautiful--rest assured that it is. All these responses and more will be found in the show.

Lynn Davis’s cool, silent, exquisitely elegant photograph of an iceberg is plainly metaphoric, matching the dazzling beauty of nature with its awesomely destructive power. In Bert Stern’s 1962 photograph of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, that same beauty, culturally magnified, is paired with mortal fragility: A tiny tracheotomy scar stands as the only blemish on Taylor’s otherwise flawless body. With a change in gender, the aim is the same in Herb Ritts’s 1987 image of a muscle man hefting an evanescent soap bubble.

Proscribed fantasies of modern heroism are explored in David Levinthal’s picture of children’s toys, in Burt Glinn’s photograph of Christopher Reeve on the set of “Superman” and in Cindy Sherman’s glamour-queen self-portrait. There’s gentle communion in Sally Mann’s tribute to her father’s life and death, and in Alon Reininger’s picture of the tenderness between men, one a person with AIDS.

Daunting puzzles of discovery are offered by Peter Nagy’s hieroglyphic map of an Egyptian pyramid and John Schlesinger’s mysterious beaker illuminated by a movie projector. There is even a “pure” image of hope: a seemingly abstract photograph by scientist Michael Davidson, which in fact shows the crystalline structure of the medication AZT.

More than any of the several score of accomplished works, however, it is the magnificent panoply of responses that is truly moving. The focus is quietly but firmly shifted away from divisive stalemate among competing doctrines, and toward an encounter with diversity, openness and the dignity of individual humanity.

“The Indomitable Spirit” opens up the experience to include virtually everyone, which is precisely the most frequently obstructed and denied reality of this disease. The populations who have taken the initial brunt of the epidemic--gay men, blacks, Latinos--were already shunted to the margins by our culture. AIDS has been used to add barbed wire to the fence. The exhibition artfully takes the fence down. It knows, and shows, that we are all living with AIDS.

Would that the same could be said for the companion show, which has been assembled by Gallery curator Susan Foley Johannsen. A brochure tells us that “Raging at the Visible: AIDS in the City of Angels” is limited to work by artists who have been “diagnosed with AIDS related symptoms or know a friend or loved one who has.” To be sure, the AIDS community has special reason to insist upon being heard; but this ill-considered venue muffles voices instead.

First, it divides people into Us and Them. In the context of a discriminatory society that has stalled research and care from the very beginning, a show like this cannot avoid an exploitative aura of voyeurism. The effect inadvertently parallels the noxious claim that the disease is a factor of special “risk groups,” who can be contained, when in truth it is spread by risk behaviors , which are responsibilities shared by everyone.

Second, it inappropriately implies that the disease is another new impulse for the creation of heartfelt works of art expressing human mortality. (The show’s title comes from Theodore Roethke’s poem, “The Dying Man.”) When you come upon the late Nicholas Wilder’s non-figurative painting, “Echo II-For G.C.,” you have been primed to scan its nested, horizontal rectangles--black inside navy blue inside white--as a metaphor for the human condition in the time of AIDS. This is both a gross distortion of Wilder’s art and a dodging of the specific ideological conditions actually responsible for the spread of suffering and death.

AIDS is a disease, not a metaphor. A few works attempt to address it as such. But the clear aim of the presentation, which frames them all, is to uncover an indivisible essence at the core of experience of the disease. At best naive, this romantic effort speaks of a serious curatorial misapprehension.

The error is that the mysterious core of the experience is not hidden, nor is there any supposed secret waiting to be uncovered. The unique essence residing deep inside this ravaged moment is a complex virus called HIV, a virus that must be avoided, subverted, stopped. Many things could have been done in the show to contribute to these necessary actions. That it only contributes to their continued obfuscation is to be earnestly regretted.

“The Indomitable Spirit” and “Raging at the Visible” remain through June 24 at the Municipal Art Gallery, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 485-4581.