Unbecoming (Series Q) by Eric Michaels

Series Q

by Eric Michaels

In 1982, the American-born anthropologist Eric Michaels went to Australia to research the impact of television on remote aboriginal communities. Over the next five years, until his death, he became a major intellectual presence in Australia. Unbecoming is Michaels’s gritty, provocative, and intellectually powerful account of living with AIDS—a chronicle of the last year of his life as he became increasingly ill. Michaels’s diary offers a forceful and ironic rumination on the cultural phenomenon of AIDS, how it relates to his concerns as both an anthropologist and a gay man, and the failure of medical and governmental institutions to come to terms with the disease. Like the AIDS testimony of artist David Wojnarowicz and filmmaker Derek Jarman, Unbecoming provides a view of the AIDS epidemic from a distinctly new vantage point.

Paperback

First published July 31, 1997

About the author

In the foreword of Eric's diary, Paul Foss summarised his career in these terms:

"After finishing his doctorate, Eric accepted a fellowship from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra to research the impact of television on remote Aboriginal communities - eventually published as The Aboriginal Invention of Television, 1982-86 (Canberra, AIAS, 1986). He remained in the Central/ Western Desert region where he involved himself in claims by Aboriginal media associations for increased local autonomy in video production and circulation (cf. "Aboriginal Content: Who's Got It - Who Needs It", Art & Text, 23-24, 1987; and For a Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla Makes TV at Yuendumu, Melbourne, Art & Criticism Monograph Series, Vol. 3, 1988). At the same time, Eric became interested in the new acrylic 'dot paintings' carried out at Yuendumu and Papunya, occasioning the essays "Western Desert Sandpainting and Post-Modernism" (in Warlukurlangu Artists, Kuruwarri: Yuendumu Doors, Canberra, AIAS, 1987) and "Bad Aboriginal Art" (Art & Text, 28, 1988). With these writings, exemplary in their refusal to romanticise indigenous cultures, Eric gained a wide following in Australia for his non-ethnographic approach to Aboriginal video and art."

Michaels, E. (1990). Unbecoming: an AIDS diary. Sydney: Empress Publishing. pp. 12-13.

But, what distinguished Eric's life as much as his brilliant career was its end. Eric was one of the first known residents of Central Australia to die with AIDS. And, in typical style, he did that in a very public and assertive fashion by documenting the last months of his life in a diary that was to be published after he had gone. "Unbecoming" is a remarkable volume. It is a confronting, 'warts and all' account of what seems like everything he did and said and thought as the virus took its final toll.

Eric Michaels home page;
http://astro.temple.edu/~ruby/wava/er...

Reviews

[Az · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Tidiness, we will discover by analogy, does not assure the cleanliness it promises... It merely obscures dirt: indeed, all natural (and finally, historical) processes."

Eric Michaels was an anthropologist who did media stuff with Central Australian Indigneous communities and wrote about the politics of Aboriginal art. In 1987 he wrote an AIDS diary, Unbecoming. He died in 1988, ironically (according to him) the 200 year anniversary of Australia's invasion by British colonists. Unbecoming knocks the breath out of you. It's a messy volume, fiercely theoretical, reflective, beautifully descriptive but also really pissed about the world that allows death to happen, AIDS to happen. It's on the list of the ten greatest books that I want my friends to read, along with Close to the Knives. Who knows, maybe it's sometimes better than Close to the Knives. I know this is a big call. But it's worth it.

[Joey Diamond · Rating 5 out of 5]

is this better than Close to the Knives like Az says? I don't know. But his spite and his humour alone make it completely wonderful.

Then there's all the genius moments of analysis that blew me away. His thoughts, just sometimes a few paragraphs, on things like Mardi Gras, hospitals, colonialism, gay lib, say more than whole books or essays. It feels like sometimes in his dying is decided to say fuck you to making boring arguments and engaging in predictable ideas so he just cuts right through to flaming brilliance.

[Zora · Rating 5 out of 5]

A blazing account of dying of AIDS in Australia in the late 1980s, but also much more than this.

[Kylie Cardell]

Intense, clever, revelatory. I love this book.