Muses from Chaos and Ash: AIDS, Artists, And Art

by Andrea R. Vaucher

AIDS is moving through every corner of the American landscape with frightening speed and force, but its presence is perhaps most deeply felt in the arts community, where it is having a shaping influence on the kind of work being produced. In this searingly powerful, daring, vitally important work from the front lines of the crisis, Andrea Vaucher explores, for the first time, the impact of AIDS on the work of artists who have tested HIV-positive themselves, from their own perspective, in their own words. Through intimate and revealing interviews, men and women from the worlds of literature, film, theater, dance, music, and the visual arts discuss the effects of AIDS on their own artistic evolution and on the creative process. Edmund White, Kenny O'Brien, Peter Adair, Paul Monette, Robert Farber, Arnie Zane, David Wojnarowicz, Bo Huston, Cyril Collard, Robert Mapplethorpe, Marlon Riggs, Herve Guibert, Larry Kramer, Tory Dent, Essex Hemphill, Carlos Almaraz, and Keith Haring are some of the artists who have had the generosity and sheer guts to share this most private side of their lives. Here they speak with freshness, vigor, and sometimes painful honesty on such subjects as anger, alienation and isolation, death and loss, activism and politics, freedom, spirituality, symbolism, sexuality, immediacy, and legacy as they relate directly to their work. The life of the artist has always been a kind of hero's journey, which AIDS only intensifies. Many of the artists living with the AIDS virus find themselves possessed of new and extraordinary energy, channeling fear and frustration into a kind of creative fire, finding new means of expression, changing the way they work and the way they perceive the ultimate meaning of that work. This transformation has far-reaching implications for the whole of late-twentieth-century art and beyond. Defiant, insightful, funny, tough, and tender, this is a book about courage, perseverance, and transcendence - and essential reading for

Genres: Queer, History, Art

260 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Soph Nova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exactly what you sign up for when you crack the book open, a lot of intercut interviews with artists dying of AIDS talking about a variety of subjects. Some of it is profound, some of it is banal, all of it is extremely worth spending time with.

[Julene · Rating 4 out of 5]

An assortment of topics: Artistic Exploration, Isolation and Alienation, Symbolism, Politics and its Activism, Spirituality, Legacy, etc... that different artists living with AIDS speak to. Many in the book have passed since it was published in 1993: Tory Dent, Keith Haring, Essex Hemphill, Robert Mapplethorpe, Paul Monette, etc... It provides insight to artists living in the heart of the epidemic and their various views. I reread sections periodically.

[Jackie]

tragic, heroic and necessary... chronicles the artistic ravages of aids ....a void in our creative community...

"A People Without History is like Wind in the Buffalo Grass... Sioux"