United in Anger

Watched the premier of this documentary on the history of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, last night. Highly recommended, especially if like me, you are looking for a historical overview of the movement and links to their use of visual & performative tactics.

United in Anger Trailer from United in Anger on Vimeo.

Did you know that by 1991, ACT UP was staging political funerals and chucking the ashes of the dead onto the White House lawn? This was one of the most powerful parts of the movie for me from a representational (can I say art historical?) perspective. Not only were these political actions, where symbols (political posters, signs, photographs, people marching, caskets, flowers, eulogies) were used to make statements about the government's and the country's blindness and disregard for a terrible public health crisis (these were truly funerals for democracy), but they were actual funeral processions, too, with actual bodies having succumbed to the virus and actual mourners with deep feelings of sorrow and rage. What happens when these two forms of representation - political symbology and public/private ritual come together? A very powerful political statement, for sure, one that is literally underpinned by the personal, by actual experience, by real and visible (and not just represented) grievance and pain.*

The film briefly touches on the fact that many participants in ACT UP were people who were not "political." They were not activists, and had they not found themselves infected and suddenly stripped of their habitual privileges within America's healthcare system, they would never have put their bodies on the line in direct action. A few people interviewed mentioned that there seemed to be a split within the movement between people who were there because they wanted to heal themselves and those who were there because they were just angry with the system itself and/or wanted to heal other people. This is an interesting point, though I'm not sure what to say about it. Except that in the case of the political funerals, clearly being touched personally, knowing that your body could be the next one in the casket, made for a stronger statement and a more powerful demonstration. Yes, it is largely a matter of demands: do you fight for drugs for yourself now or do you set your sights on a larger transformation of the healthcare system for everybody, not just yourself, not just for those society finds "deserving." Tough questions, though not, I think, mutually exclusive ones.

*Not saying that demonstrators do not bring their actual experiences with them when they march, just that they are not as visible then and there, they do not constitute the very form of the protest.