THE FLASH COLLECTIVE
After decades of lecturing on the topic, I have come to realize that the answer to the question of how to re-engage a public with the issues surrounding HIV/AIDS in the present doesn't lie in looking at the canon of cultural production from those early days, such as Silence=Death. It's in looking through these works, to the resistance strategies that brought them into being in the first place. That's how we might imagine alternative models for the activation of our social spaces.
The "Flash Collective" is a part of my current practice, an experiment in political art-making in which I assemble a collective of limited duration to produce a single intervention in a public space. It is designed to focus the skills drawn on in collective decision-making with a surgical and fast-paced format intended to cut directly to the point of the work, content. The flash collective is a result-oriented exercise aimed at the very core of all social engagement, collective action.
I have conducted dozens of Flash Collectives on topics ranging from HIV/AIDS, stigma and criminalization, the viral divide, state violence and mass incarceration, gentrification, reproductive justice, gender and identity, displacement and immigration, and the 21st century commons, for partners including Yale, NYU, The New School, Visual AIDS, GMHC, Broadway Cares, The New York Public Library, Tufts/SMFA, Concordia University, The Helix Queer Performance Network, and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, and I have spoken about them at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Visual Activism Conference, Yale, The New School, SUNY Purchase and for Visual AIDS. The final chapter of After Silence: A History of AIDS Though its Images is devoted to a description of the initial Flash Collective exercise, and I have a Flash Collective lesson plan with Dipti Desai, Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Art + Education Programs, NYU, in the upcoming book, Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art, by Gregory Sholette, Chloë Bass, Social Practice Queens.
THE FUCK LAWS FLASH COLLECTIVE
During a workshop for Concordia University I formed a one-day Flash Collective to create a projected billboard in a multi-use shopping street during rush hour. I started with a brief lecture about audience, public spaces, and various strategies for collective cultural production, and followed it with a trust-building workshop on issues of HIV criminalization and a mini teach-in on the complexities of HIV disclosure, as modified by pharmaceutical interventions like PrEP/PEP. We then had a series of brainstorming sessions, broke into three working groups — one for text, two for design— and executed the billboard as well as buttons and postcards with accompanying messages to hand out on site, mounted a Tumblr page, and planned several follow-up projects. We did it in eight hours with a half hour lunch break.
THE HELIX QUEER PERFORMANCE NETWORK MARCH 5TH FLASH COLLECTIVE
The Helix Queer Performance Network asked me to assemble a Flash Collective to mount an intervention during Paweł Althamer's Draftsmen’s Congress at the New Museum, a project where artists, activists and museum-goers were invited to paint and draw in a rotunda constructed inside the museum. During our brainstorming we decided to take on the canon of Western European cultural production, and the meaning of institutions staging social practices that attempt to break down the class barriers between art and the audiences who view it. How might we participate without commenting on such a heavily mediated space? The Helix Queer Performance Network March 5th Flash Collective decided it couldn't. The intervention centered on this sticker and a performative presence during the install, which we conceptualized and designed in a half-day. The collective left 1,000 of them in clear plastic pockets dotted around the walls of the rotunda, to be taken and used by museum-goers. They were removed shortly after the collective left the install. The stickers are still visible, however, on the streets of New York.
THE HIV IS NOT A CRIME FLASH COLLECTIVE
When we began our workshop at the historic HIV Is Not A Crime Conference, I asked the Flash Collective to simply explain what everyone in the room knew to be true: that decades of draconian criminalization case law have solidified into legal precedent, right under our noses. Our task was to tell the public why they should care about it. We only had 2 1/2 hours to design one image, and I was nervous about time: it was the shortest flash collective I had attempted. But I also knew the best minds in the country working on this issue would be in the room. The collective came up with not one, but three images, and there are several more in the wings. The phrase, "You care about HIV criminalization. You just don't know it yet," will be used to tell other stories, giving a face to the criminalization cases currently in the courts. I was so inspired by the people I met there.
THE HELIX QUEER PERFORMANCE NETWORK APRIL 25TH FLASH COLLECTIVE
Collectives are like organisms. Each one has its own temperament. When the visionary Dan Fishback asked me to conduct a second Flash Collective for the Helix Queer Performance Network, I could tell in the first go-around that this was a collective that would not shy idea from big ideas. By our first break we had zeroed in on the ways assimilation is privileged over radical forms of queer resistance. This sticker is a meditation on the ubiquitous rainbow flag, and is an attempt to re-orient it. The Tumblr page mounted by the collective clearly explains why: "When the rainbow flag was first designed in 1979, each color represented a different aspect of queer life, including hot pink for sexuality and turquoise for magic and art. By the 1980s, those two colors were removed, and quickly forgotten about. We oppose the erasure, corporatization, and commercialization of any radical aspects of queer culture, and so, we reclaim the colors that remain." Within a day of it's release we had over 100 correspondences from across the Americas about the image, and it was requested for a leadership training seminar conducted by the United States People Living with HIV Caucus.
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY FLASH COLLECTIVE
When Jason Bauman invited me to organize a Flash Collective to mount an intervention at four branches of the New York Public Library in conjunction with his exhibition Why We Fight, I had high hopes: Jason knows how to push the boundaries. When I met the collective, my hopes were exceeded. By the end of our first session we had moved from a mapping exercise that covered the sprawl of questions of class, race and access, to a very focused core concept, the question of undetectability and its relationship to stigma. During our second session we started hammering out a text that could inform an audience of undetermined race, gender and class, while delivering our political perspective on the questions raised by the language surrounding undetectability. We were thinking of how GIFs function when we chose to use the lenticular technique for both the posters and 2500 postcards, because we wanted to illustrate how the question of antibody status is now in flux, depicted by the ghosting of positive and negative signs. The text underneath gives a crash course in the medical meaning of the word undetectable, and it's social and policy implications. It was translated into five languages to reach multiple audiences. The text reads: WE'RE AT A CROSSROADS IN HIV TREATMENT. HIV POSITIVE & HIV NEGATIVE ARE NO LONGER THE ONLY POSSIBILITIES WHEN DISCUSSING SEROSTATUS. THE WORD UNDETECTABLE HAS EMERGED IN THIS CONVERSATION. UNDETECTABLE ORIGINATED AS A MEDICAL TERM FOR AN “ACCEPTABLY” LOW PRESENCE OF HIV IN THE BLOODSTREAM DEPENDENT ON STRICT COMPLIANCE WITH “SUCCESSFUL” ANTIRETROVIRAL TREATMENTS. MAINTAINING UNDETECTABLE VIRAL LEVELS SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCES HIV TRANSMISSION, BUT IT IS NOT A CURE FOR AIDS & DOES NOT REMOVE STIGMA. NOT EVERYONE HAS ACCESS TO INFORMATION OR TREATMENTS, SO THE EMPHASIS ON ACHIEVING UNDETECTABILITY REINFORCES RACIAL & SOCIOECONOMIC DIVIDES. BECAUSE THERE IS MORE MONEY IN LIFELONG TREATMENT, PROFIT-DRIVEN DRUG COMPANIES HAVE NO FINANCIAL INCENTIVE TO FIND A CURE. UNDETECTABILITY SAVES LIVES. BUT WHOSE LIVES? & WHO PROFITS? WHERE’S THE CURE?
THE NYU REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE FLASH COLLECTIVE
We only had four hours for our Flash Collective, so I asked the Director of the NYU Steinhardt Graduate Art and Education Program, Dipti Desai, to help choose a topic in advance. The collective decided on reproductive justice. After a 20-minute talk I immediately dove into a mapping exercise that steered us in the direction of how and where we speak about the body. By the first break we’d landed on a simple and powerful statement: mirrored stickers to reflect the viewer, one that read PUBLIC, to be mounted at eye level in public bathrooms, and another that said PRIVATE, at crotch height or to be installed inside toilet stalls across from the seat. By the end of our time we had designed and sourced the stickers, and begun constructing a Tumblr page to fully explain the meaning and impact of reproductive justice, and to share resources and information.
