{"id":18893,"date":"2024-05-17T14:12:29","date_gmt":"2024-05-17T14:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=18893"},"modified":"2024-05-22T18:51:49","modified_gmt":"2024-05-22T18:51:49","slug":"robert-blanchon-aids-and-the-question-of-conceptualism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=18893","title":{"rendered":"Robert Blanchon: AIDS and the Question of Conceptualism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For his 1974 series Men<\/em>, James Welling arranged some of modernism\u2019s most celebrated artists into a sequence of pas de deux. Each work contains two images of its titular artists in their studios, montaged to showcase the strikingly similar ways they perform their role. Rothko\/Giacometti<\/em> shows both men on a break, smoking cigarettes as if to deflate the existential demands of making artwork; Pollock\/Serra<\/em> shows these artists in the midst of painting, their active physical engagement seeming to shore up the expressive mark\u2019s authorial index. As isolated images these photographs might inspire a sense of high drama; however, by placing these \u201cdances of embattled subjectivity\u201d alongside each other, Welling pokes fun at artists who rehearse the set of romanticized tropes about the creative process and become, in the words of Douglas Eklund, \u201cprepackaged personae ready for consumption.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> Coming seventeen years later, the 1991 work Untitled [Schnabel]<\/em> by Robert Blanchon (1965\u20131999) finds a similarly parodic pitch. Using a found image of the artist, Blanchon shows Julian Schnabel dressed like a prep school dropout, his loafers and wristwatch clashing with what appears to be a pair of striped pajamas and black sunglasses. Hunched over in a chair, gesturing at his audience with an air of jocular self-assurance, the image catches Schnabel in the midst of performing his own distinct artistic personality, one that substitutes the doom and gloom of Welling\u2019s diptychs with a combination of \u201chero and buffoon.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> While the photograph captures Schnabel\u2019s carefully crafted persona, Blanchon complicates his representation of the painter with a caption included below the photograph: \u201cHas Magic Johnson replaced Julian Schnabel? Happy Hunting. I love you from Robert Blanchon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With his question, Blanchon produces a rather puzzling equivalence between the notorious Neo-Expressionist painter and one of the NBA\u2019s most famous athletes. Both men were wealthy and celebrated within their respective circles; however, Blanchon\u2019s caption suggests that a recent turn of events had structured their relationship to one another. Considering the work\u2019s creation in December 1991, Blanchon\u2019s association between Schnabel and Johnson seems to rest on the latter\u2019s HIV diagnosis, which he had revealed to the world just a month before. In fact, this image of Schnabel bears a certain resemblance to Johnson\u2019s posture during the press conference in which the latter revealed his positive status, speaking in front of a flock of reporters.3<\/a><\/sup> The question remains, however, of what more specifically likens Johnson to Schnabel and what made his confession, or its reception among AIDS activists, similar to Schnabel\u2019s work and the Neo-Expressionist current in contemporary painting he represented. By parsing this complicated ecology bridging aesthetic and sociopolitical domains, it becomes clear that the rise of 1980s Neo-Expressionist painters like Schnabel was pitted against more critically engaged practices\u2014namely those of photo-based Conceptualist artists such as Sherrie Levine and other \u201cPictures Generation\u201d artists\u2014according to antagonisms that also distanced celebrities like Johnson from activist organizations including ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the Lesbian Avengers, Queer Nation, Gay Men\u2019s Health Crisis, or Sex Panic!.4<\/a><\/sup> While Blanchon was a member of ACT UP, acting as an institutional liaison at the New Museum during his time in New York City, his work nevertheless complicates the sharp divide carved out between deconstructive, politicized analysis focused on structural aspects of the AIDS epidemic and more individualized reactions to its disastrous effects.5<\/a><\/sup>: The Work of Robert Blanchon<\/em>, ed. Sasha Archibald (New York: Visual AIDS, 2009), 4.] Specifically, his discursive approach to sexuality and desire serves as a case study of how the supposedly solipsistic arena of subjectivity might have reentered AIDS discourse and activist art through a formal language that maintained the depersonalized edge of Conceptualism\u2019s \u201caesthetic of administration.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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