Book Review | Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS, by Marika Cifor (University of Minnesota Press, 2022)
Loyola Marymount University
Mairead.sullivan@lmu.edu
Marika Cifor’s Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS confronts the generative tension of archival practices that document, and thus necessarily distill, a past while also producing new presents. Cifor deftly grapples with the ongoing legacy of the archival practices of AIDS activists and the pleasures and perils that a politics of remembering offers today. As she notes in the conclusion, Cifor completed the project in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this way, the text is prescient in its thinking about how we document living and struggling, surviving and dying in the context of a viral epidemic. The innovation of Cifor’s text is not only its exploration of the archiving practices, including the technologies that informed such practices, of early and contemporary AIDS activists but also the curation practices that bring such archives to life in the present day.
Central to Cifor’s project is her theoretic of “vital nostalgia.” As she defines it, vital nostalgia “is a generative practice for interrogating, addressing, and repairing structural power inequities grounded in the bittersweet longing for a past time or space” (6). Contra an understanding of nostalgia as a kind of left melancholy, à la Walter Benjamin or Wendy Brown, Cifor mobilizes vital nostalgia as a productive practice that grapples with our affective attachments to the past for the purpose of changing the present and future. Though Cifor does not use this language, vital nostalgia is a reparative stance that allows for both an appreciation and interrogation of the past for the goals and means of the present and future. In order to unravel this analytic, Cifor takes the reader on a tour of the archival practices of HIV/AIDS artists and activists, including not only archival collecting but also archival curation, from the early days of ACT UP/New York to the present.
Temporally, Viral Cultures grounds itself in Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism, an exhibit and programming series hosted and curated by the New York Public Library (NYPL) across 2013 and 2014. Why We Fight signaled a critical mass of interest in early AIDS activism, especially the archives of ACT UP/New York, which are housed at the NYPL, as well as an attempt—though one not always well executed—to broaden the dominant narrative of AIDS activisms, which frequently foreground the lives and works of cis white men. Across the text, Cifor returns to this event as a touchstone for understanding the generational tensions, which often also track along lines of race and gender, that inform AIDS activism today, the curatorial practices that valorize some stories while occluding others, and the new forms of AIDS art and activism that followed. In so doing, Cifor highlights how emergent activists, especially queer and trans artists and activists of color, draw from, reject, and rework dominate HIV/AIDS narratives.
Chapter one grounds its analysis in the poster Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me created by artist-activists Vincent Chevalier and Ian Bradley-Perrin. The poster, which depicts a teenage-like bedroom built as a kind of shrine to early AIDS art and activism, especially the work of ACT UP/New York, both reflects and ignites generational tensions between AIDS activists of the 1980s and 1990s and emerging activists today. Cifor argues that the recent affective investment in the politics and aesthetics of early AIDS activism has the unintended effect of rendering HIV/AIDS struggles as in the past. Such tensions came to a head in the wake of the Why We Fight show. While Cifor notes that generational tensions are always imbued in activist work, what made this particular moment so explosive was the rapidity with which social media allowed the conversation to travel. It is social media, as well, that has allowed for the wide dissemination of early AIDS activism ephemera where it often circulates without context. Across the chapter, Cifor disentangles the nostalgia expressed by seasoned activists whose work is being recirculated, often with critique, with the complicated nostalgia of a generation who was “not there” but who, nevertheless, live, especially living with HIV, with the inheritance of early activist cultures.
In “How to ACT UP,” the second chapter, Cifor explores the archival practices of ACT UP/New York as themselves a form of AIDS activism. For ACT UP/New York, archiving was central to their political project. As Cifor compelling argues, ACT UP/New York was unique as a grassroots organization that understood the political imperative for preserving its archive. Of course, the archival work of ACT UP/New York, and especially the perseverance of the archives today, was heavily informed, and often led, by lesbian feminists, most notably Maxine Wolfe, who themselves were central to the building and maintenance of community archives such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives. The decision to house the bulk of ACT UP/New York’s archive at the NYPL was a contentious one made even more complicated by a recent acquisition of the digitized archive by a private for-profit company. Again, generational tensions inform how the archive is used and how it informs contemporary HIV/AIDS discourse. Even more so, as Cifor demonstrates, technologies, whether the portable video recorder or the ability to digitize more than ninety linear feet of material, heavily influences the archives’ use and usefulness.
Technology, however, is not the only mediator of the use and usefulness of an archive. In chapter three, “An Archival Cure,” Cifor takes on the curatorial practices that inform an archive’s public consumption and distribution. Cifor employs the language of cure, and its implication in curation, to argue that while a cure to HIV/AIDS is both vexed and distant, curatorial practices can operate from the same ethic of care and remedy. The chapter examines the work of the Visual AIDS Archive Project through a disability justice lens that deploys an analytic of cure as, vexingly, both a eugenic technology and an often desired intervention. Here the vitality of vital nostalgia shines brightest. The work of the Archive Project is to preserve the work of artists living with, and often dying from, HIV/AIDS. In this way, the development, maintenance, and curation of the Archive Project point to the affective balance of interrogating the systems and structures that render HIV/AIDS a stigmatized and violent disease while, simultaneously, celebrating the liveliness, specifically artistic liveliness, of those living with and among HIV/AIDS. In examining the archive, Cifor shifts the language of cure from one inflected with a medical imperative of eradication to one that insists on preservation. Curation as curing allows the archive to engage the generational tensions that are so central to the book’s first two chapters by thinking about the archive as relational.
The challenge of biomedical cure begs for other logics. Cifor mobilizes more recent biomedical advancements in HIV/AIDS care—namely, the promises of viral undetectability—in chapter four, “Status = Undetectable.” Cifor traces a contemporary emphasis on viral undetectability through medical intervention—those with access to financial resources are now able to engage in drug regimes that render their viral load “undetectable”—and juxtaposes such a promise with the risk of rendering HIV/AIDS struggles today also undetectable. The chapter again returns to the Why We Fight installation and the concomitant collaboration between Visual AIDS and the new art-activist group Undetectable Flash Collective. The collective is emblematic of recent work to keep HIV/AIDS activism alive through public awareness via art. The technologies employed by more contemporary AIDS art and activist work, Cifor demonstrates, reach to the past, especially with the use of recognizable images and texts from AIDS archives, while also mobilizing current digital and visual modalities, such as the Tumblr platform. The book’s fifth and final chapter brings the reader more squarely into the present, both the present of the AIDS crisis and the present of digital technologies. In this chapter, Cifor narrates the modes by which contemporary artists, especially artists of color, rework archival images through modern technologies, such as GIFs, in order to metabolize whose stories persist and whose are lost while reframing past activist modalities for usefulness today.
Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS adds to a growing body of academic and trade press texts that return to the heady days of late 1980s and early 1990s AIDS activism, an especially necessary return given the ongoing conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The text is stunningly interdisciplinary, offering a vibrant history of archival work as an activist practice, a cogent analysis of the political promises and perils of archival curation, and a compelling interpretation of the traffic between technology and the production of art and archives. There were times when I felt that text was repeating itself. On reflection, however, I note that this style performs the very analysis that Cifor offers. Namely, each encounter with an object or text is ripe for its own analysis in a given context. As the violences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the invisibilizing technologies of HIV/AIDS drug regimens drive even greater wedges in the steep socioeconomic divides that disease engenders, Cifor reminds us that who and what is remembered, and how, is a political practice that necessitates our ongoing care and attention.
Author Bio
Mairead Sullivan is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University and the author of Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger Between Feminist and Queer (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). Sullivan is currently at work on a cultural biography of herpes.