The ICI Library has a shelf dedicated to books on or about AIDS. Some titles are iconic such as Susan Sontag’s AIDS and its Metaphors or Doug Crimp’s Melancholia and Moralism; others are by individuals who turned their HIV+ diagnosis into powerful statements about art and society such as David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives. Sadly, the effects of HIV and AIDS extends to many other shelves in the ICI Library in the grim statistic of loss. So many, too many, of the artist monographs in our collection catalog the work of artists who died of AIDS: Felix Gonzalez Torres, Paul Thek, Robert Mapplethorpe. On our ‘fiction’ shelf there are books by Bruce Chatwin, Herve Guibert, Isaac Asimov, writers of such diverging interests, all victims of AIDS. These books are not relegated to a single shelf but remain sprinkled through our other documents of culture in an attempt to remember each author’s contribution to society and not just their loss to us, even though their absence is always palpable in a library whose main focus is the arts. In a small cubby, as yet untitled, a slight book by Derek Jarman captures this sentiment in its final refrain: “I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave.”
Wojnarowicz, David Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz (2002) FIRST LINE: “I’m sitting here in this room and it’s around dusk” LAST LINE: “And maybe somebody coming along and just putting their arms around me for a few minutes.” ICI SHELF: … Continue readingLIBRARY SHELF: Weight of the Earth
Jones, Cleves Stitching A Revolution (2000) ICI Shelf: AIDS First Line: “Thousands of people stand on a grid of canvas walkways.” Last Line: “Please don’t make us come back.” ICI History: Last line, Today at the ICI-Twitter Feed (11-10-11); First Line, Today at the ICI-Twitter … Continue readingLIBRARY SHELF: Stitching A Revolution
Crimp, Douglas Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (2002) FIRST LINE: “I assert to begin that ‘disease’ does not exist.” LAST LINE: “How do we make what we know knowable to legions?” ICI SHELF: AIDS ICI HISTORY: First Line: Today at the … Continue readingLIBRARY SHELF: Melancholia and Moralism
Wojnarowicz, David Tongues of Flame ICI Shelf: AIDS FIRST LINE: “It’s so simple: the man without the eye against a receding wall, the subtle deterioration of weather, of shading, of images, engraved in flaking walls.” LAST LINE: “…bottom line, with enough gestures we can deafen the … Continue readingLIBRARY SHELF: Tongues of Flame
Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum; John Bommer: Vibgyor (1988) ICI Shelf: Artist Monographs First Line: “John always said he would die before he was thirty or live to be a hundred and twenty.” ICI History: Today at the ICI — Twitter Feed (03-08-14) Accession #: … Continue readingLIBRARY SHELF: John Bommer
Hanstein, Henrik Rolf; Art Against AIDS: Auktion zugunsten der Nationalen Aid-Stiftung (1988) ICI Shelf: AIDS First Line: “Der vorliegende Katalog ist das Dokument einer beispielhaften Initiative, die zeigt, wie das Zusammenwirken engagierter Menschen zu einem richtungweisenden Ergebnis führt.” ICI History: Today at the ICI — Twitter … Continue readingLIBRARY SHELF: Art Against AIDS
Guibert, Herve. to the friend who did not save my life (1991) ICI Shelf: AIDS First Line: “I had AIDS for three months.” ICI History: Today at the ICI — Twitter Feed (11-28-12)
Visual AIDS Bodies of Resistance (2000) LAST LINE: “…we are faced with an experience of AIDS which can only be called ongoing.” ICI SHELF: AIDS ICI HISTORY: Today at the ICI-Twitter Feed (12-01-11)
Visual AIDS Share Your Vision (2000) LAST LINE: “Maybe here and now, or in the future, you too will also let the work speak first.” ICI SHELF: AIDS ICI HISTORY: Today at the ICI-Twitter Feed (11-29-11)
Rosenberg, Charles E. The Cholera Years (1962) FIRST LINE: “It had been an unhealthy winter and the dry spring promised a sickly summer.” ICI SHELF: AIDS ICI HISTORY: Today at the ICI-Twitter Feed (11-27-11)