Blunt instruments

Collectives’ AIDS art made an impact with just a few strong images

October 30, 2009|Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

CAMBRIDGE - “With 42,000 dead, ART is not enough,’’ says a 1988 poster by the artist collective Gran Fury calling for collective action to end the AIDS crisis. The message strikes a discordant note in “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987-1993’’ at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, since the point of the show is to celebrate art’s ability to effect political change.

Art, of course, is never enough. But this fascinating and provocative show demonstrates how important a savvy way with visuals can be in raising awareness and bringing about change.

A word of caution: The exhibition is divided into two parts. The ground floor gallery has a fleet of monitors screening interviews with individuals who were associated with ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). It’s billed as the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project. It’s also interminable. Most of the interviews are in the vicinity of two hours long, and it’s very difficult to know in each case who is speaking.

There’s clearly value in the project for historians and other parties closely associated with ACT UP, but the display is not exactly designed to ingratiate itself to passersby.

The posters, videos, and other items related to ACT UP’s visual campaigns are to be found in the Sert Gallery on the third floor of the Carpenter Center. They’re altogether more lively.

ACT UP formed in New York in 1987, when the number of deaths from AIDS-related illnesses in the US had hit 16,000 and politicians, both local and national, were still ignoring the problem. The aim was to force governments and the medical establishment to confront the crisis and effect change.

With fear-mongering, ignorance, and bigotry playing a huge part in public attitudes at the time, consciousness-raising was part of its agenda. But so were tangible shifts in policy.

Ronald Reagan, the president at the time, had failed even to mention AIDS in public until 1986 - five years after an epidemic was first declared. Not until 1987 did the Food and Drug Administration approve the first therapeutic drug, AZT. It cost patients around $10,000 a year. The Helms Amendment, meanwhile, had banned the use of federal funds for AIDS education that was seen to promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual behavior.

Fired by outrage, spurred on by a sense of urgency, ACT UP went to work. It organized protests that closed down the FDA in 1988. It infiltrated the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street and drowned out the opening bell with bullhorns as activists unfurled a banner reading “SELL WELLCOME.’’ (Manufacturer Burroughs Wellcome sold AZT at high prices.)