Visual AIDS : ‘The First Exhibition’ Is a Mixed Display of Emotions

“It started at 5 m.p.h., and now we’re past the speed limit. We’re just jammin’!” exults Mirella Moses, curator of a show of AIDS-related art at a storefront space in the Marketplace of Irvine. Once you get her started about the project--done on a dime, with donated space, labor, paint and lighting--she barely pauses for breath.

“The First Exhibition,” which remains in Space B-163 through June 13, is part of “Art for Life’s Sake,” a constellation of art, fashion and food events in Irvine and Santa Ana. The events, organized by Mark Smith, whose brother died of AIDS-related causes two years ago, are designed to focus community attention on the AIDS pandemic.

Moses selected the 28 artists--some of whom haven’t shown anywhere before, a few of whom are virtual recluses--mostly through word-of-mouth. Trying to be as inclusive as possible, she made a special effort to represent a wide range of contemporary media (including book art and installation) as well as different moods and points of view, straights and gays, healthy people and those with the AIDS virus.

There was also another criterion: “I wanted all the artists to feel passionate about putting the show together,” she says. If she suspected that an artist was just looking for another item to beef up a resume, she turned that person down.

Moses, a 33-year-old native of Berlin who has lived in Orange County since 1981, wasn’t shy about including in the show one of her own mixed-media pieces, “Busy” (an expanse of rumpled bed sheets with a telltale stain left by lovers who didn’t use a condom), as well as a collaboration with Smith. All but one of the labels identifying the work in the show include a photograph of the artist--as well as a brief statement--because Moses felt it was important that the public be able to connect the work with the person who made it.

She also insisted that each artist serve as a gallery attendant--a rather vulnerable position for someone unused to public exposure, since the photographs will make it possible for viewers to connect each sitter with his or her work.

“In a way, (the artists) are standing there with no pants on,” Moses says breezily. “But who knows, it might trigger something else in their work” that they wouldn’t have thought of before discussing it with a stranger.

To be sure, the art on view has nothing in common with the ironic and mordantly witty AIDS-related works that have been displayed at museums and major Los Angeles galleries for the past few years. The artists in this show mostly wear their emotions on their sleeves.

There’s an overriding tendency to go for the big, obvious gut reaction--a tactic that almost inevitably bogs down in cliche and mawkishness. Too many works rely on beat-’em-over-the-head preaching rather than explorations that permit viewers to come to their own conclusions. Imagery veers off into triteness (a little person climbs a ladder held by a giant hand; a suffering figure holds his head in his hands).

By far the best work is an installation with strong cultural roots: “Coffins” by William Benson of Santa Ana. As he explains in his statement, AIDS is known as the “slim disease” in Africa because it wastes the body.

Benson’s 17 carved and brightly painted open coffins (16 of which are upended and clustered together like so many totemic sculptures) each hold a mere wisp of a “body”--a bundle of burlap, a bunch of thin sticks or a length of rope “dressed” in colorful raffia skirts. Some of the bodies are held in nooselike arrangements of rope, killed by a disease as coldly and dispassionately cruel as an executioner. The skimpy “remains” are garnished with survivors’ tokens of respect: necklaces, a vividly dyed shoelace, a cuff of beaded material. Massed together, these ghostly figures have a powerful presence, as if unseen shamens have conjured the souls of the dead.

Among the curiosities on view are paintings by Archie Mays, a doctor active in health care reform, and a man who goes by the name Gardan.

Mays’ painting, “Luck and the Cycle of Humanity,” represents portions of AIDS’ decade-long history with a series of interconnected geographic and medical signs and symbols, including the African continent (where the earliest AIDS cases--most of them in heterosexuals-- were documented), a huge gloved hand holding a syringe topped with the Eiffel Tower (French doctors are believed to have first isolated the AIDS virus), huge red blood platelets tossing in the sky like so many Frisbees and a flying convoy of antibodies that metamorphose into sea gulls.

Gardan’s paean to masturbation, “Safe Sex,” has the look of a paint-by-numbers canvas based on some obscure cartoon character. A skipping, jesterlike figure in a hooded garment airily scatters a cloud of sperm as if it were so much, uh, fairy dust. While some hip contemporary artist might have intended a piece like this as a campy parody with a bitter edge, Gardan’s work has the innocently straightforward intent of a thrift store painting.

One work is so subtle that even viewers who are able to find it may be puzzled about what it has to do with AIDS. Andrew Freeman and Mara Lonner collaborated on “From Here to There,” a patch of white wallboard attached (near the entrance) to the otherwise unfinished ceiling. The wallboard curls up and under where it meets the walls, as if continuing into an unseen realm. Freeman and Lonner write that the work is “literally about extending physical boundaries.”

Another piece, Suvan Geer’s “Drying Whispers”--shown last year at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton--is not specifically about AIDS; Geer writes in her statement that she offers it here as a gesture of solidarity. Two wall-mounted pillows of salt conceal speakers that broadcast the labored breath of someone who sounds old or ill. On the floor, the words “once fluid” are written in a spill of salt. The piece links notions of sleep, death and preservation (formerly the chief use of salt) in a gently allusive way.

Several pieces incorporate real or painted condoms. Lynn Kubasek combines them with latex gloves to fashion a pale cape-like garment, “Love You (Covered),” which she describes as “awkward (like condoms).” Glenn Brooks’ ponderous untitled kinetic piece features dollar bills revolving above a field of condom-gravestones, the faint sound of a church bell and images of an anguished face clawed by a parasitic animal.

Despite the aesthetic weaknesses in the show, all but one of the artists at least seem to be portraying AIDS-related viewpoints in an honest manner. The troubling exception is Roberta Carasso--or rather, Roberta Carasso, Ph.D , as she signs herself--an art educator formerly associated with the now-defunct Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana.

Under the guise of addressing the AIDS crisis in a loving, spiritual way, Carasso presents a clutch of narrow-minded assumptions as if they were somehow rooted in impeccable logic. In a two-page essay bound into an open book that sits on a pedestal, Carasso takes contemporary society to task for “cherish(ing) self-pleasure through sex” as “the very highest good of life.” In her view, this “love of self-pleasure” is--are you ready?--”the meaning of AIDS.”

This is dangerous nonsense. AIDS has no “meaning” any more than cancer has a meaning. Carasso’s vaguely uplifting statement about “cross(ing) life with values that are counter to life principles” is in fact a coded way of expressing a conservative religious agenda. The touchy-feely language is a means of ever-so-subtly injecting the notion into the reader that AIDS is a punishment from God for enjoying sex for its own sake--with partners who may or may not be of the opposite sex.

“Self-pleasure” is, of course, a bizarre choice of word in this context, since it sounds like masturbation, which has nothing to do with the spread of the AIDS virus. But then again, Carasso seems bent on twisting language to mean whatever she wants. “Health is not physical,” she writes. “It is a mental perspective.” Well, a cheerful mood can do wonders, but it has yet to cure the dying.

Told that at least one viewer finds this work not only seriously offensive but underhanded and deceptive, Moses seemed taken aback. She said Carasso assured her that the piece is sympathetic to the cause of AIDS victims. In any case, Moses says her overriding hope is that the different perspectives revealed by the works--despairing as well as life-affirming--will encourage viewers to think for themselves.

She says shows such as this can give audiences new to art “something they can understand” while also suggesting, “Where do I go from here?” in terms of increasing their awareness of social issues.

“Call me crazy,” she says. “I’m just an idealist. If I could do this for the rest of my life, I’d be happy.”