From The Brooklyn Rail
July/August 2009
Tainted Love
by Kara L. Roney
Love is not about power. It is not about politics. It holds no stake in reason, activist articulation or abstraction—or at least that is what the literary romantics would have us believe. Love, in fact, is intimately connected to the above, its voice most powerfully manifest in its contribution to communal world-making and social reform.
On the evening of June 28, 1969, a riot broke out at the Mafia-owned Stonewall Inn, one of the sole refuges at that time for the gay community in New York City. Largely viewed as the catalyst for the modern gay rights movement, these demonstrations would become a touchstone for the gay faction in America, giving birth to a number of organizations that would, at first, advocate for gay rights and later agitate against the AIDS epidemic. Forty years later, Tainted Love, curated by Steven Lam and Virginia Solomon, features works by a number of these organizations and collectives—among them General Idea, Gran Fury and fierce pussy—as well as individual artists intimately connected to the AIDS movement in some form. These artists, responding to the personal and communal devastation wrought by the epidemic, as well as the notion of love as a political animal, invoke the aesthetics of language, text, video, photography, and even the traditional platform of painting as activist signifiers. (continue reading here)
[Tainted Love closed June 28, 2009 at La MaMa La Galleria. For exhibition details and catalog click here)
image: Gran Fury, “RIOT,” 1988
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