We are pleased to present a lecture by Jonathan D. Katz, with the support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies.
A Viral Theory of Art: AIDS and the Aesthetics of Protest
A lecture by Jonathan D. Katz
Presented with the support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies
UBC Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory
1:00 p.m. PST, Friday, February 11, 2022
This virtual event is free and open to the public
When Felix Gonzalez-Torres allegorized his art to the workings of a virus, saying “I want to be like a virus that belongs to the institution,” he explicitly took the HIV virus that was killing him as a roadmap for his own strategic involvement in the museum world. The defining characteristic of the AIDS virus was to camouflage itself within the immune system so as to appear to be part of the very system it was intent on destroying. In this talk, Katz traces the history of this viral approach, from the earliest Pictures Generation through AIDS and onto the most recent activist art, exploring how and why protest today so often mirrors the very forms it works to detonate.
Jonathan D. Katz is an art historian, curator and queer activist. Now Associate Professor of Practice in the History of Art and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Katz is a pioneering figure in the development of a queer art history, and author of a number of books and articles. He co-curated Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the first queer art exhibition ever mounted at a major US museum, which opened at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. His next major exhibition, entitled Art AIDS America, traveled to 5 museums across the US, also accompanied by a substantial new book.
As a scholar of modern and contemporary art, Katz is responsible for many of the first queer studies of such defining artists as Georgia O’Keeffe, Jasper Johns, Leon Polk Smith, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton, Yayoi Kusama, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Robert Indiana, and a number of others. Katz is now completing two new books, Hiding in Plain Sight: On the Queerness of Contemporary Art and The Silent Camp: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and the Cold War. He is also editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Queer Art History. He is currently curating a major international exhibition called The First Homosexuals, a global show of the very first representations of sexual difference after the coining of the term “homosexual” in 1869, accompanied by a book of the same name. He is also, as the beneficiary of a major Mellon Foundation grant, organizing 14 exhibitions and performances in Latin America on the theme of contemporary and historical dispossession.
Image: Félix González-Torres, Untitled (Placebo), 1991.