It's not actually like going into a subway and doing it. And I said, "We're a small consciousness-raising group," and that's all I said about it, and then there was some applause, and then I realized that, you know, all of these thoughts were going through my head. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And then we did—we were—we were still meeting. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: To—The poster says, in small font, "With 42,000 dead." Most of the artists involved were millennials or millennial-adjacent like me. Yeah. Through these—through tiny dots. Now, I actually brought this [book] in, because 1990 was such a hot year for people in the general public to attack artists. ", AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: "We're not asking you to. CYNTHIA CARR: So, yeah. And so he also assembled a lot of public programming, some of which was incredibly insightful like—he did a panel on women and AIDS. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: —meant for both audiences, but it was meant as a signal to people who only would have a casual relationship to the questions, and there were two lines of modifying text across the bottom that talked about, "Why is Reagan silent about AIDS?" CYNTHIA CARR: Mm-hmm. People worked by markers. Or—, AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: They funded it in New York and I'm not sure how that came to be. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: It was actually—I wasn't present in—I didn't join Gran Fury until they had already designed the 1 in 61 poster. So a lot of—and the bubble I live in is the art world, and academia, and people who think about these issues. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: We came to later on accept works in gallery settings. Okay. We had to requisition pentamidine from the CDC—. Okay. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Then I went to the war council. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: This is 1988 when we were doing this. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And almost everything I was doing was centered there. And I think the typesetting was all done as favors because they were graphic designers. Simpson trial. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Yeah. CYNTHIA CARR: Actually, though, what—you know, since I come from writing about performance, this sounds like improv. "With 42,000 dead," and then underneath it in slight larger font, "Art is not enough." Avram Finkelstein is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. It was Pawel Althamer's Draftsmen's Congress, I think was the name of the project. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: It was decided by the floor of ACT UP that it would be a concentration camp float. So I came cold to it, but I came to it from this political background from the '60s and from my family, and what was happening in that room as I saw it was undoubtedly very different from a lot of people who were there because they knew who Larry was. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Costas, C-O-S-T-A-S, after Costa Pappas who died—and was a member of DIVA TV, and died very early on. They just had their second run this year and it skipped a year, so I guess it was—. But we also want a billboard. "Do you resent people with AIDS?" CYNTHIA CARR: Okay. What would happen if something happened to him on the tour? This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. His book, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images, was published University of California Press in 2017. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: But I think it's—the reason why I bring them up in the same breath is that the —again, the question of critique and participation—this was a transitional moment for ACT UP during the FDA demonstration. So, that's why I'm quibbling with the idea of our leaving as being the same thing as TAG. So I think it's easy in hindsight to see all of these things as having happened at the same time by the same people, so Silence = Death sort of became the ACT UP logo, but it wasn't. It's just the things that we don't talk about are the things to pay attention to, and I think that that's where I have become so obsessed with sort of using the dominant narrative to explode the dominant narrative and pave the way for these other counter-narratives which are—if you want to think of it in terms of the HIV as a metaphor, these are the reservoirs in the body politic where HIV stigma has been hidden, and if we're spending all this energy trying to eradicate HIV from the body in an effort to end the AIDS crisis, it could end tomorrow and people would still be in jail, and there would still be decades of case law to keep them there. It was an NYU class. Which is why the definition of AIDS being based on cohort studies of gay men was a lot easier to do than one that involved people without healthcare, people of differing genders, people with different racial and ethnic—backgrounds and experiences. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And I feel like it basically kept me alive. It was like an erotic fantasy, and, you know, I was so sort of overwhelmed by what he was telling me—about what this actually—what I was actually looking at. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: They are essentially questions of how to engage or resist and when you fold tent on one thing and move on to another. We also spoke last time about the window installation done at the New Museum. CYNTHIA CARR: Oh, okay. And then you think, "Okay. CYNTHIA CARR: Right. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Yeah. I feel like there's this very weird.- we have a very skewed idea of the historiography of HIV/AIDS. But, again, I don't think ACT UP needed a poster to become ACT UP. It goes on with globalization struggles. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: That was the—that was the piece when the sub-group who—"Good Luck. Avram is a dark-haired, solemn man with sharp eyes. You know, its temporary booths. When we came to be mounting the retrospective at 80 Washington Square East, we realized that we didn't have original artwork for some of the works that were in that show. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: So it was purposefully targeted to communities that might need that information about the CDC and how it worked. And on the other side was the poster. And it was so cold, that the wheat paste froze before it had adhered to the wall. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: But it basically said—it gave a list of stats. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Because there were men and women on either side within ACT UP. They're in NYU at the moment. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: —who had been at MoMA, who nominated us. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: John Lindell was in and out. And we had done that Je Me Souviens project, which kind of blew up in our face because we used a secessionist slogan without knowing that it had other implications. So Avram, again, say your name and spell it. We had to explain why it's a problem; maintaining undetectability is not an easy thing to do. The Julie and Lola one? He was like super excited about this image. CYNTHIA CARR: Was there anything—it just says "private" on there and then was there another message? I mean, it's a complicated question. CYNTHIA CARR: Mm-hmm. But he seemed coyly apologetic about it, or slightly embarrassed. The fact is, The New York Native ran a column about it months before that. It was my first Flash Collective and it was the—they asked me to come up and do a lecture for their —they have an HIV/AIDS lecture series, and then asked me if I would do a workshop afterwards, and I was beginning to think about these questions. CYNTHIA CARR: Okay. So every Tumblr page is group-created, and everyone in the collective has access to it. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: In this particular case. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: There was a people living with AIDS—at the time we called it People With AIDS Issues Day. CYNTHIA CARR: The Daily Worker goes all the way around the edge. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: It's not a good thing to never talk about IV drug use with regard to HIV/AIDS. Which we can talk more about when we talk about the politic—. And in fact, the image that you're looking at is reconstructed. And I was very surprised that ACT UP didn't seem to have those conflicts. I became very interested in palmistry, and I was just—I was trying to figure out which my lifeline was and how long it was. What does it mean to be in this space in this way? CYNTHIA CARR: Right. I think General Idea did something. Not everyone can get them. So the bargain that we struck over that was, "Only if you put it in the windows, based on the idea that it's less rarified if people could actually see it without going into the museum. Russian propaganda textiles. CYNTHIA CARR: Right, okay. I was writing it when you came. And I consider myself a lifer. And I've never been to Venice. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Only in Manhattan. So I hadn't—because he was a musician and didn't want anyone in the music business to know that he was sick. But I thought, I mean, ACT UP was so good at that. And I said, "But they must know that we're not talking about pharmaceutical companies here. One was a trans person; one was a black person; you know, I think there might have been a Latino; and literally, the image was split in half and one of them was depicted as vibrant and colorful and happy, and the other side was depicted as unhappy or in some way bad. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And the people that I mentioned the poster to said, "Well, you want to do what? And underneath it, it says, "The U.S. Government Considers the 42,524 Dead from AIDS Expendable. He is a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives, and is featured in the artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. It's one of my favorite lines—from this poem. At what point did the six of you become the Silence = Death collective? I moved into his house. But it wasn't until looking back at it and thinking about it, and I realized that there were—that within the art world, people have a very set—a very definite set of ideas about who they are in the world, and their levels of participation in social engagement and political questions. Because when you see it, you know, in a vitrine in an exhibition you don't know anything about the dissemination. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: I did, I stayed there for a few years. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: So, I—what happened was Steve committed suicide in the middle of February. They Just Die From It. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And the Kitchen pulled Patrick in, this is according to Patrick, and I spoke to him recently about it. So they practically owned bus advertising in New York. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: So, it was the indelibility of their own quotes was what—and the name of the installation was, Let the Record Show. For the election. 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