Harvey milk | 1992
Consumed exhibition, Goethe House, New York City, 1992
In 1991 I began this photo based process art work. The work was dedicated to the gay activist Harvey Milk who was assassinated by his co-worker Dan White in 1978 an act of homophobic aggression. In 1991 another assault was being perpetrated on the gay community and many of my friends in the art world in the form of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. My role as a doctor at this time treating the retinitis caused by the disease which led to blindness made my relationship to the social affects of this disease very real. I began the project by finding pictures of Harvey Milk in the Associated Press Archive. The conceptual project began with putting the photographs i had found in old-fashioned glass milk bottles and covering the surface of the photograph with milk. The emulsion of the photographic surface mixed with the milk to form a culture media on which bacteria grew. These bacteria were transferred to culture tubes and grown. They were then used to streak agar plates with letters that spelled Save Our Rights. This phrase alluded on the one hand to the indignation felt by the San Francisco Gay Community when Dan White only received a seven year sentence for his grevious act as well as the fact that his defense was based on the fact that he stated that he had a form of temporary insanity caused by eating too many TWINKIES. The threat of AIDS to that community was also a direct assault on the gay communities rights as the decimation of their ranks by the disease would greatly affect their voting power as well as draining them of their physical and psychic energy. The bacterial grew on the petri plates and spelled out Save Our Rights in about three days. Thereafter other organisms invaded the plates blurring the text. At the end of the exhibition all that remained of the text was a smear of dried out bacteria and agar. The installation shown here consists of the agar plates aranged in rows and the milk bottles with the photograph which over time is actually eaten away the bacteria.
Consumed exhibition, Goethe House, New York City, 1992
In 1991 I began this photo based process art work. The work was dedicated to the gay activist Harvey Milk who was assassinated by his co-worker Dan White in 1978 an act of homophobic aggression. In 1991 another assault was being perpetrated on the gay community and many of my friends in the art world in the form of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. My role as a doctor at this time treating the retinitis caused by the disease which led to blindness made my relationship to the social affects of this disease very real. I began the project by finding pictures of Harvey Milk in the Associated Press Archive. The conceptual project began with putting the photographs i had found in old-fashioned glass milk bottles and covering the surface of the photograph with milk. The emulsion of the photographic surface mixed with the milk to form a culture media on which bacteria grew. These bacteria were transferred to culture tubes and grown. They were then used to streak agar plates with letters that spelled Save Our Rights. This phrase alluded on the one hand to the indignation felt by the San Francisco Gay Community when Dan White only received a seven year sentence for his grevious act as well as the fact that his defense was based on the fact that he stated that he had a form of temporary insanity caused by eating too many TWINKIES. The threat of AIDS to that community was also a direct assault on the gay communities rights as the decimation of their ranks by the disease would greatly affect their voting power as well as draining them of their physical and psychic energy. The bacterial grew on the petri plates and spelled out Save Our Rights in about three days. Thereafter other organisms invaded the plates blurring the text. At the end of the exhibition all that remained of the text was a smear of dried out bacteria and agar. The installation shown here consists of the agar plates aranged in rows and the milk bottles with the photograph which over time is actually eaten away the bacteria.