AIDS DEMO GRAPHICS by Douglas Crimp; Adam RolstonReview by: Alfred WillisArt Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 10, No. 1(Spring 1991), p. 49Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27948320 .

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Art Documentation, Spring 1991 49

classic two-volume A History of Garden Art second edition (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928), still available in reprint. This reviewer's recommendation would be for libraries to

immediately purchase The Renaissance Garden in Italy, forego purchase of Paradeisos, and invest the money saved in a second copy of The Oxford Companion to Gardens which does everything Bazin tried to do and more, but actually does it right.

Sheila Klos University of Oregon

DESIGN: Social Use and Consumer Desires AIDS DEMO GRAPHICS / Douglas Crimp, with Adam Rolston.?Seattle: Bay Press, 1990.?141 p.: ill?ISBN 0-941920-16-X (pa); LC 89-18756: $12.95 (pa).

"This book is intended as a demonstration, in both senses of the word. It is meant as direct action, putting the power of representation in the hands of as many people as possible.

And it is presented as a do-it-yourself manual, showing peo

ple how to make propaganda work in the fight against AIDS," state the authors frankly at the outset of this book. "AIDS Demo Graphics fuses political activism with innovative graphics to create a new kind of publication," declares Linda Nochlin in her blurb for the back cover. Obviously we are dealing here with no run-of-the-mill art book?and not just because of its extraordinarily handsome design and the re markable quality of its many color plates.

The AIDS epidemic of the past decade, as most art librar ians must realize, has decimated the art world in which they labor. Countless artists, architects, fashion designers, art and architectural historians, curators, and critics have already been lost to it, and ever more are dying. One of the para doxes of this epidemic is the vitality that it seems to have injected into the art world even as it has killed off many of its leaders (such as Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe), in part by paving the way for the integration of gay styles and subjects into the cultural mainstream. (The work of David

Wojnarovicz, for example, can hardly be considered "mar ginal" in 1990.) AIDS Demo Graphics documents another ef fect that the AIDS epidemic has had on the art world: the subversive transformation of fine art into a tool of social protest and a catalyst for social change by artists attempt ing to defend themselves, their profession, their art, and their society against the threat not only of AIDS itself but more over of the vicious public attitudes and policies to which it has given rise. Significantly, as the book shows, this transfor mation has taken place not in established cultural institutions (such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which failed to include any AIDS- or sexuality-related work in its 1988 exhibition, "Committed to Print") but in the loci of American political, economic, and ideological power (including the New York Stock Exchange, the New York City Hall, the corporate offices of Burroughs Wellcome, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and the public streets).

AIDS Demo Graphics chronicles the activities of the New York City-based AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). ACT UP is a grassroots organization formed in 1987 and dedi cated to addressing directly the political issues bearing on solutions to the AIDS crisis, first on the local level and later on a nationwide scale. In text and images AIDS Demo Graphics details the crucial importance of the contributions made by its artist members (including the "Gran Fury" group) to the furtherance of ACT UP's program, and hence to contemporary art. Turning Pop Art on its head, these artists have co-opted numerous icons of contemporary art (the high art creations of Hans Haacke, Barbara Kruger, Robert Indiana, et al) and reworked them into politically charged artifacts of popular culture (crack-and-peel stickers, "play money," pos ters, tee-shirts, etc.). Their graphics have the power to shock precisely because they look less like graphics (as the posters

of Paris in 1968 did and those of the Guerrilla Girls do) than works of fine art; because they are indeed fine-art graphics used in low-art or nonart contexts defying categorization as fine or applied art, high or popular art, original or reproduc tion.1 The method of the ACT UP artists has been parody carried off with impeccable seriousness and flawless techni cal precision. Steeped in postmodern culture theory and armed with more than a passing acquaintance of Walter Ben jamin, they are well aware not only of the propagandistic value of their productions but of the profound implications that their work has had for the social status of art and esthe tic theory today. Itself a product of the ACT UP movement (the authors are partisans), even as it documents the move

ment's art, AIDS Demo Graphics must be considered not just art history but a primary document. It is therefore a publica tion likely to be of considerable interest to future historians and historiographers of 20th-century art.

The book consists of an introductory chapter outlining the history and mission of ACT UP followed by what amounts to a chronologically arranged catalogue raisonn? of the most momentous public "actions" carried out by the group over the past three years. These events, as described, appear to have much more in common with performance art than with the activist street theater of the 1960s or Russian revolution ary AgitProp (their closest parallels). As the graphics put into service by these actions make the fine art pieces that in spired them seem rather pointless and insignificant by com parison, the cleverly orchestrated actions themselves make even strongly politicized performance art, like that of Tim Miller, seem almost trivial.

AIDS Demo Graphics provides a readable, richly illustrated, and inspiring account of a difficult and timely subject.2 Equipped with scholarly notes (but unfortunately not an index), this eye-opening book is an essential purchase for all public libraries. It also belongs in any collection of materials on contemporary art, graphic design, the sociology of art, or art historiography?not to mention medicine (where the Li brary of Congress has classified it!). It would also be appro priate for research collections with strengths in aesthetics, popular culture, gay studies, women's studies, or the history of New York City. Because one of its coauthors is an archi tect, and one section deals with the issue of homelessness and the housing of people with AIDS, the book should also be considered for exhaustive research collections in archi tecture.

By acquiring it, and by actively placing it in the hands of readers, art librarians may have the rare opportunity of not

merely enriching lives but also saving them.

Alfred Willis Kent State University

1. One reason for their resistance to traditional categorization is the fact that sometimes the formal source of the ACT UP graphics is not fine art at all but popular artifacts or imagery (paper money Benetton ads, front pages, etc.). Thus the ACT UP artists seem to have taken the position that high and low art expressions are neither complementary nor mutually exclusive but rather completely interchangeable; the impact of AIDS on the art world has made the very notions of high and low art meaningless.

2. Two related books are AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988); and Mark O'Brien and Craig Little, eds., Reimaging America: The Arts of Social Change (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990).

THE MEANINGS OF MODERN DESIGN: TOWARDS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY / Peter Dormer.?New York: Thames and Hudson, 1990.?192 p.: ill.?ISBN 0-500-23570-8; LC 89-51583: $24.95.

DESIGN: VIGNELLI / Essays by Germano Celant et al?New York: Rizzoli, 1990.?292 p.: ill.?ISBN 0-8478-1140-9; LC 89-42958: $50.00.

The Meanings of Modern Design is mistitled. Peter Dormer seems as little interested in graphic design as he was in his previous books, 77?e New Jewelry (1985), The New Ceramics (1986), and The New Furniture (1987), all three with the appended subtitle Trends and Traditions. Even New British

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