<nettime> Let the Archive Speak

[d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

Let the Archive Speak

All this week I’ve been reading (or rather devouring) Sarah Schulman’s 
book ‘Let the Record Show’ A Political History of ACT UP New York, 
1987-1983, a stunning history of the New York branch of the legendary 
campaigning ‘AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power” (ACT UP). Sometimes 
described as the ‘mother ship' of global AIDS activism.

ACT UP pioneered uniquely powerful and expressive forms of activism that 
changed policies and saved lives at the height of the AIDS crisis in New 
York and in the process forever transformed the art of campaigning.

Schulman’s book succeeds not just in telling the story of the movement 
but also embodies ACT UP’s experimental urgency, spirit and inventive 
methods. The book is both an extraordinary stand-alone document and the 
culmination of a long-term archival project, ‘The ACT UP oral History 
Project’ which Schulman and Jim Hubbard have been working on since 2001.

There are good practical reasons to take note of the book’s archival 
dimension, as the printed document is constructed around multiple 
interviews with key ACTUPers drawn directly from the archive. And rather 
than quoting the interviews in extenso they are made more readable and 
by being paraphrased and accompanied with the author’s contextual 
reflections. However critical readers will wish to go to the source of 
these interpretations so access to full transcripts of the interviews 
can be downloaded from www.actuporalhistory.org allowing close readers 
and researchers to go back and forth between book and the archive.  
Moreover, the archive also includes five minutes of streaming videos of 
each of the 188 people profiled. The complete movies can be viewed in 
person at the New York and San Francisco Public Libraries.

Finally, a vital aspect of the book are the many acts of remembrance 
that intersperse the interviews with affecting ‘recollections’ of 
individual ACTUPers who did not survive by those who knew them. The 
cumulative impact over the 700 pages is one of both apocalyptic loss 
coupled with an abiding sense of immediacy and relevance to the wider 
campaigning necessities of today.

-------------------------------

My single fast only reading scratches the surface but while its fresh in 
my mind I thought it worth sharing some notes and sharing a number of 
key points that still resonate. There are many more.

* The AIDS crisis is not over- By definition historians attend to the 
past, but as Schulman sees it the AIDS epidemic is not over. Just from a 
local perspective of the hundred thousand New Yorkers who have died of 
AIDS, 1779 died in 2017.  We can only wonder how many would have been 
saved had a fraction of the resources thrown ad Covid would have been 
directed to HIV AIDS.


* Purpose continued relevance*- Schulman’s declared purpose “is not to 
look back with nostalgia, but rather to help contemporary and future 
activists learn from the past so that they can do more effective 
organising in the present. We wanted to show, clearly what we had 
witnessed in ACT UP: that people from all walks of life, working 
together can change the world.

* Disrupting the trajectory of gay male history*- “AIDS activism’s most 
radical and socially revolutionary vision evolved when white men were in 
the same boat as everybody else who had AIDS: desperate. Because they 
were desperate, they acted differently. They listened. Anyone with no 
way out looks for a way out. And it is only in that moment that their 
prejudices, conventions and egos are up for grabs.

Schulman analyses a previously ignored story of women, race and drugs 
and housing with regards to the AIDS crisis, and most of all, the power 
of groups over individuals. Schulman used the ACT UP Oral History 
Project to unearth real lessons for the future, which is our present. In 
the process and came to understand that, for one thing, AIDS activist 
history has been mistakenly placed overwhelmingly  in the trajectory of 
gay male history. Many individual gay men with expertise in business 
organisation, public relations, advertising, graphic design, and health 
care often had never thought deeply about how to organise a popular 
meeting, or how to build an action outside of established institutional 
frameworks. This combination of shock at how little their lives meant to 
powerful institutions, and the need to quickly create a functional 
grassroots movement, meant that lesbians with tested organising 
experience from the lesbian and feminist movements were- for once – 
noticed, needed and very welcome.

* Art* The book’s headline title ‘Let the Record Show’ refers to the 
name of an installation placed in the street facing window of the New 
Museum in SoHo, in the form of a  visual display/montage with images 
associating hostile socio/political actors of the time with the war 
criminals tried at Nuremberg. The installation (or display) was by the 
artist’s collective that later became Gran Fury and was also the group 
who designed the famous Silence=Death logo that became the visual 
calling card for global AIDS activism.

By using an artwork as the title of the book Schulman signals that her 
‘political history’  treats ACT UP’s cultural production as indivisible 
from its other campaigning activities. Indeed, she later contends that 
“ACT Up was probably the first movement of deeply oppressed people whose 
lives were at stake to have included such a large group of designers, 
advertising professionals, studio artists, marketeers, and publicists 
well versed in the visual language of branding and experienced in 
selling ideas, fresh out of art school and with relationships to 
institutions with cultural influence. ACT UP not only adapted the 
aesthetics of advertising but also benefited from activists who were 
actually the people who *created* the aesthetics of advertising.”

* Theory/Direct Action* - In his review of the book for the London 
Review of Books, Adam Mars-Jones asserts that for ACT UP “theory was a 
late arrival at the party, if it turned up at all.” But this is 
definitely not true or what Schulman is arguing.  One of the important 
lessons that today’s activists can take from the book was that theory 
was present but (like the art) it was not separate from action.  Indeed, 
the distinctive way in which theory operates in relationship to action 
is a key part of ACT UP theory. As Maxine Wolfe, one of ACT UP’s most 
influential leaders put it, “theory emerges” as a concrete result of 
actual decisions that are being made for real-life application. Instead 
of the Gramscian concept of “praxis,” which is the application of theory 
into practice, ACT UP first chose a practice – an action – and then 
evolved a theory necessary to make it work towards our larger goal of 
“direct action to end the AIDS crisis”.

In this way campaigns were structured as a series of interconnected 
actions, designed to produce a larger outcome…. energy was not wasted 
and events had purpose as part of a larger scheme. Not wasting energy, 
effort, or goodwill was essential for being effective in a movement of 
people who literally dis not have time.

* Simultaneity Not Consensus* Although it was never made explicit at the 
time ACT UP’s process of dealing with differences [conflict] was to 
practice a kind of radical democracy. In this way, individuals and 
cliques had to give up any thought of successful control over the 
entirety of the organisation.”

The method was to allow many, different expressions of direct action to 
be carried on simultaneously, none of them requiring full consensus, 
total participation or universal agreement. The only requirement was 
that it was direct action, with a goal related to ending the AIDS 
crisis.”

This freedom of expression within the movement was born not out of 
theory but of necessity. Many people in ACT Up did not have long to 
live. They were working against the clock to try to save their own 
lives. This lack of time made people more efficient, creative and 
flexible […] ultimately this very wide range of simultaneous responses, 
in multiple social milieus, with different concrete aims and involving 
different targets and participants, strengthened ACT UP because it 
created a large and resonant, cumulative impact that singular activity 
could never have produced.

* Affinity Groups* -  Gregg Bordowitz remembers at a Monday meeting 
rising and saying “Look you can just do this. You don’t have to go to 
the large group and ask for authorisation. In fact its better that the 
large group is not involved with these kinds of actions because they 
don’t have to be held accountable. So you can just do stuff. ACT UP is 
just this place where we all meet on a weekly basis to talk about 
strategy and prioritise issues”. This happened at the same time that the 
concept of affinity groups, which are inherently autonomous from the 
larger body, was gaining more popularity in ACT UP.

* The Common Factor* Schulman began her analysis of the interviews 
looking for what it was that connects such a diverse Group.  In the end 
her conclusion is surprisingly individualistic. ‘what ACTUPers had in 
common” she argues “was not experiential…Rather it was characterological 
. These were people who were unable to sit out a historical cataclysm.. 
In the case of emergency they were not bystanders’. She believes that 
social change is made by coalitions, and the thesis advanced here is 
that the skills and resources acquired from the struggle for 
reproductive rights enabled women to play a transformative role in ACT 
UP. [This conclusion speaks to us directly as a challenge we all face 
today in responding to the climate emergency ]

*No Bystanders* Artists (one of a number associated Whitney Museum study 
program)  David Meieran and Gregg Bordowitz showed up at a Monday-night 
ACT UP meeting with cameras seeing themselves as traditional 
“documentarians.” They didn’t conceptualise themselves at first as part 
of the action. So they were upset when people didn’t want to let them 
film, and when Larry (Kramer) had no interest in being interviewed. It 
was the learning curve of realising that everyone who was present was 
expected to be active.

Later with videographers Hilery Kipnis, Robyn Hutt, and Sandra Elgear 
they formed the Testing the Limits video collective and in the process 
of filming every action as ACT UP grew, also started to develop a 
conceptual role for documentary film making that functioned as part of a 
movement instead of being separate and outside collective. This would 
come to be known as video activism….” Bordowitz later got together with 
They activists Charles Stimson and Ortez Alderson and decided to do a 
kind of activism not authorised be the large group.”.


-------------------------------------------------------

My interest in this book is partly the result of being part of a group 
who organised The Sero Positief Bal an HIV AIDS event held in Amsterdam. 
We invited a number of the individuals featured in the book not only 
from the New York chapter of ACT UP but from many locations. I later 
went to New York to assemble ACT UP graphics for a small exhibition at 
the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. It was then that I was able to attend a 
couple of the legendary Monday evening meetings at Cooper Union. Gregg 
Bordowitz was moderating with Alexis Dansig. I have never before or 
since encountered anything that matched the energy and dynamism of those 
meetings.

That said the visit of the ACTUPers to our well meaning but flawed event 
in Amsterdam was not a happy encounter as we were roundly critiqued by 
ACT UP for our efforts. But the impact of their work and its 
implications on a number of us was profound.  So much of the above you 
might recognise in the politics and aesthetics of ‘Tactical Media’. It 
is no coincidence that the first edition of Next 5 Minutes followed a 
year later.



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