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There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. [1]
Is there a gay voice or, more generally, is there a body of discourses or identities which can be cited as being intrinsically gay? Although framed in terms of a deliberate refusal to speak, this is a question raised by Mathew Jones's exhibition Silence = Death:
We rally to the slogan because they have forced us to, but keep the silence, as a place where we refuse to use their terms.[2]
The "slogan" to which Jones refers is of course the by now infamous Silence = Death rallying cry coined by Act Up (New York). But the exhibition Silence = Death is not the loyal reiteration of this slogan. Instead, Jones's purpose is to draw attention, through reiteration, to what he sees as the closures which are set up by such a statement.
However, while this critical scepticism is to be welcomed in that it offers to set in motion a speculation about responses to AIDS which does not ultimately resort to a reductive didacticism, the question of closure is one which returns to haunt Jones's own intervention. For, to quote Simon Watney in his various analyses of what he has described as "the politics of [the] representation" of AIDS, "strategy is everything".[3] It is precisely the strategy of this exhibition (the forms of visual rhetoric it employs, the institutional space in which these are mobilised, the potential audience to whom they are addressed etcetera) which is perhaps somewhat oblique and potentially self defeating.
Watney's reference to a "politics of representation" is indicative of the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline