Project description

1933/1984/2020

Digital printing on fabric
Eight panels, 96”x96” each

For Tinworks Art 2020, Avram Finkelstein has created a series of eight hanging pieces that integrate the language of the graphic image with that of the handmade. In concert with one another, they urge us to contemplate the relations among public health, economics, personal loss, and state responsibility by anchoring us in three world-historical moments —the years 1933, 1984, and 2020.

The installation begins along the back wall with a series of opaque hangings. On the far left, HOME is in dialogue with three historical single-word images, each referring to the other, each encapsulating a cultural zeitgeist. They are: Robert Indiana’s LOVE (1965), General Idea’s AIDS (1987) and Gran Fury’s RIOT (1989). The latter two images were also made in response to a pandemic —the ongoing AIDS crisis. The word home is a meditation on conditions necessitated by America’s pandemic response in 2020, in a way that circles back to the originals as symbolic of sheltering and/or self-care.

The two central images are a meditation on two radically different attempts to compensate for economic strife in 1933: Germany’s (the burning of the Reichstag), and America’s (the creation of the New Deal). Finkelstein employs  historical photographs that reference these events, including that of a Social Security Number proudly tattooed on an Oregon itinerant worker’s arm during the Depression. 

Each of these images is accompanied by a sheer textile with hand drawn texts that are Finkelstein’s personal attempts, as a Jewish gay man, to square his own feelings about the events of 1933 with the experience of living through a lethal pandemic, twice in one life, and the similarities and differences between them. The first text is redrawn from a journal he kept after his boyfriend died of AIDS in 1984. The second is a line from a poem that appears in John Huston’s 1987 movie The Dead. A friend asked him to take him to see it, and was dead within a month.  

Finally, We’re Here For You ponders the meaning of a proliferate contemporary advertising phrase and its relationship to pandemic preparedness and commercial responses in late-capitalism. 

Artist Statement

My practice re-imagines information technologies as an ecosystem of narratives bridging egalitarian fantasias about social spaces at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, exploring tensions between identity and colonization, access and limitation, agency and refusal. While waiting for fabrication tests for a recent commission, I started sketching my source material, a photo manipulated iPhone image of a transgendered friend—the first drawings I’d attempted since recovering from a stroke. I was surprised to find my hand no longer “belongs” to me, and dictates its own vernacular. These arduous gesture drawings, involving graphite held with both hands, evolved into detailed pencil renderings. The resulting mural-sized drawings document a reacquaintance with my disobedient body, raising questions that exceeded my explorations of gender representation, into personal inquiries about corporeality as a system in flux.

-Avram Finkelstein

ABOUT AVRAM FINKELSTEIN 

Avram Finkelstein is an artist, activist and writer living in Brooklyn, and 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. His book, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images (2017), is available through University of California Press.

 He has work in the permanent collections of MoMA, The Whitney, The Metropolitan Museum, The New Museum, The Smithsonian, The Brooklyn Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum and The New York Public Library, and his solo work has shown at The Whitney Museum, The Cooper Hewitt Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, FLAG Art Foundation, The Museum of the City of New York, Kunsthalle Wien, The Harbor Gallery, Exit Art, Monya Rowe Gallery, and The Leslie Lohman Museum. His practice also includes an experiment in political art-making, the "Flash Collective," an exercise centered on the creation of a one day collective to produce a single art intervention in a public space that combines the skills used in collective decision-making with a surgical and fast-paced format intended to cut directly to the point of the work, its social content. Finkelstein has conducted dozens of Flash Collectives at Yale, New York University, Concordia University, The New York Public Library, The New School, Visual AIDS, GMHC, Broadway Cares, and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, has spoken about them at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yale, The New School, SUNY and Visual AIDS, they have been covered by Slate and the Vice Creators Project., and are the subject of a documentary, After Silence(2017) by Vincent Gagliostro. 

Finkelstein has been interviewed about art in the public sphere by international publications including The New York Times,Frieze, Artforum, Bomb, Interviewand The Boston Globe, and for multiple film and oral history projects, including Let The Record Show, Silence Opens Doorsand The ACT UP Oral History Project, and has been invited to speak about art, political activism, AIDS activism, LGBT politics, LGBT cultural production, the American Left, and art and intellectual property by Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Exit Art, Fordham, RISD, MassArt, The New School, Parsons, The School of Visual Arts, CUNY, UMASS and the Arts and Labor working group of Occupy Wall Street. He was one of the Opening Ceremonies speakers at the Life Ball in 2011, and has created public awareness campaigns for AmFAR, The AIDS Policy Project, The Campaign to End AIDS, ACT UP, POZ, United Against AIDS, and ACRIA.

Website: http://avramfinkelstein.com

@avramf