CYNTHIA CARR: Wasn't he Attorney General or something like that? People are always being politicized, no matter how political you are, or apolitical you are. So to talk about Silence = Death without those sets of social context makes no sense because it would have functioned completely differently in another social context and I don't think that you—whenever I speak about Silence = Death, one of the things I say about it is that it was designed by a six-person collective. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Well they did and they told us. Maybe just for the purpose of this, because the focus is AIDS activism and art, is there another one that you maybe would want to describe and talk about that had to do with AIDS—. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. CYNTHIA CARR: But there was something—before we discuss the—like the Flash Collectives and the other—the drawings. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: When I was a kid. And they have that—a cross on it that's like a red cross, the shape of the red cross. And eventually they seceded from ACT UP. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: There were people who—people had many different responses to the AIDS crisis. But it—so, we debuted it. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: We just would—they would be at different people's apartments and we would each bring food, and we would end up every session—we would begin by talking about our fears and our anxieties, but by the end of each time we were talking about the politics of AIDS, and that's when I—something clicked, and I remembered when I was a kid when—are you from New York? And, you know, it creates—it—I felt it creates the—helps create a cushion between people who weren't involved in HIV/AIDS and the rest of the world. So by the time I was in college, I was really thinking very conceptually about my work, but I also was very influenced by the Situationist critiques because of the May '68 strikes. He booked that kind of thing. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: It was—you were there. Not everyone can get them. CYNTHIA CARR: Along with going to ACT UP meetings, or? There is footage of it in United In Anger, but I can't recall. CYNTHIA CARR: That's good. But we know that people did see them. And I remember thinking I didn't even know—I had no experience of that painting other than the fact that I knew it was the most expensive painting in the world, the most valuable painting. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: It was amazing. And, basically, everyone I knew stole from all of their clients—like, billed everything we did. Or what are you asking people to do? And I said, "So, what can I do for you?" "Kissing doesn't kill. It's a very defined set of parameters that pretty much no one speaks about. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Yes. And we would be discussing a project, and then come to a certain sense of resolution amongst the people attending that meeting. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: No, no I had not come out. I moved out of New York in probably 1998 or '99—. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: So—and we're talking about like 1991. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: —so I think I stopped going to ACT UP around '96 or '97, somewhere in there. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And we were doing ACT UP. I think she minored in microbiology, and she did cancer research throughout the '60's and then did pediatrics research in Meadowbrook Hospital until she retired. We did it all over Manhattan. Then yellow was originally meant to represent sunlight. And David Meieran, from the Testing the Limits Collective, who was in the Whitney Program—and I don't know if that's how we knew Bill—but David called me up and said that, "Bill wants to speak to someone in the Silence = Death project about ACT UP doing the, you know—". Where the controls are such where you can make certain assumptions. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Well we hadn't decided there was going to be a black poster. Those are the four questions. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Yeah, those were all abstract, but they came out of the same—I did those right after this solo show. My voice is raising. So, can you—are you—how are my levels? AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: I think it was very easy to stand out in an international beauty company. Digital prints: Big Image Systems AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: But I think in a way, Cynthia that construction in itself is inaccurate because ACT UP has always met every Monday and still does. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: I wanted to go to Cooper Union my entire life. But if you sit anywhere outside of the walls of institutional power structures, engagement is the—is the key. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: So we went to war for him—with him. And I was in the Student/Teacher Show at city hall and one of those—a picture, a portrait of a drag performer that both Nan and I knew was in the show. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: It was NIAID but it was—they had community constituency boards that were—that were assembled as a result of the NIH and FDA actions. Yeah. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And he said, "Well, I just—I wanted to tell you the story of that image." AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And I was thinking a lot about my own sexuality and about the ways in which masculinity is, as we now know after decades of queer theory, is performed. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Yeah. They were not enthusiastic about it at all. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: I think he was Attorney General. And anyone could come and work. I moved into his house. So we started with the—we did the mapping exercise and then I did a series of brainstormings, and then we broke into groups to craft the text, and other groups to craft the image, and then we came back together. So the one that you have on your website—there's a portrait of Kerry, a man named Kerry. So I—the exercise, the prompt had to do with private spaces and public spaces and safe spaces. Right. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And we still felt like we weren't doing enough. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And I proposed this poster. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And during that period, Mark Simpson was getting sicker and we weren't getting a lot of projects, and it just—those were the last three things that we did. And the group was sort of winnowing down to a core group. [Laughs.] And so I think Neil said, "So who are you?" CYNTHIA CARR: Mm-hmm. Because we were being embraced the art world, but there was also a fair amount of mishegas and tension surrounding us and our work, and how we were seen. So we had to run to the 24-hour drugstore on Beacon Hill, near where Nan and David live to buy a tub of Vaseline. It's good that we didn't, I think. And then were things distributed to people coming into the stadium? CYNTHIA CARR: Right, and when Don died and, I mean, there weren't any groups together except for Gay Men's Health Crisis. They became merged with my identity as a gay man. No one in my circles knew Larry. and I shrugged. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And I think we started meeting in January of 1985 [1986–AF], and within a month, I said, "Let's do a poster.". So we frequently met in the common rooms of the Whitney Program, on Lower Broadway. "No glove, no love." Okay. You know, in order for a space to be made safe other people have to be put in danger, and it talks—you know, it's very much about that, and that's what this work was a meditation on. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: He was all about color, and in fact I think Jorge has some of the sketches that we did on that night of playing with color, but Chris and I felt really strongly—I wanted it to—I had this idea that in order to create the illusion that we were more organized than we were, and we'd gone through many conversations about how didactic it should be, and I wanted it to be a manifesto, because they were such complicated issues, and Charles was like, "No. And the—by the time we had reached the FDA and NIAID, we were already becoming insiders. It said, "Kissing Doesn't Kill, Greed and Indifference Do. But without knowing that there were—there was a tremendous amount of room to move between how people within arts funding institutions, within AIDS funding institutions within the art world thought about these questions. He was also in my affinity group. CYNTHIA CARR: Because, clearly, something had to happen. We decided that since we couldn't—they couldn't give us an exterior space we would make billboards inside. But it didn't feel safe to me to be gay. You know, if you keep the middle class preoccupied with two or three jobs, they can't think about things. CYNTHIA CARR: Okay. He had done several of them, and basically he papers the walls over a public space and invites people in to draw on the walls. She said, "It's our responsibility as artists to do this work, too. It was a small demo. CYNTHIA CARR: Yeah. Avram Finkelstein has reviewed the transcript. Yeah. CYNTHIA CARR: So how—what was the process of getting Silence = Death, you know, into—like integrating it into ACT UP, and saying let's make T-shirts that say that and let's do—. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And it happened because Bill Olander at the New Museum wanted to offer the windows of the New Museum to ACT UP. And he said, "Well, we should really spell those out." And we immediately decided we wanted to do something that was neon colored, involved mechanical production that would be antithetical to that, and did this sticker that said, "This is not a safe space to be queer; there is no safe space," and set up a Tumblr page, and one of the members of the collective who came out of the spoken word collective Dark Matter, who are brilliant, wrote this piece that is the top part of the Tumblr page that talks about colonization. CYNTHIA CARR: Right. CYNTHIA CARR: None of them were a part of it? 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