Day Without Art / New Museum

If I could do anything I liked today, I'd get out of this crazy library and go to New York, get free admission to the New Museum on its opening day, and see what they're doing with the Day Without Art (which began on World AIDS Day, December 1, in 1989) -- whether it's a tribute to the efforts of the 80s and 90s to increase AIDS awareness, or whether it treats as an urgent, contemporary concern...

In the early aughts, I worked on a Day Without Art-related project at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in L.A. called the "AIDS Chronicles Project." One of my professors, also a huge mentor (my first art history teacher) Lise Patt, was also the Director of Institute, and at the time, I remember thinking of it as this quirky, creative haven on Robertson Blvd., a bizarre place with bookshelves and gadgets and tiny boxes with art in it, and everything that could make an odd creature very, very happy. I had never witnessed anything quite like it prior. (I hope it's still in existence. One of my high school classmates appears to have taken a gig as the assistant to the Director, our old Professor, which gives me cause for optimism...)

So, the AIDS Chronicles Project was this installation wherein every day, the cover of the New York Times was collected, and the entire page was blacked out with paint except for any references to AIDS, AIDS research, etc. Then, the pages of each year were bound together into this volume that had mostly pages painted in all black, except for these white spaces that were able to visually communicate the media's coverage of AIDS. My job was to take these sort of haphazardly-collected pages and cut them neatly, organize them, and skim for AIDS references. Obviously, it wasn't the most creative task, but then again, it was a fairly literal project, visually blocking out everything but the AIDS references so that they appeared as a contrast to the rest of the media, as a separated entity.

Here's an example of a page that had no references to AIDS, which was not infrequent:

On December 1, the Day Withotu Art, they were fond of bringing the year's volume to a public space as an installtion (when I was in high school, it was brought to our art gallery once or twice), and conduct a "Turning of the Pages," slowly going through the volume as onlookers waited for white spaces (coverage of AIDS) to appear.

I never realized this, but in 1995, the project was displayed at the New Museum of Contemporary Art:

....which, today, I'm pleased to say, on its opening day at its beautiful-looking new Bowery location (whose construction I passed by almost every day this summer), is still commemorating the Day Without Art.

"Today, as activist and arts organization mark Day With(out) Art around the globe, let the record show that many in the arts community still choose not to be silent. For the opening of the new building at 235 Bowery, the New Museum pairs the old with the new, presenting significant works in the collection that address the AIDS pandemic such as Act Up’s Silence = Death and Gran Fury’s Wipe Out (New York City Subway Project)." (from their press release)

So, if you're in NY, go visit and let me know.

(And maybe somewhere, the ICI's pages are being turned....?)