Fiona Johnstone is an art historian whose research focuses on the intersections between visual culture and the medical humanities. Her short Manifesto for Visual Medical Humanitieswas published on the BMJ’s website in 2018.
Her monograph, AIDS and Representation: Portraits and Self-Portraits during the AIDS Crisis in America, which will be published by IB Tauris in late 2019, argues that the AIDS crisis necessitated a radical new approach to conceptualising and visualising the human body. During the 1980s and 1990s, artists addressing their own experiences of HIV and AIDS frequently dispensed with straightforward pictorial depiction, instead representing themselves and their experiences more obliquely, often using strategies borrowed from conceptual art.
Fiona recently co-edited a collected volume of essays on Anti-Portraiture, which explored practices of expanded portraiture across a range of art historical contexts.
Fiona is currently a research fellow in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, where she is working on People Like You, a Wellcome Trust funded collaborative project that is investigating processes of personalisation in medicine, data science, and digital culture.
She is an editor for the medical humanities platform The Polyphony.
FIONA JOHNSTONE’S 120 BPM: SYMPOSIUM KEYNOTE LECTURE:
Absences and Intangibilities: HIV/AIDS and (self)-portraiture before and after the second silence.
“His name was Kenny.” In a key moment in 120 BPM(Robin Campillo, 2017), Nathan recalls his reaction to one of the first images of a person with AIDS published in the mainstream press. “He looked like a freak. I’d never seen a gay couple in a magazine before. Except it was to say that homosexuals were going to die.” Photographs of Kenny Ramsauer and his partner were published in Paris Match, Photo (Paris), and the British tabloid Sunday Peoplein 1983; with their before-and-after format; unambiguous narrative of disfigurement, debilitation, and death; and barely-concealed homophobia, these pictures established the predominant conventions of the AIDS media portrait.
The first half of this paper explores how HIV-positive artists of the 1980s and 1990s sought to circumvent, subvert or challenge the pictorial media stereotype of the AIDS ‘victim’. Working predominantly in the registers of photography and conceptual art, these artists devised radical new ways of representing the AIDS affected body, frequently rejecting straightforward pictorial depiction, and instead self-referencing through processes of suggestion, substitution and metaphor. The physical body is often rendered elusive and intangible, paradoxically at its most eloquent in the gaps left by its absence.
The second half of the paper examines visual representation after the ‘second silence’ (broadly post-2010), focussing particularly on the touring exhibition Art AIDS America(2015-17), which was heavily criticised for its under-representation of artists of colour. Out of a total of 107 artists in the original show, only four were initially identified as African American (and of which only one was a woman); outraged by the discrepancy between the empirical data, which shows that people of colour are disproportionately affected by AIDS, and an overwhelmingly white art-world representation of the epidemic, activists staged a die-in protest in the museum, displaying posters with the words ‘stop erasing Black people’. The concept of ‘absence’, so central to the work of the predominantly white cis-gendered gay male artists explored in the first half of this paper, suggests a very difference set of issues in this context, forcing a reconsideration of the kinds of bodies that have so far been erased by dominant histories of HIV and AIDS.
120 BPM: A Symposium 