Robert Blanchon: AIDS and the Question of Conceptualism

Abstract

According to the conventional art historical genealogy, artists associated with the Pictures Generation would find their conceptual adversary in Neo-Expressionism. The twinned issues of authorship and individual expression were key to this antagonism. While artists such as Julian Schnabel purportedly embraced the idea that painterly marks were unmediated expressive registrations, Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine, according to critics associated with the journal October, aimed to deconstruct the very means of representation. As this discourse advanced in the 1980s, a remarkably similar debate began brewing in regard to AIDS imagery. While photographers including Nicholas Nixon produced harrowing depictions of AIDS patients designed to express the epidemic’s deleterious effects, activist organizations virulently opposed this strategy, opting for a political rhetoric centered on text-based graphics that pointed to the epidemic’s structural roots and representational distortions. Robert Blanchon, the subject of this article, created a curious synthesis of these otherwise opposed methodologies, matrixing sexuality, death, and their idiosyncratic expressions through the formal language of Conceptual art. His work approaches what Isabelle Graw calls “conceptual expression,” using what Benjamin Buchloh famously called the “aesthetic of administration” to analyze AIDS and the sexual freedom it displaced. In addition to introducing the work of this underdiscussed artist, this article frames Blanchon’s practice as a prompt to reconsider the prevailing divide within a certain art historical lineage between “critical” art and subjective expression to make room for a framework that accounts for artists’ porous movement between analytic and more personalized approaches to activist artwork.