{"id":89,"date":"2025-05-17T22:34:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-17T22:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/?p=89"},"modified":"2025-07-16T22:43:20","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T22:43:20","slug":"excerpt-from-the-dangerousness-of-the-12-inch-tall-politician-on-documentation-mediation-and-creative-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/17\/excerpt-from-the-dangerousness-of-the-12-inch-tall-politician-on-documentation-mediation-and-creative-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Excerpt From “The Dangerousness of the 12-Inch-Tall Politician: On Documentation, Mediation, and Creative Action”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There’s something primal about losing yourself in an orgy of expression, unsure where you end and begin. The rhythmic shouts thrumming in your body and blood. When all of it is working together to produce a shared sense of us-ness. A sonic ocean eroding your sense of the solitary, resounding in a universal language of the psyche. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we could see the city in four dimensions, collapsing time, then the sounds of those cries, those appeals to shared humanity, would overlap, resonating through every street. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside the gates of the White House in 1992 the words are clear, echoing the call\/response format of a revival tent: \u201cOne-hundred-sixty-thousand dead. Where is George?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s 1988: anger at Wall Street, at \u201cbusiness as usual,\u201d at the trade in lives for profit, burns. ACT-UP activists scatter hundreds of dollar bills1<\/a><\/sup> bearing the imprint of that collective rage. A simultaneous expression of collective anger and an appeal to shared humanity: You too are desperate for dollars on the street outside the corporate offices of pharmaceutical companies and profiteers. You too are being harmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three decades later on posh Fifth Avenue, a flurry of leaflets fall from the balcony of the Guggenheim museum to the still bodies of those staging a die-in below. A crystallized appeal to that same universal us. To a shared humanity. And at the same time, an expression of collective pain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sometimes like to imagine eavesdropping on artists David Wojnarowicz and Zoe Leonard, a fly on the wall in an old tenement building on the Lower East Side, hidden in a crevice formed by the crumbling brick. I picture the two of them like I once was myself: barely out of their teens, stalked by a plague,  frightened to pick up the phone because its ring had come so often to signal another death. David, recently diagnosed, mourning his mentor and former lover Peter Hujar. Zoe, devastated by her childhood best friend’s fatal diagnosis, invigorated by the ACT-UP meeting they’d just attended. Both determined to make a change in the world before death intervenes, christening their new cohort the Candelabras.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One can hardly imagine a more viscerally obvious breakdown of existing social structure than street actions. Chants like the ever popular \u201cWhose Streets? Our Streets\u201d or schoolyard taunts thrown at powerful political figures, a pie in Anita Bryant’s face or a president burnt in effigy. Even with a more strictly vertically hierarchical structure than ACT-UP\u2019s ad hoc coalitions of affinity groups, the theatricality of the street is a mask that offers an ephemeral anonymity. Those marching in the street are, for a moment, no longer doctors or lawyers or janitors or school teachers\u2014instead a single uniform fact of identity rises to the forefront. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a 2010 interview with Sarah Schulman, Leonard discusses tactical civil disobedience, the formation of the Candelabras as an affinity group to support the 1988 action targeting the FDA, and how amazing it was to have \u201ca place to bring your rage and a place to bring your anger and your fear and your sadness and actually try to understand how the virus, how the disease had been made into a crisis.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rage and fear are equalizing. Fear of death is universal; disease\u2019s skeletal hand is no respecter of persons. And on the most basic level, street actions like ACT-UP\u2019s were about creating a space to express that rage and fear and attempting to create empathy in others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When one thinks of communication, one\u2019s mind immediately goes to language, but there are other ways in which to reveal one’s innate humanity to others, to reach into their brain and stimulate their amygdala. Protests, rallies, and moments of street theater can be powerfully effective because they work on a prelinguistic level, encapsulating basic human emotions in a way that allows people to see beyond social structure.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The political funerals designed by ACT-UP activists during the late \u201980s and early \u201990s were likely so effective\u2014in a way that continues to resonate decades later\u2014precisely because of their prelinguistic and extra-discursive nature. Rhythmic chants have been shown to function as a bonding mechanism within groups,3<\/a><\/sup> but iconography that a wide range of people can connect to is perhaps more accessible to a general audience. The image of activists scattering ashes on the White House lawn became indelibly sealed in the nation’s memory; a public ritual that, like any funeral, serves to broadcast personal pain\u2013mourning, privation. In his unpublished 1988 journal Wojnarowicz scrawled an early version of an idea that he would reframe publicly in his memoir Close to the Knives<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The thing that’s important about memorials is they bring a private grief out of the self and make it a little more public which allows for communicative transition\u2026but the walls of the room or chapel are then unnecessary one simple step can bring it out into a more public space don’t give me a memorial if I die\u2014give me a demonstration.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The 1992 demonstration grew out of and was inspired by the creative practice of the artists involved with ACT-UP\u2019s affinity groups\u2014the same groups that staged die-ins and carried coffins through the streets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Art, so often reduced to a decorative bank vault, has the potential to be a powerful weapon. This is why our nation’s leaders have a history of wielding political power to silence certain forms of creative practice: because either the content or form thereof threatens those in power. We speak of \u201cculture wars\u201d because they are quite literally wars waged on the discursive plane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The year I was twenty-five I went to six funerals. The following year four more. The maelstrom of AIDS that cut down an entire generation of artists and outlaws had abated, but the opiate crisis was in full swing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2025, in the wealthy countries of the global north, most HIV positive folks can access medications that render the once deadly virus a mere inconvenience. And the rest of us can take PreP. But the story to be remembered isn’t that the government and the medical community saw the light and saved the day. What should be remembered are decades of institutional neglect and discrimination and how a handful of sex workers, injection drug users, and queers waged a war both ideological and practical and how we can replicate those tactics today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n
  1. The \u2018bills\u2019 scattered mimicked real currency in ten, fifty and hundred dollar denominations with \u201cGran Fury\u201d in place of the treasury signature and slogans like \u201cFUCK YOUR PROFITEERING. People are dying while you play business.\u201d inscribed on the back. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. Zoe Leonard. \u201dACT UP Oral History Project\u201d Interview by Sarah Schulman, The New York Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Festival, Inc.<\/em>, January 13, 2010, audio. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  3. Mentel, Andrej. \u201cRituals and Group Solidarity: An Ethnographic Case Study.\u201d Slovensk\u00fd n\u00e1rodopis<\/em> 70, no. 2 (2022): 228\u2013247.
    Both controlled research experiments and field studies of rituals\u2013religious and otherwise\u2013have indicated a connection between synchronicity of movement or speech and greater in-group solidarity. Analyzing two Muslim and one Roman Catholic communities in Eastern Europe, Andrej Mentel concludes that \u201critual performances seen as displays supporting the group member\u2019s commitment is not the only mechanism promoting the willingness of other group members to cooperate. In addition to it, there is another mechanism directly related to the nature of collective rituals or similar activities which gives them their specific form and is theorized to be directly involved in increasing cooperation. This mechanism directly involves the evoking and strengthening of certain emotions. It is about the use of rhythm and collective coordination of movements and vocal expressions (especially in the form of singing).\u201d     \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  4. \u00a0David Wojnarowicz, Journal Entry, 1988, NYU Fales Collection David Wojnarowicz Papers \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    There’s something primal about losing yourself in an orgy of expression, unsure where you end and begin. The rhythmic shouts thrumming in your body and blood. When all of it is working together to produce a shared sense of us-ness. A sonic ocean eroding your sense of the solitary, resounding in a universal language of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":91,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"The \u2018bills\u2019 scattered mimicked real currency in ten, fifty and hundred dollar denominations with \u201cGran Fury\u201d in place of the treasury signature and slogans like \u201cFUCK YOUR PROFITEERING. People are dying while you play business.\u201d inscribed on the back.\",\"id\":\"2ec8e7f3-b136-402f-9c0a-3576e80eda79\"},{\"content\":\"Zoe Leonard. \u201dACT UP Oral History Project\u201d Interview by Sarah Schulman, The New York Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Festival, Inc.<\/em>, January 13, 2010, audio.\",\"id\":\"eec6bd78-01aa-4d8a-8be7-8dca3dccd98b\"},{\"content\":\"Mentel, Andrej. \u201cRituals and Group Solidarity: An Ethnographic Case Study.\u201d Slovensk\u00fd n\u00e1rodopis<\/em> 70, no. 2 (2022): 228\u2013247.
    Both controlled research experiments and field studies of rituals\u2013religious and otherwise\u2013have indicated a connection between synchronicity of movement or speech and greater in-group solidarity. Analyzing two Muslim and one Roman Catholic communities in Eastern Europe, Andrej Mentel concludes that \u201critual performances seen as displays supporting the group member\u2019s commitment is not the only mechanism promoting the willingness of other group members to cooperate. In addition to it, there is another mechanism directly related to the nature of collective rituals or similar activities which gives them their specific form and is theorized to be directly involved in increasing cooperation. This mechanism directly involves the evoking and strengthening of certain emotions. It is about the use of rhythm and collective coordination of movements and vocal expressions (especially in the form of singing).\u201d\",\"id\":\"1aa63b77-3742-4579-a037-f202b1676ae5\"},{\"content\":\"\u00a0David Wojnarowicz, Journal Entry, 1988, NYU Fales Collection David Wojnarowicz Papers\",\"id\":\"54e44197-1de1-4170-a554-4c1774e89f47\"}]"},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98,"href":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions\/98"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writing.pinxelate.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}