The performance of mourning Essay Example For Students

The performance of mourning Essay In the five and a half years since Cleve Jones, a San Francisco AIDS activist, decided to stitch a six-foot-by-three-foot grave-shaped quilt in memory of his lover, the AIDS Memorial Quilt has become the chief focus of mourning for hundreds of thousands bereaved by AIDS, as well as a canny organizing tool in the global battle against the disease. Ironically, in its present immensityfilling eight 48-foot tractor trailers, weighing 26 tons, covering the equivalent of 12 football fields when displayed on the grounds of the Washington Monument in October, and growing by another football field and a half just that weekend from new panels streaming inthe Quilt is perhaps nearing its effective social and political limits. This may have been the last display of the Quilt in its entirety, say its coordinators, who are beginning to find themselves the stewards of a sacred leviathan of mourning, difficult both to preserve and to show, and subject to much debate now as to its future course.Yet as a great community artwork and symbol of postmodern culture, even as postmodern performance, the quilts measure has hardly been taken. It is startling to visit the Quilt, for instance, and realize that its plan is inspired by the modern cemetery. This walking along the nine miles of black plastic walkways, this searching the eleven different color fields on the Quilt map to find which of the 22,000 plots is dedicated to, say, Charles Ludlam, suddenly feels familiar: This is what we do at Woodlawn, Mount Auburn and Laurel Hill. And indeed I did feel that I had come to a site radiating the specificity of what Walter Benjamin called an aura, that Charles Ludlam was in some sense actually here. Perhaps it is the acute sense of hereness about each person remembered in the Quilt, impossible not to experience, that leads on to the thought Wait now! This is not Woodlawn, but its symbolic double, its parody even, or better still, its performance. And a road show at that. The AIDS Quilt as traveling graveyard. How do you perform a graveyard? First you need performers. There are the live ones, like the white-clad volunteers, fully 1,000 of them in Washington, who have developed a balletic ritual of laying out the Quilt. There are the readerssome 500 were scheduled over the weekendwho make the showing of the Quilt a performance by calling off the sad litany of names and names and names: 32 for each speaker at the podium, eight hours a day, for three full days. There are also the visitors, who are invited to leave their own names and messages on the signature squares set aside for that purpose. But in truth it is the brio of the dead performers that captures our attention. There are moments when the entire vast field of the Quilt, riotous with the iconography of show business, takes on the aspect of a players cemetery. The top hats, tap shoes, gleaming black and white keyboards with flying notes or actual staves of music stitched in; the cut-work doublets, smiling and frowning masks, the programs and ticket stubs carefully sealed in plastic, the feathers, ribbons, junk jewels, a whole black slinky drag costume, the painting of Ludlam as Camille with all the ring curls these brilliant traces of vanished talent not only tell a tale of devastation to our crowd, but lead to reflections on the deeper structures of performance here.Real cemeteries of course specialize in permanence. Granite and marble are their natural materials. They seek to foster a sense of perpetual home, as one 19th-century enthusiast put it, and will offer, for a prepaid fee, perpetual care for your gravesite, though the idea lacks somewhat in historical probability. Despite the fact that a tangential cult of stitchers and gluers called Handmaidens of the Quilt has sprung up to repair panels already aging, the Quilt, like painted flats of scenery representing rocks or pyramids, is clearly not for all time. Its fragile materials will decay long before a tombstone, and must always be protected from the weather. From the Bowery to Broadway: Lew Fields and the Roots of American Popular Culture Essay Each Washington appearance has been a calculation to catch the conscience of the king.Cleve Jones is reported to have said, when he first envisioned the Quilt and the gathering of the names, that he wanted to make something he could take his grandmother to. Who can miss the shrewd conflating of tradition and subversion in the gay communitys reaching back to a 19th-century collaborative womens craft form for inspiration? Women have long understood how to give the needle to dominant social forms while perfectly fulfilling them. Thus the Quilt, without an ounce of apparent confrontation in its soft and comforting body, is a hugely visual riposte to official cultures fervent wish that AIDS would just disappear from view, like some distant famine. By now the Quilt includes many panels dedicated to women, children, I.V. drug users and hemophiliacs. But its association of gay sexuality with Reaganite cultural mythology the celebration of the rural American, family American, homemade American, nostalgic American in effect forcing its spectators to embrace in a single image what to many is an impossible contradiction this is no doubt the Quilts most brilliant and far-reaching element of ironic masquerade. Without losing its healing associations, the Quilt is far more than comforter. It is an inspired multiplex of grieving, art and social activism. Shaped by thousands of hands, it is, one might almost say, a seismic social art eruption, in so deep a region of the mind does it originate. It plays out a terrible connection between death and the erotic, thinks past mournings ancient links to church, family, class and state, yet re-imagines a connection between politics and the sacred. The Quilt is a new cultural form, a unique symbolic representation emerging in response to an unprecedented crisis, but it is renewing tragic themes that have always been the province of ritual performance.