AoR
Robert
Farber
Western Blot #11 (1992)
Western Blot #14 (1991)
Robert Farber (1948-1995) was a New York based mixed-media artist. He is most known for his Western Blot Series, named for one of the tests used to detect the presence of HIV. The Western Blots, totaling 22 in number, are richly textured collages comprised of text, gilded architectural forms, textured surfaces brushed with grey scale hues, golds and deep reds, and photographic materials. The Western Blot’s gothic sensibilities are part of Farber’s aesthetic practice of turning backwards in time - to a pandemic of the past - to make sense of the lived realities of HIV in his time. Feelings and aesthetics of viral pasts and presents entangle in these collaged landscapes. Faber’s work for us then recalls pasts and presents of ruination at a time when the promises of Antiretroviral Therapies for living with HIV and investments in the medicalisation of queer bodies had not yet wholly come to pass. The effect of the folding of time and feelings in these landscapes of ruination invite consideration, not only of what futures are being foreclosed in the present of HIV but also, perhaps, what possible futures can be speculated upon in post viral times. Despite being heralded in posthumous, retrospective showings of his work in the late 1990s, Farber’s aesthetic attunements subsequently fell out of favor. In a post anti-retroviral world that promises different HIV futures than what could possibly have materialized in Farber’s time, Farber’s Western Blot series’ relevance seemingly attunes more properly to a memorialised past of AIDS rather than to its presents or futures.
In contradistinction, and in a gesture towards remembering Farber’s work otherwise, we continue to be drawn to the enriched possibilities afforded by Robert Farber’s methodological practice of reaching backward to Medieval Europe’s experiences of the bubonic plague to engage his own epidemic time of AIDS. Farber’s approach to pandemics’ space-time continuums feel salient for where we are at present with coronavirus, the spectre of other zoonotic viruses yet to come, and their relations to HIV. We find ourselves then drawn to Farber’s attunement to negative feelings, to what haunts viral presents , to the experiences of living in the face of immanent death, but also to expressions of beauty and the monstrous that are formulated. These gothic aesthetics at work in the Western Blot series also seemingly articulate a relation to how queer urban communities’ embodiments are (and can be) lived and shaped in the shadow of biomedical technological innovations and mechanisms of surveillance.
Western Blot #9 (1991)
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Western Blot #8 (1991)
In Farber’s collages, suffering, the woundings of stigma and loss loom large, as does his fierce commitment to political mobilisations and attendant acts of bearing witness. And yet, there is also an erotics at work in the textures of these landscapes that echo in defiance, reaching to an elsewhere beyond the edges of the assembled fragments of remembered histories. We wonder, by enfolding the bubonic plague into an HIV present, do Farber’s aesthetics suggest possible means of breaking open HIV archives of the past and present - whether imaginatively, poetically, speculatively, or through material practices and rituals? In other words, can the very act of breaking apart the space-time continuums of how HIV and other virus are embodied, curated and remembered - as Farber did in his sculptural assemblages - lead to other creative practices of re-assemblage for how to live virally? And more generally, what echoes from his works touch in ways that invite a different gambling on ways of inhabiting futures not yet arrived?
Western Blot #19 (1993)