How Ross Bleckner Addresses Aids In His Art

How did the AIDS epidemic affect your work?

I think they’re always essentially transcendental issues that come up in our lives, and transformational issues just like there are transformational people and ideas. For me, AIDS certainly in the 80’s when I was in my 30’s, was one of them. Because what it’s signaled was a kind of an end to an era of unbridled optimism about -- actually what it meant to live a “normal” life back.

So suddenly, endless optimism became a sense of the fear of mortality, of early mortality and I think that that became a very pervasive consciousness with -- regardless of what your sexuality is that was very profound. And I think that the idea of not addressing shifts in consciousness you know as an artist in the world, which for me has to do with really describing what it means to be. It's like a rhetorical statement. Being an artist in the world means describing and what it means to be an artist in the world.

What is the emotional impact of having disease?

The spectrum, the emotional range, the spectrum of emotional range that you deal with when you’re dealing with anything whether it’s political or health or psychological, person I think is part of you know the trajectory of what the work looks like and I have gone through periods whereby work is -- where I consider it to be kind of almost sentimentally romantic and then a holding back and a withdrawing from that mindset to a real documentary. You know there I went through a period when my work really focused on microbiology and electron you know, like doing research with electron microscopes and in fact making extremely realistic pictures about what it means for cells to divide, what it means and the kind of fragility of -- you know it's always -- you know it's about our skin and our consciousness and it's really a membrane. And when you think about it, that membrane is a one cell thick membrane between what's normal and what becomes abnormal.

And I think that the sadness that I came home with from Africa I think is something that I'm just figuring out how that will kind of be retrieved and circulated back into my world. You know but, I don’t want to make sad paintings, I don’t want to make happy paintings. But my aim is to make paintings that I feel are spiritually generous and somehow on some level, bring in the whole kind of ellipse of the body and anybody’s work, happiness into the world and some kind of joy and some kind of optimism, and some kind of hopefulness, just like I saw in those kids.