Dear Viewer,

What do I want from you? To bear with the following diagnosis: This is about my/our role as artists and spectators. Look at the left panel. A photograph from a National Geographic special? An anthropology textbook? The object of study? The object of imagined pleasures and cultural anxieties? A woman from Zaire? Look at the other panel. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. He has transformed his subjects into frightful “primitives.” As we watch, we experience his exorcism of the desired but infections exotica. The pathogen. The portrayal of Africa as the source of HIV seems to depend on these same historic Western perceptions. I can’t help staring.

AIDS is overwhelming Africa’s meager medical resources. The legacy of colonialism and exploitation by the West is evident in Zaire where but one doctor is present for every 4,092 people. Or in Uganda were there is one per every 20,300 people! The average annual income in either country is no more than $240 per household.* By contrast, the cost of a year’s supply of the Burroughs-Wellcome drug, Retrovie (AZT), is about $10,000. But you may ask what modernism has to do with AIDS, or with Central Africa, or with this exhibition? I leave these questions open to you, the viewer. For my part I offer this work as a kind of apology. An anthro-apology.

Yours,
Greg Sholette 1990

* Figures are from The World Almanac, statistics taken in the early and mid 1980s.