By David Bayne-Jardine
Finally permitted to give in to that festive impulse, on the 1st of December the world hits ‘go’ on its favourite ritual of organised mania. We haul boxes of decorations down from the attic, hit ‘play’ on Mariah as we march through the cold, and anticipate like giddy children a month of comfort, good food, and boardgame-induced fights.
Unfortunately, this means the much more significant meaning of this day, muffled and dampened by the tinsel and Bublé tracks, tends to fly under the radar. The 1st of December is also World AIDS Day – 24 hours set aside to commemorate the estimated 44.1 million people who have died from HIV/AIDS since the first reported cases in 1981. These figures make it one of the deadliest pandemics in global history; for comparison, the worldwide number of confirmed deaths from COVID-19 is 7.1 million.
To this day, there are still tens of millions of people living with HIV/AIDS, and yet it remains a condition as stigmatised as it is unknown. Charities and activists spend much of their time fighting the harmful misconceptions surrounding the disease. For a start, many remain unsure about the difference between the two terms. HIV stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus – the actual pathogen itself that enters a body, attacks its white blood cells, and weakens the immune system to make a patient more likely to develop diseases, infections, and cancers. AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), however, is the name for the condition of depleted immunity obtained when someone is exposed to the virus.
Others have misconceptions about the lethality of the disease. No, a diagnosis of HIV is not a death sentence (modern drugs allow a long and healthy life for many with the disease). Others believe it just affects gay men, but in 2023 the majority of new cases in the UK were amongst heterosexual people.
As a schoolboy, I recall the word ‘AIDS’ being used as an adjective, synonymous with ‘rubbish’ or ‘annoying’. The term was a part of our everyday language, and yet none of us really knew what it meant. Even as a gay man myself, it wasn’t until my early 20s that I finally educated myself on the story of this disease; ironic, considering that it is a story so deeply tied up with that of LGBTQ+ emancipation. Almost all of my mates who I’ve spoken to about HIV/AIDS admit they know next to nothing about it, aside from the fact that a diagnosis is, in the words of one friend, ‘very, very bad news’.
In the days when the disease was still being largely ignored by politicians, artists played a very significant role in raising public awareness and campaigning for action. One of these figures was Derek Jarman, a renowned British painter, filmmaker, and stage designer who died of AIDS-related illness in 1994, aged 52. His films were known for being highly political, visually stunning,and gloriously punk. Some of his most celebrated works include Caravaggio (his queer biopic of the rebellious Baroque painter), Jubilee, and Blue – a 79-minute still of the titular colour over which the artist meditates on living with AIDS.
But it is another work created in this same year of declining health, mere months before his passing, that I want to revisit on World AIDS Day. Jarman’s ATAXIA: AIDS IS FUN (1993) is a striking canvas housed in the Tate Modern that is perhaps this artist’s most celebrated and moving painting. Violently spattered and slashed with paint, equal parts angry as it is despairing, ATAXIA offers a profound insight into the artist’s mind mere months before his death.
What we are first drawn to in this painting is the sense of contrast between the colours themselves and the way they’re deployed. Bright, radiant, almost childish primary colours are applied on a luminous red background with a shocking sense of violence. This dissonance between typically ‘happy’ colours and their brutal application creates a sense of irony, a sort of black comedy that persists as we move through the painting.
From the mélange of colours, we can quickly make out two lines of text: ‘ATAXIA’, and ‘AIDS IS FUN’. The former, ataxia, is the medical term for what Jarman experienced as the disease took hold of him – a disorder that affects muscle coordination and leaves patients with difficulty walking, writing, and speaking (we can see this reflected in the seemingly uncontrolled form of the painting). The latter line, ‘AIDS IS FUN’, is as disturbing as it is ambiguous. Perhaps it’s a macabre reference to the changes happening in Jarman’s body – the loss of control and new sensations could be considered ‘thrilling’ and ‘fun’ in a bleakly ironic way.
As we continue rootling through the layers of paint, two more lines of text whisper at us through the canvas. On the bottom, we can make out a desperate and hopeless ‘LETS FUCK’; on the top, ‘BLIND FAIL’ emerges in strokes of murky green, alluding to Jarman’s own loss of sight. In fact, the artist gives the viewer a taste of the experience of blindness through the way information is obscured in the painting. Just as Jarman struggled to make out people and things around him as his eyesight declined, so too does the reader have to squint and scramble to find form and meaning amidst the wash of the canvas’s colours and textures.
But it’s not just the way we are put in the shoes of the sufferer that makes ATAXIA special. For me, it’s how the painting invokes an image beyond the canvas we see before us. In academic terms, we could call this work ‘palimpsestic’ – the image we see on canvas prompts another image in our head: that of the artist creating the painting. In the violent brushstrokes we can almost see a dying Jarman slashing at the painting, angry at a world that for so long ignored this disease, angry at this disease for cutting his life short.
In this way, behind the abstract painting lies an intimate and detailed portrait: a visionary artist, desperate and tired in his final months, engaging in a gruelling battle which he is destined to lose. Whilst Jarman stands out as an icon of the AIDS crisis, it is the millions that died before him and the millions that live with HIV to this day that society risks overlooking. I hope that on World AIDS Day, amidst the Christmas chaos, we can spare a thought for these forgotten people.
Sources:
https://worldaidsday.org/about/
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hiv-aids
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/coronavirus-disease-(covid-19) (COVID-19)
https://nat.org.uk/about-hiv/hiv-statistics/ational AIDS Trust
Featured Image: Ataxia – Aids is Fun, 1993, Derek Jarman / Tate Collection