Greyson’s opera: Ambivalent hero and AIDS activist

karen herland

Video artist John Greyson is the first of 50 Concordia HIV/AIDS lecturers to be invited back. Judging by the crowd that packed H-110 on Jan. 19, his encore performance was warranted.

Greyson’s talk covered his two decades of video art and activism. On the one hand, his work spans the artistic, social and scientific themes of the interdisciplinary course which the lecture series complements.

On the other, his works reflects the evolution of AIDS art and activism over 20 years. Greyson was a member of the cultural committee created to present artistic works during the World Health Organization’s AIDS conference held in Montreal in 1989.

The first video clip he showed, taken from The World is Sick (sic), documented activists who storm-ed the stage at that conference to open the event in the name of people living with AIDS. “Now people with AIDS routinely open and close those conferences.”

This year’s conference will be in Toronto, and once again Greyson is sitting on the cultural committee. This time it’s in his home town, where he teaches film and video at York University.

The 1989 committee had to work to find pieces representing different countries. In 2006 artistic expressions involving AIDS are globally institutionalized. Many countries have programming by people with HIV on their national broadcast networks.

This shift from margin to mainstream is present in Greyson’s work, which he describes as explorations of “public activism and private fears.” His early videos demystified homosexuality and demonstrated safer sex techniques for a gay male audience.

But the bulk of his lecture concerned his 2003 work, Fig Trees, a multimedia opera that considers treatment and political issues in the story of Zackie Achmat, a South African man living with AIDS. Achmat’s decision to refuse treatment until medication was available to all who needed it made international headlines.

Greyson’s work ranges from Zero Patience, “a fluffy discredited musical” about the roots of AIDS, to the sober and multilayered Fig Trees installation. He presented video excerpts of the installation, which he is remaking as a film to reach a wider audience.

The words of the pieces performed in Fig Trees were “plucked with a yellow highlighter” from news clippings and Achmat’s speeches.

Greyson was conscious of the dictum that “opera must be tragic and tragic opera must end in death.” Yet his work challenges that relationship when Achmat rejects both death and the role of hero by ending his treatment strike. Life imitated art as Achmat began taking medication because of government policy changes at almost the same time that Fig Trees opened.

Greyson has shown some excerpts to Achmat, who remains ambivalent about his own role as hero/martyr for the cause. The two have discussed the contradictions inherent in the fact that “audiences want movements to be represented by individuals.”

Although this work has a different texture from his earlier pieces, Greyson explained that his practice of subverting, reversing, and redefining pop cultural and media expressions remains constant. His pieces take traditional forms of expression, the musical, the music video, opera and rework them to deconstruct their meanings and invest them with new ones.

He concluded by saying “each form I chose was intended to intervene in the time in which it was made.” Reviewing his work, he is aware that although pop music is a seductive tool to use to make a statement, it becomes stale quickly.

The opera is immune to similar transience, “because it’s not very popular,” he joked.