TO BE AUCTIONED ON THE 11TH OF APRIL AT CHRISTIES, LONDON IN AID OF THE TERRENCE HIGGINS TRUST.
Depicting viral loads and dildos, Paul Chisholm’s work is particularly interesting. In VIRAL LOAD (2010), straight pins puncture this phallus with a congregation of red pins, signaling danger, concentrated at the very tip of the cock. In this era of neoliberalism, where people are held more individually responsible for personal and public health, viral load also becomes a way to know how infectious one is; viral load becomes a (re)markable way to predict transmission rates as we see in new prevention technologies such as community viral load mapping. Now, having a viral load is not only potentially damaging to one’s own health, but also dangerous for those uninfected. Purity and Danger (2010) more pointedly remarks on the threat not only of the virus in semen, but also on positioning subjects in oppositional stances within debates on barebacking and HIV prevention. Now more than ever, one who has a viral load is marked as dangerous and criminal, at least in Canada with the 2012 Supreme Court non-disclosure ruling. L. Robert Westeen’s Criminalization Is Not A Cure (2013) reminds us that criminalizing people living with HIV is counterproductive to stopping AIDS by highlighting the continued, but revised medicalization of HIV prevention
Visual Aids Blog
Eli Manning Curator