Interview: Avram Finkelstein

“If the you and I’s of this world don’t have this conversation and it doesn’t lead to other sets of thoughts...”

It is towards the beginning of this interview that Avram Finkelstein, in his therapeutic geniality, elicits a confession from me: the confession of my frustration. The frustration about the political passiveness of the larger part of my generation, born from the relentless grinding of consumerism; the feeling that collective effort is not really something that seduces many of my peers in any way; the vexation of being cut off from the political effort and achievements of our elders. 

It is no helpful attitude, I am aware, and certainly not a great conversation starter. But Avram waves it aside with a confident insistence: “You may feel balkanised, you may feel like you live in a world in which collaboration is more difficult than ever, you may feel you live in a world in which social spaces are harder to activate but as somebody – I’m 63 – who has lived in many worlds, I feel it’s actually easier in a way. We’re just told that it’s harder. The trick is to not listen. To not listen to that.”

We talk via Skype, and while I am sat in my dark, spare South Welsh living room by a cup of tea, it seems to be sunny on the US east coast. Behind Avram, huge bookshelves tower over him in the bright light, their centre adorned by a Chinese communist poster. Once I can hear a foreign police siren, as if straight out of a Hollywood movie, blaring in the background. Avram seems worlds away from me; but as we talk he draws me in. 

We discuss his work in collectives, from the 1980’s AIDS activism flagship Silence=Death to his recent Flash Collective initiative. He considers the necessity and rewards of interacting with public spaces, and visual and performance art produced within the paradigm of political resistance. We argue the role of the individual in a collective, and today’s problematic historiography of HIV/AIDS. And as we speak, Avram never fails to give me a sense of, ‘You and I, we’re in this together.’ He is eager to hear me out, emphasising the value of our exchange. 

“We share an intergenerational responsibility that goes both ways: For young people to listen – you know, everyone’s back goes up because the assumption is, those old-timers who will tell you how it was and you need to listen. That’s not actually true. We need to listen, to all of the questions, all of the holes in the story so we can help a younger generation understanding all of its complexity while we’re both still here.”

“It’s my thing.”

He laughs when I wonder whether he might be fed up talking about collective cultural production, after all those years. “My entire life is dedicated to thinking about collectivity from a political and grassroots organising perspective, and cultural production. No, it’s my thing. I’m not sick of it. I have a lot to say about it.” He has always worked in collectives. The child of two communist parents, he appreciates the unifying and empowering potential of this strategy: “We’re told that there are intersectional tensions that are insurmountable because capitalism depends on our being balkanised. And any collective endeavour is an attempt to pierce through that.” An endeavour, he is quick to add, that is literally open to everyone who dares it, as long as they leave their ego at the door. 

“Individual identity can sometimes be somewhat antithetical, or emphasising individual identity can sometimes be antithetical to collectivity because the collective experience is really surrendering yourself to the other people in the room. Collectives are organisms, each one is different, each day that organism is different. I feel collaborative thinking is giving, learning when to trust enough to give in to the collective and that is something a lot of people find hard to do, but I don’t think it’s generational.”

Learning processes are essential to him, and if anything, his 63 years seem to be encouraging him. Recently it has been the concept of performativity - “everyone I know currently is in performance!” - that has helped him shine a new light on his work, and approach it from a different angle, and he seems to be enjoying it immensely. His pedagogical initiative, the Flash Collective, enables him not only to pass on resistance strategies to new audiences – varying profoundly in age and profession, from activists to academics – but to discover new ideas, learning new strategies himself from his collaborators. 

“I’ve come to realise the performative nature of the work that I used to consider visual cultural production. So I’ve actually spent time thinking about what performance is and the importance of performance in particular, the ways in which public spaces are performative. So I feel like I have learned more from younger artists than I have from my own peers who have settled ideas about cultural production that are somewhat crystallised.”

“The history of AIDS hasn’t begun to be written yet. But we’re pretending that it is.”

It is this crystallisation, the stagnation, that clearly bothers him. For years, he has been openly critical of what he calls 'AIDS 2.0', the “re-imagining of this historical moment that shuts out the potential for current and future activism”. It is a complacent, and somewhat lazy gaze back on the events of the 1980s and 1990s, pursued by stories such as told in the Academy Awards contender How To Survive A Plague. We’re witnessing over-simplifying, marginalising, misinterpreting attempts to press diverse, complex histories into one glorified historiography, written to suit the taste of late-stage capitalism. Its tale of heroes, complete with “beginning, middle, and end” has a finality to it, a deceptive conclusiveness to which Avram strongly opposes – not alone because it affects one of his most famous works, the ubiquitous Silence=Death poster.

“I think something like Silence=Death is a very funny case study. It’s a cardboard cutout that represents an entire generation of activists, queer activism, AIDS activism. It’s come through the mechanisms of late stage capitalism, it’s come to represent a whole series of ideas.”

The Silence=Death project was founded in 1985 by Avram, Jorge Soccaras, Oliver Johnston, Chris Lione, Brian Howard, and Charles Kreloff, as a consciousness-raising project based on popular feminist models. The six men – three of which previously hadn’t known each other – soon found each other continually debating the politics of HIV/AIDS. Eventually the idea of making a poster was brought forward by Avram, who had gained his political education in the anti-war movement and Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. The result, with its eminent pink triangle and stark white letters, predated ACT UP by two weeks. Yet it became its most popular embodiment.

“The poster went up literally just two weeks before ACT UP formed. So in the AIDS historiography the story goes that Silence = Death is the ACT UP logo and it represents an entire generation of activism and a whole series of questions. But in fact it was created by six individuals, three of whom didn’t know each other … it was six people who designed that poster. It activated public spaces and it was ACT UP who was responsible for that.”

Avram is keen on pointing out that the Silence=Death poster couldn’t have existed as a product of any other collective. It is the brainchild of six individuals, not of an entire generation: a circumstance that has been neglected countless times, in the effort to smooth it into the predominant, institutionalised narrative. It is a superficial reading, erasing voices left, right and centre: “Communities are made of individuals and I’ve been writing about this in reference to the question of an AIDS historiography – the intersectionality; this very interesting kind of crosshatching of multiple generations with HIV-positive gay men.”

There are stories to be told, viewpoints to be opened. “The history of AIDS hasn’t begun to be written yet. But we’re pretending that it is.” If you ask Avram, he knows where he would start. His voice becomes excited:

“The How To Survive A Plague construction completely obliterates this parallel story that affects over half of the people in the world infected with HIV which has to do with the fact that up until 1991 they weren’t doing any surveillance on women with AIDS. And How To Survive A Plague doesn’t even touch on that. It’s a pretty interesting story: It took hundreds of activists years to get the CDC to redefine, to include manifestations of immunosuppression in women in the definition of AIDS. If I were an activist in 2070, I would want to hear that story, wouldn’t you?”

“I want to create a space for the replacement for the Silence = Death poster.”

“The whole idea of the flash collectives is: I want to create a space for the replacement for the Silence=Death poster.” 

It sounds crass, the way he bluntly throws this statement into our conversation. It breaks with the veneration we all share for that poster, the firm belief that, yes, this poster deserves its place in the museums. But let the words sink in, and they start to make sense, you can sense where Avram is coming from. Isn’t he proud of what the collective achieved, doesn’t he want it to go on? “I end up spending more time speaking against my own work ... because it’s like a doppelgänger, it’s like it’s trotted out to represent a whole set of things, but it’s a set of things that are so deeply institutional and totally ignore a whole other set of things.”

Avram is ready to move on, and he has found a way to return to the nitty-gritty of the Silence=Death Project, without falling for the glory-laden fantasy that the poster has come to represent. His Flash Collective initiative seeks to engage new audiences and activate public spaces by steering away from canonical cultural production, and by employing non-hierarchical, collective strategies in order to reframe social questions surrounding HIV/AIDS, gender, reproductive justice, and only recently, the refugee crisis.

“I want us to figure out what it means and set up whole new set of conversations so that the critiques that brought that poster into being will always be alive, that’s the point of the poster. The point of the poster is resistance. And those are the skills we need to make sure are always alive. That’s what the Flash Collective experiment is about, it’s trying to learn new strategies to make new work.”

Returning to his grassroots origins, Avram now challenges himself and others by forming collectives for only a couple of hours. In the limited time, Tumblr blogs are created and interventions in the public sphere are staged; each collective approaches a subject differently, and Avram is experimenting with “which arrows to draw out of your quiver that are going to be right for that room full of people at that moment”, because there are “a million strategies for collective cultural production”. Restricting the time window is only one of those strategies, but arguably one of the more effective, as he explains:

“The reason why I have experimented with the idea of condensed time frames is to remove a lot of the obstacles that we place in our own way when it comes to complex messages. We’re sort of led to believe that some things are too hard to talk about or too hard to understand and consequently we don’t ever attempt to, but I feel like saying something about social issues is more important than saying nothing. So the condensed time frame is a way of forcing people to going on the record.”

It opens the room to dialogue. A dialogue between the people in the collective – which, as Avram admits, can easily be subject to some tension between the participants –, and a dialogue with the space. When a Flash Collective was invited to contribute to Pawel Althamer’s Draftsmen’s Congress by drawing on the walls of a museum, they decided to challenge the brief. What does it mean to be invited into an established, mediated space like Manhattan’s New Museum, and is it really as egalitarian as it sounds? After all, which audience would behold the spectacle? They ended up producing stickers, claiming ‘This is not a safe space to be queer’, for the museum-goers to take and use. The pockets with the stickers were soon removed by the museum, but as Avram writes on his website, “the stickers are still visible on the streets of New York”. 

“It’s about the ways to articulate complex things.”

The public becomes the pivotal ground for dialogue, a paradigm that the collectives are maintaining since the Silence=Death days. And the dialogue could not be carried without a language. To Avram, the key that opens the door to the public is the familiar, sometimes provocative, sometimes humorous parlance of advertising.

“I feel like advertising vernaculars pose as declaratives but I feel like public spaces are interrogatives. And the key to understanding how to break through or to pierce through complicated subjects is understanding which questions to ask or reading responses as interrogatives. I feel like even when we’re in a public space and we’re saying something incredibly declarative, like to use a Gran Fury thing, “Kissing doesn’t kill: greed and indifference do”, we’re activating that space in the hope of a response, so in fact, what appears to be declarative is a dialogue. And I think it’s really essential to think any work in the public sphere as a dialogue and paying attention to the responses however they’re gaged.”

It makes a full circle, this strategy, twisting something that could not be more consonant with capitalism and consumerism to your own political ends. “[It is] a dynamic practice that is really about resistance strategies...it’s about the ways to articulate complex things.”

Avram cherishes his flash collectives because it is a way to pass this practice, his knowledge and experience of many years, on to the next generation, and make his voice heard without obliterating others. He is aware that time is precious. 

“You have this very limited period of time where people who were actually there in the beginning are still alive and young people who are completely versed in the complexity of historiography, archives, archival practices and intersectionality and are thinking about all that stuff, they are both alive at the exact same moment and that’s not going to be true forever. So I feel like we share an intergenerational responsibility and this goes back to the collectives.” Again, he calls on the duty of his peers. “It’s sacred ground for us. We lost a lot of people. But that doesn’t mean it’s over. We’re responsible to those people, to help critique the story, right?”

There it is again, this flicker, this ‘we’re in this together’ moment. It feels like he reaches out a hand through the screen. I can only imagine what it must be like to work in a collective with him, to be inspired to come up with something exciting in only a couple of hours, to thrust yourself in the transformative experience of collaboration. It sounds really easy and not scary, not frustrating at all. Let’s sit, and talk, and listen, really listen, and work. 

Avram pauses. In the past hour we sat, I drank a cup of tea, he ran to the bookshelf to find Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto for me, we chatted, we laughed. Now he is serious, almost weary.

“If the you and I’s of this world don’t have this conversations … We’re going to be gone and I don’t want someone else after we’re gone to say ‘this is what it meant’.”


All images provided by Avram Finkelstein.