Rebels Rebel
Art Activism during the AIDS Crisis
Tommaso Speretta‘s Rebels Rebel: AIDS, Art and Activism in New York, 1979-1989 is the most recent in a series of works that bring to light the activism surrounding the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Along with the documentaries How to Survive a Plague and United in Anger, Rebels Rebel joins an emergent history, giving voice to a Queer movement born out of crisis. In order to construct his narrative, Speretta looks to the art collectives involved in producing art propaganda, or agitprop. Merging written and visual histories, Rebels Rebel reflects a moment where the lines between art, politics, pop culture and social theory were purposefully blurred by AIDS activists bent on creating greater awareness for the growing epidemic. Speretta adeptly articulates the ways artists, and those involved in AIDS activism, repurposed advertising, marketing and communication techniques to combat an indifferent media and government.
Tracing the multiple axes of resistance utilized by ACT UP, Rebels Rebel paints an unsentimental picture of both the pain that comes with losing loved ones and the artistic pleasures that come with using art to make a difference. In the process, Speretta gives readers a look at life and death in queer New York before marriage equality and the mainstreaming of the Gay Rights Movement.
He concludes the book with an essay on his personal experience of coming out at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and working alongside AIDS activists to create a voice for people largely ignored or deemed undeserving of help by an increasingly conservative public. It is Speretta’s ability to bring together the disparate pieces of the AIDS crisis — the personal, political, artistic, institutional and commercial — that makes Rebels Rebel a great book to own.
