Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde by Robb Hernández (review)

In his original and moving attempt to map the history and ongoing impact of queer Chicanx artists, Robb Hernández underscores the need for a more sophisticated art historical analysis when encountering the detritus and artifacts of brown, queer lives lived—and extinguished—on the margins. Archiving an Epidemic pulsates with the continuing trauma of HIV/AIDS, materializing the effects of that pandemic through its complex, multidisciplinary approach to the creative production of queer Chicanx artists and its resistance to a traditional mode of historical storytelling that satisfies itself with uncovering disregarded subjects and entering them into the art historical record. Tracing the art and performance practice of Californian Chicanx artists from the late 1960s to the present, Hernández invites readers into the difficult, intimate, and energizing spaces of feeling provoked by queer, brown art and demonstrates how these spaces of affect necessarily become intertwined with the physical and material structures that provide homes for his subjects’ artifacts.

While AIDS-related loss lends this project its urgency, Hernández begins the book with a particular moment of institutional trauma—a photographic image displayed at a symposium sponsored by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. The image in question, a portrait of artist Mundo Meza (1955–85) from a collage by his friend and collaborator Robert “Cyclona” Legoretta, was projected onto an introductory screen at the 2006 “Queering the Archive, Or Archiving the Queer” symposium. The decontextualized image provokes Hernández both in its conjuring of Meza’s presence within a larger field of Chicanx avant-garde practice and in its fragmentary nature. Culled from Legoretta’s acquired archive, this extracted photo enacts the violence of institutional collection: the portrait is used as evidence of a queer life for which, it is suggested, little other evidence exists, Meza’s own materials having been purportedly destroyed by his surviving family members. At the symposium, AIDS remained unspoken in relation to the dearth of material evidencing Meza’s life and artistic contributions, demonstrating how the institutional collection, management, and promotion of queer Chicanx archives necessarily reproduce the silences and erasures that these protective projects often want to counter. Inspired by the late José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on queer ephemera and taking up Ann Cvetkovich’s call to infuse queer historiography with the feelings and emotions that shape one’s experiential relation to archival matter, the book charts an ambitious methodological path into alternative spaces of care, feeling its way through historical excitations of AIDS loss outside the more official systems of protection and provenance often favored by art historians and museum curators. As such, the book challenges the ways in which Asco, the most prominently documented and exhibited Chicanx art and performance collective from post-1960s Los Angeles, has come to be seen as the primary historical representative of the Chicanx avant-garde. Archiving an Epidemic disrupts this conception by following the circuitous and ambiguous networks of influence that queer residue illuminates in the aftermath of devastating loss.

Hernández, in his introduction, describes a theoretically informed practice for apprehending alternative archives, which he refers to as the “archival body/archival space study model” (21). Elaborating this approach across literal and figurative bodies of art, the book introduces a queer praxis in which ethnographic methods become inseparable from an intensely poetic formal analysis. The central technique of the archival body/archival space model is “archive elicitation,” a mode of oral history engagement with the custodians of unofficial archives (21). In conversation with Hernández, these custodians uncover, display, and sift through their materials, often housing artifacts in domestic settings that accentuate the ephemerality of objects. The method not only elucidates his subjects’ intimate relations with the deceased but also reveals how they conjure those absent bodies through storytelling. Considered within the larger history of Latinx testimonio, the narrative acts and observational registers that emerge from both custodial speakers and the...