The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

by Sarah Schulman

As artists as well as queers, these people wanted to be able to think in radical ways, to have insights, to realize, to make work that was outside of social assumptions, to be radical people who could—like the weary ACT UPers—achieve justice in some fashion. They admired their predecessors who had created change through confrontation, alienation, and truth telling. But their professional instincts led them in different directions: accommodation, social positioning, even unconscious maneuvering of the queer content they did have so that it was depoliticized, personalized, and not about power. A month later I was talking to a young man whom I like very much. “You know,” he said. “I'm interested in making work about an artist who died of AIDS.” “Oh, who?” I asked. “I don't know yet. I've been looking at people who are unknown.” “Like who?” “Well, I'm interested in someone named Patrick Angus. And in another one named Mark Morrisroe.” He said these two names with a kind of contemporary upslide at the end. Like they were questions: Patrick Angus? Mark Morrisroe? “Those are both really well known artists,” I said, realizing that these two were among many who had not been properly historicized. “Mark Morrisroe has a catalogue raisonné.” “Oh,” he said. “Do you know any artists who died of AIDS who no one's ever heard of?” “There are thousands,” I said. I loved that he wanted to know, and hated that he didn't get it, didn't understand what was missing, how much is gone. How would he?