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AIDS Sculpture “Vandalized”
General Idea’s AIDS sculpture, newly unveiled at the corner of Queen’s Park and Bloor, is used to graffiti, and the public’s writings on the nine-foot-tall statue (“use protection ♥,” “fuck homophobia,” and “it can happen to you” are some of the messages on it right now) make it all the more powerful. Yesterday afternoon, a new message appeared on the statue’s previously untouched base: “Stephen Harper, You Shame Us!!”
The tag is almost certainly an angry response to Stephen Harper’s no-show at the ongoing AIDS conference – the largest conference for the deadliest disease in the world, all held in his country’s largest city, which he opted out of to go up north. To talk about building a military base.
Some may object to the message, but the statue has always been political, with or without graffiti. It was created in 1987 by the Toronto-based collective, after all, in response to Robert Indiana’s 1976 LOVE sculpture, suggesting that AIDS – not love – had become the most defining word of the time. Proving that the anti-Harper tag is “vandalism” on an art piece welcoming public interaction is much harder than if it was done on one behind bullet-proof glass. However excessive (and, debatably, insensitive) this scrawled message may be, this is simply one more opinion on a piece full of them.
Besides, if the public doesn’t like it, they’ll take care of removing or replying to it themselves. The addition and removal of messages and stickers on the sculpture will continue no matter what – yet more proof that, with AIDS, there’s no such thing as stasis.