AIDS can neither be fully represented to consciousness, nor can it be forgotten. The enormity of its reality continues on a global level far beyond the Day of Remembrance performed in the hall of a great museum. We are unable to comprehend its totality and unable to confine it to the forgetful silence of oblivion. AIDS remains an event in history rather than an object of history. We call out in the present tense from this event called AIDS.”

These words introduce Immemorial, a video produced by San Francisco-based artist Rudy Lemcke as part of a presentation on women and AIDS he helped organize at Mills College in Oakland, California, in February 2005. The film, which juxtaposes footage from a 1990 ACT UP demonstration with images from his own 1992 “Day Without Art” performance/installation at San Francisco’s De Young Museum, was aimed at reminding viewers of the enormous amount of activist energy it took to force government and corporate attention in the direction of developing the drugs whose advent in the mid-1990s helped redefine AIDS from a surefire death sentence to a chronic, if undesirable, disease. And the words from the video quoted above remind us that, for the vast majority of those around the globe afflicted by the disease, AIDS even today remains a quick death sentence because they still have no access to the medicines they need to treat their condition.

Lemcke’s art spans several genres besides video—performance, audio recordings, painting, sculpture, still photography, and on occasion intricate interplays between these categories. His work has been exhibited nationwide, including at the 1991 Whitney Biennial in New York City as part of Group Material’s AIDS Timeline, and Immemorial is only one example of his work related to AIDS. Currently he is director of on-line programs for the Queer Cultural Center, San Francisco, the California LGBT Arts Alliance and web manager for the Larry Kramer Initiative, Yale University. In the following, he offers some thoughts on art, AIDS, and the need to remain mindful of this tenacious disease whose end, even for those who do have access to the medicines they need, is nowhere yet in sight.

Lester Strong: Your art is not just about AIDS. It’s also about living in a complex world of language, sound, and movement, about our interactions with that world. How do you define yourself as an artist in terms of the range of your interests?

Rudy Lemcke: I’ve been working as an artist for about thirty years. If there were a centralizing theme to my art over that time, it would be the idea that everything is always in flux and that we are always changing and morphing into new states of existence. It’s about the unstable nature of our perceptions and language. I think it’s impossible to see the world or even talk about being in the world as something static or permanent.

I studied philosophy in college and worked in Canada picking tobacco as a migrant worker during the summers to pay for school. The extreme difference between those two worlds created an ideological tension in my thinking that has never been resolved and has always affected the way I approach things. My early art was very conceptual and theoretical, but always grounded in the everydayness of the world. When AIDS invaded this world, it became the lens through which everything I did was filtered.

When we look at things, there’s always a tension between the lived experience and the idea of it. I think my work tries to reflect this tension, swinging back and forth between the real world and political involvement and the art that has a certain philosophical distance from the world.

How did you become interested in being an artist?

That’s like asking how did you become gay. It’s just the way your are…

What drew you to AIDS activism?

I don’t consider myself an AIDS activist. That high honor belongs to the men and women who were in the streets and breaking down doors to get the professional bureaucrats in the government to respond to the crisis. As an artist, I consider myself more of a cultural activist—looking to have an impact on the world around us by changing people’s perception of things. I think there’s a distinction between the two kinds of activism.

Are you working on any art projects today related to AIDS?

Not on anything hew at the moment. But I’m putting together a retrospective of the work I did in the early years of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco. It’ll be called Picturing AIDS: 1986 – 1996 and hopefully will be finished in the next year or so.

Currently I’m working on an autobiographical Web/video piece called September: Video Blog (2005). I’m also curating an experimental video art exhibit that will be part of this year’s National Queer Arts Festival.

How do you view the situation today in regard to AIDS in this country? In regard to AIDS around the world?

It’s hard to grasp the enormity of the AIDS crisis, and because of this it’s easy to slip into a forgetfulness of how it’s impacting our lives daily. We are in that forgetfulness right now as a community, and need to wake up—again.