In Imagevirus, the connection between love and AIDS isn’t causal but metaphorical. As an acronym alone, AIDS could stand as a cold, formal abstraction. But linked with a known logo, bearing a resemblance to the colorful form of modernism, the word-image becomes a sensuous irritant that could begin a dialog about the virus in a public domain, or, at the very least, bring awareness to its presence.

“A virus, like all forms of nature,” Bordowitz writes, “must enter into language for humans to recognize its existence. If there are no words to describe it, it does not exist. But words are also images, and both are constituent parts of a larger picture registered and held by sensory experience.”

I could see how, in an atmosphere where there was a stifling and blinding mass of silence and denial about AIDS, a complex work like Imagevirus could be confusing and perceived as aloof and cruel. In the book, Bordowitz discusses the genesis of Imagevirus, imagining the members of General Idea (AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal) brainstorming and realizing the power of that work. Bordowitz does not shy away from speaking about Imagevirus being perceived as a potentially perverse conflation of disease and life-giving force. In fact, he dives in and confronts his own reservations about the work that he had held in the past. In the 1980s, the implications of Imagevirus ran the risk of dovetailing the ignorant and deadly misconception that AIDS was the consequence of a love considered illicit by right-wing conservatives. These contradictions are woven into the work; the way Bordowitz speaks about Imagevirus feels like a current of words that flows and connects various influences and ideas, from William Burroughs and Gertrude Stein to Marshall MacLuhan and television. He brings to light the conflicting characteristics of Imagevirus and the heated atmosphere into which it was introduced. Bordowitz doesn’t offer clean resolutions, but he doesn’t impose a cold interpretation either. He gives a personal, heartfelt account and scholarship of Imagevirus, showing the often unseen connections that the virus has presented.

There have been a lot of mixed messages about AIDS that continue to this day, but it is better to have them out in the open, blaringly visible, than to keep them hidden in the dark alleys of silence. In public, those nuances can be discussed and energized into action. But remaining in shadows like an unresolved trauma, they can fester as violence that repeats and propagates itself.

This past June, I saw a show of text-based works at La Mama Galleria, curated by John Chaich for Visual AIDS, that speaks against that self-repeating violence. “Mixed Messages” had a galvanizing spirit to it, probably because many of the works were created as agitprops and meant to rally people into action. With over forty artists and collectives, the show seemed to take its cue from General Idea’s Imagevirus, which was the oldest work there. Language, as word-images, becomes a way to access and feel sensuous, human experiences, which communication design, as advertisements have shown us, can stealthily and violently manipulate, distort, and dismiss. But with these works, graphic media is felt. It has body. The violence of written language, being able to sharply define a bodily experience at a distance, rendering it detached and cold, is subverted here to bring sensation back to the experience of reading and feeling the text.

Some works directly allude to the human form as they can be worn or carried. For instance, there was a tote bag by Chloe Dzubilo and T De Long asking the viewer to pay attention to AIDS prevention, written in script on dark fabric. It is written twice, in lavender blue and white that overlap each other. To obscure, perhaps, or to emphasize the request for awareness.

Protest is more effective with signs and logos. And indeed there were a lot of posters (or works that resembled posters) by Experimental Jetset, Anthony Burrill, James Joyce, Nightsweat & T-Cells, and David Wojnarowicz. Their messages vary from ironic wordplay to poignant narrative.

Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (One Day This Kid…) (1990) is the most haunting. Although it does not directly address AIDS, it highlights the social limitations that AIDS has rendered visible: apathy and hatred from both the government and the public. A photographic image of the artist as a child is captioned by an oracular text listing the future of the boy as he discovers himself and the violence he will confront in a homophobic world.

Other works combine smirking irony and self-awareness with confrontational bluntness. Paul Chisholm’s makeshift crucifix, Love & H*I*V (2010), and Andrew Graham’s AIDS is God’s Curse (2009), are two of those purposely disturbing and inflammatory word-images. Like Imagevirus, they’re meant to make you feel uncomfortable with their double entendre. Chisholm’s vinyl letters on two crisscrossing pieces of plywood read “Fuck me I have… love and HIV." It’s a message that points to a complicated doubling which exists inherently in language. Fuck me, because I have love. Fuck me, too, for my circumstances. Similarly, Graham’s wordsmithry overturns Fred Phelps’s hate mongering by placing the onus on God; AIDS is His curse. Ultimately, as these artists have shown, the meaning of a word or an image comes down to the reading, to the context in which it exists.