Resumen de Les temps pestifères: l'imaginaire de la peste dans l'art des années 1980 et 1990
The imagination of the plague in the Art of the 1980s and 1990s.
In October 1983 seventeen cases of AIDS had been recorded in the United Kingdom. This same year, "Black Death" by Gilbert & Georges, one of the first appearances of AIDS in art, opened the decade under the sign of the menace, when the artists, in the major catastrophe that they presented, reverberated the echo of the long time of the plague, to which the disease was then compared.
Its specter returned to suddenly haunt the dreams of full health of the end of the century, and this very striking image of the two British men, that of an abyss opened under the epoch, suggests the capacity of artists to grasp, often in advance of others, what is at stake during their own time and to give it a form. Their manner also ansewering history is to transfer their anxiety from an object to another, to talk about something other than events in order to better come back to them, by diverting them or by going beyond them.
That is what this text would like to demostrate, focusing specifically on the resurgence of the imagination of the plague in the art of the 1980s and 1990s. In the context of the crisis of AIDS, this was the case for a number of artists, for their thought, looking critically at the discourse, the significations, from a reflex to register in the long time of this other major tragedy that has always haunted history to the point of trauma.
